“The Invisible Pandemic within the Pandemic”

“The Invisible Pandemic within the Pandemic”  July 26, 2020

Drs Stephen Christiansen, Roger Ray, and Paul Thomlinson

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Politico, By BRIANNA EHLEY  06/29/2020

Top Trump administration officials say drug overdose deaths are surging amid the coronavirus pandemic, driven by increased substance use due to anxiety, social isolation and depression.

A White House drug policy office analysis shows an 11.4 percent year-over-year increase in fatalities for the first four months of 2020, confirming experts’ early fears that precautions like quarantines and lockdowns combined with economic uncertainty would exacerbate the addiction crisis.

ROGER: I am not the sort of person to ever say that I am tired of being right about things but at this moment, I am. When the pandemic began I publicly expressed concern about the spread of the virus among imprisoned populations and especially among the children being held by ICE on our border. I did not mention nursing homes but, those in prison and in detention, and those housed in long term care facilities have been the hardest hit in the pandemic, accounting for more than half of the fatalities in America. 

At the end of March, when we first began our lock down, I posted some

meditations online warning those who had a proclivity for drug abuse, depression, or who suffered with suicidal ideation out of a fear that since all three of those problems are either caused or made worse by social isolation, that the pandemic would likely make all three a more serious concern.

I have been actively supportive of AA and AlAnon meetings for the past 40 years and I have never seen a holiday, or an event of weather ever cancel a meeting, but a pandemic is different. In person AA meetings have almost entirely ceased and online alternatives just don’t work for everyone. So, I expected addiction to be a growing problem. But I was not prepared for what I read in the Washington Post a few weeks ago when they published that: Nationally overdoses in the United States jumped 18 percent in March, 29 percent in April and 42 percent in May according to the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program, a federal initiative that collects data from ambulance teams, hospitals and police.” 

Data for June and July are not currently available to me but given this meteoric rise, in spite of a relative silence in the media, deaths from overdoses, primarily a synthetic fentanyl, must be rivaling the fatality rate from Covid-19, literally, a silent pandemic within the viral pandemic. 

I have invited two friends, both of whom I have known for more than 25 years, to join me today. Dr. Paul Thomlinson has two PhD’s in psychology and is a leading researcher in suicide’s causes and prevention. Dr. Stephen Christiansen is a former trauma surgeon who evolved into being an addiction treatment physician. 

Speaking first as a member of the clergy, I have been painfully aware, as Viktor Frankl noted nearly 75 years ago, that addiction, depression and suicide are primarily caused by social isolation . . . and not mere loneliness, because many of the people we have seen have lots of social connections, but more an isolation from meaningful connection. 

Frankl could not have imagined the emergence of the internet and certainly not social media, but he did chronical the breakdown of social norms and customs which once kept families and friendships knit together at a more substantive and meaningful level. 

I have always believed that the two most meaningful reasons for churches to exist in this modern and largely post-theistic age, is to create meaningful community connection and to organize well-intended people into opportunities for community service and action. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, we are nearly entirely prevented from in-person community gatherings and a non-compliant community makes community service or public demonstration a potentially life-threatening situation.  We do what we can to make progressive faith relevant to our viewers online, but I know that the lack of contact is undermining our effectiveness. Let me ask you, Paul and Steve, for your reactions to this sudden escalation of addiction over the past three months.

STEVE:   Let me begin by thanking you for asking me to participate. A great deal has changed in our understanding of the "use disorders", the present idiom for what used to be called abuse or addiction. There is a growing realization that all of these "disorders" represent self medication of what is usually a inherited problem with producing brain chemicals. These disorders can broadly be grouped into self treatment for anxiety(nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, bento's, and barbiturates) or self treatment for depression(amphetamines,ketamine, peyote). Since these are inherited diseases, they are best treated by restoring the deficient brain chemicals to a better balance by using medication , exercise, counciling, or other social interventions so that the patient can be the best person that they can be. I believe that the increase in deaths we are seeing related to OD is caused by the increased stress we have been experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the social unrest related to the polarization of society. Stress requires increased coping skills which are already stretched thin in  people already self medicating to cope. Obviously, it doesn't help that fentanyl has arrived and is incredibly potent. Any failure to appropriately mix it with base leads to overdose. As an aside, overdose from stimulants have been on the rise and are now nearly as large as opioid deaths.

Of interest is the most recent press release from the Mo governors office stating that opioid death rates have fallen in Missouri. I am not sure that rings true and it does not speak about the surge in stimulant deaths in the last year that no one is talking about. Today, the accepted most effective therapy for opioid use disorder is MMT(monitored maintenance therapy, medication maitainence therapy). The success rates for abstinence based therapies are about 10%(meaning 10% remain off of opiates at the end of a year) while the success rates for MMT programs(which combine a closely monitored maintenance dose of an opiate and counciling) are about 70%(meaning that 70% of those who began the program remain on it and off street drugs a the end of a year). The documented reduction in mortality is also impressive. A IV drug user has an apx 13x increased risk of dying compared to an non-user. An oral opiate user has a 4x risk. MMT reduces those risks to about 1.7x a non-user. In practice, safety is the last selling point for the programs but the easiest for a non-user to understand. MMT is safer, cheaper, and legal. The average price of oxycodone on the street is about a dollar a milligram(a 10mg oxycodone retails for about $10). Most oral users use 60-120mg a day. Most MMT programs cost about $10/day including drug costs and monitoring. It further allows a user to qualify fro jobs that demand a urine drug screen pre-hire. This opens up a large range of employment opportunities that otherwise would be closed. Once the daily search for money and supplies has ended, social relationships that have been damaged or destroyed by years of lying and stealing can be repaired. 

While the only currently approved replacement therapies are for nicotine and opiates, there is interest in extending the replacement and counciling model to stimulants. The most challenging and common problem is the anxiety driven use disorders. The ugly truth is that we do not have a good medical treatment for excess anxiety. Benzodiazapams(Valium, Xanax, ativan, klonipin, etc) are effective in the short term but habituation occurs making them less than desirable long term choices. Gabapentin is marginally effective for anxiety though is often used in an attempt to avoid the benzo's. Commonly used drugs like VIstaril(which is an antihistamine) do not target the GABA receptor at all and just make people sleepy. SSRI's and SNRI's have some anxiety relieving effects but are not reliable or rapidly effective. Alcohol works rapidly and is effective but in susceptible individuals, can lead to overuse and a long lis too problems. Nicotine is the only anti-anxiety drug I am aware of that has a rapid onset, tolerable habituation, and makes you more alert, not less. Unfortunately, the delivery system(inhaled smoke or chewing) leads to a whole host of problems which are well publicized. 

I wish that there was higher availability of counciling services and the they were much better coordinated with the services I provide. In my experience, finding a good councilor is difficult and once found, getting insurance to pay for any councilor, let alone the good one is very difficult. Counciling is an investment in oneself and requires time to be effective. For those reasons, my schedule is always full of people struggling with anxiety, depression, or fatigue and wanting relief.

Paul:  Thanks for the invitation, Roger…always a pleasure and my honor to share this panel with you and Steve. As you know, I’ve also been concerned about this from the jump as well, and have done a couple of podcast pieces on it through Compass Health Network.

Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse has recently written in the Annals of Internal Medicine of how the global COVID-19 pandemic is colliding with the more familiar public health crisis of substance use disorders. By that, she meant that we were already struggling with the wildfire opioid epidemic and the fatalities related to that, and then the COVID tsunami hit us.

As Dr. Volkow points out, we can easily see how COVID-19 can make things even more difficult for people with addictions…for example, the healthcare system may not prepared to take care of them in the midst of the demands created by COVID. There are also stigma and social issues created by this crisis: so-called social distancing may make these people even more vulnerable because it interferes with many of the support systems that can help them to reach and maintain recovery. Add to that the fact that drugs themselves negatively impact our physiology and make us more susceptible to infection and more prone to poor outcomes and it becomes very obvious why we should be concerned about the collision of these public health crises.

As I’ve noted before, the lack of a sense of mission, the lack of a purpose in life, has been identified as one of the major factors that make people more vulnerable to taking drugs. We know that feeling irrelevant, feeling that no one cares about you, is probably one of the most devastating feelings a human being can have. Epidemiological studies show that social isolation and neglect increase dramatically the risk of taking drugs, and, if you are trying to stop taking drugs, it increases that risk of relapse. So, as Dr. Volkow has put it, the challenge is “How do we provide social support for people at risk of substance abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic?” This got me thinking about what we’ve learned about substance use in the past few decades. Some of you may remember a series of anti-drug messages from the 1980’s including one PSA, based on studies from the 1960’s, showing rats in a cage dying from consuming heroin. You see, in those studies scientists put rats in cages with two water bottles. One bottle had water; the other bottle had water laced with either cocaine or heroin. In virtually every case, in this free choice situation, the rats would keep going back to the drug-laced water bottle and fairly quickly die of an overdose. The conclusions are clear, right? Drugs have an inherent hook in them, they are addictive, and if you start them, they will kill you.

Kind of ironically, those messages and the underlying studies became an inspiration for a psychology researcher named Dr. Bruce Alexander at Simon Fraser University. This clever psychologist wondered, what else is going on here, and maybe it’s not really the drugs themselves that explain what’s happening. He wondered if it might be the cage, the environment in which these rats were placed—a bleak and solitary existence in which they only thing there was to do was…drink water or take drugs. So, Alexander repeated the experiments, but rather than putting one rat in a small cage, he created what he called “rat park.” Famously now, this cage was filled with lots of good things to eat, other rats for socialization and plenty of physical intimacy, and toys and colored balls for recreation. Rat park also had two water bottles: one with water, and one with drugged water. The rats tried both, but given the choice between good food, enjoyable activities, and playful friends, none of the rats became addicted or overdosed. Not a single death by overdose. They, in fact, didn’t like the drugged water.

Does this study have any relevance to humans? Of course it does. Pesky research ethics prevent us from putting humans in cages for extended periods of time with ad libitum drug consumption…but as Johann Hari beautifully describes in his book Chasing the Scream, in the Vietnam War and it’s aftermath, we have something of a natural human experiment that illustrates the principles very well. At one point, a huge number, upwards of ten percent of American soldiers stationed in a miserable jungle, where they didn’t want to be and where they might be killed at any moment, were using heroin. It was feared that when these soldiers came home, we would have hoards of vacant-eyed heroin addicts roaming our streets—but that’s not what happened, thankfully. When they were removed from their virtual rat cages in the jungles of Vietnam, and were able to come home to the embrace of family, the meaningful activities of employment and school, most were no longer interested in heroin and simply quit. They were not criminal nor physically addicted. They just changed their cages.

As the great Hungarian born, Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Mate has put it, “All substances of abuse will either treat pain or distract from pain. So the question is not, why the addiction, but why the pain?” This question is a haunting one…it is what we must answer if we are to make long-term, sustainable recovery possible for people with addictions. The sources of the pain that humans treat with whiskey and Oxycontin, with cocaine and benzodiazapines, are many—chronic physical pain from injuries and illnesses, for sure. But I’m convinced it is much more likely to include psychic pain from trauma (either in childhood or later), from interpersonal alienation from primary relationships, from family disconnection and conflict, from shame and guilt heaped upon us, from abject loneliness, from having not found a guiding passion or a meaningful purpose for one’s life. These are the real sources of pain that lead so many to find connection with alcohol or other drugs. These are the sources of pain that lead to self-medication. These are the sources of pain we can and must find ways and means of treating.

I’ll conclude with an all-too-obvious application of all this to our current circumstances, the COVID-19 crisis. Under quarantine, we may all begin to feel like rats in cages, right? What if our cage is feeling pretty desolate, and we have two bottles from which to choose? We might begin to choose the whiskey bottle, or the bottle of pills, rather than the healthier water bottle if we don’t take care to enrich our environment. Rat park was an enriched environment that included, not insignificantly, other rats with whom to play, socialize, have sex…be close to. So we need to enrich our environments by bringing our offline supports online through regular phone calls, FaceTime, Zoom, syncing up Netflix accounts. Getting and/or staying connected with others is really the most important thing we can do for ourselves right now. We need to enrich our environments by refusing to drink from the firehose and restricting the flow of bad news and misinformation—make sure we are getting good information, and balance it with stories of human kindness and resilience. We need to enrich our environments by developing and demonstrating mastery—learn something new or practice something old. To be most helpful and hopeful, make sure it is something that provides meaning and purpose to life—some way of adding beauty to your own life or those of others, some way of contributing joy to someone who may desperately need your light. Let’s all enrich these cages we are living in, together.

I also want to speak specifically to a potential perfect storm for a rapid spike in suicides as well. Clearly, there are major risk factors afoot these days: economic stress, social isolation, loss of community and religious contacts, barriers to mental health treatment, other medical problems not getting proper treatment, and social media influences. So far, we don’t know what the impact is on suicide…but we are worried, obviously. Yet, there is cause for some optimism on this point. Suicide rates have declined in the period after past national disasters (eg, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks). One hypothesis is the so-called pulling-together effect, whereby individuals undergoing a shared experience might support one another, thus strengthening social connectedness. Recent advancements in technology (eg, video conferencing) might facilitate pulling together. Epidemics and pandemics may also alter one’s views on health and mortality, making life more precious, death more fearsome, and suicide less likely. But, clearly, we are not pulling together to the extent that we could or should in order to make this a real protective factor against suicide. Wear a mask…it’s a tangible sign that you care about someone other than yourself…and that maybe, just maybe, we can pull together.

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”    July 12, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) wrote in 1962, when The New Yorker commissioned her, a Jew of who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany herself, to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

“You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/?fbclid=IwAR2_QRBEW3eq4-YH1NnnX-9PBHz8MpRvXICd2q2cyQS4ObGQz6dmZCudYIs

In October of 1989 there was an earthquake in San Francisco and a very old part of their freeway system, the Nimitz, collapsed. 11 people lost their lives in this incident, 39 people were trapped in their cars between these pancaked layers of the freeway who were eventually rescued. 

I remember when it happened. I was living in Louisville, KY. My daughter was just 10 months old; I had a new doctorate and a challenging career and, frankly, I didn’t think about this incident for a long time. Check your own feelings about it now . . . do you remember it? Does it pull any emotional energy out of you?

A few years ago, I met a delightful single woman for dinner at a French restaurant about 50 miles west of town. She is a children’s author who lives alone on a farm in the wilds of southern Missouri. She was one of the 39 people pulled from her car from between the collapsed expressway. 

She was a college student then but after the incident, she couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork. She took the money she had for her education and found the best deal on just a tract of land that she could find and moved to live in noiseless isolation without crowded expressways and long commutes. Though she never married, never had children, she applied her considerable intellect to writing children’s books and has had a successful career. 

I was evidently neither sufficiently charming nor interesting enough to entice her to meet me for a second dinner, but we speak now and then. I called to check on her after the pandemic “stay at home orders” and she laughed and said, “I was made for this. Staying home alone is what I do.” 

I know you were not at the dinner with us that night but when you look at this image of the collapsed highways now, do you feel a little something more? Knowing that about an hour and half west of here, there is a beautiful, mature woman, who is still, in a way, stuck in her car between two giant slabs of concrete and steel? Because, folks, we do not have an unlimited supply of empathy. We can only care about so much before we become emotionally exhausted. But if you spent a couple of hours with this author, you would remember the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the earthquake in San Francisco in October of 1989 differently.

One of the most memorable yet disturbing moments of my graduate school education was when my counseling professor, the late Dr. Liston Mills, said to me, “You try to tell yourself that you love all of your clients but the fact is that no one actually loves more than four or five people at any time. If you are a saint, you might be able to muster the energy to love eight people. So, you have a case load of 20 clients. Which ones can you really care about?” I argued with him, of course, that’s what I did. I had more than a hundred parishioners, 20 counseling clients, a dozen family members, he just couldn’t be right. I thought he was cruel. In fact, I don’t know how that got him to smile for this photo, I had him as my counselor, advisor, and professor for 8 years and I never saw him smile. I thought, Mills can’t care about more than four or five people, but I can. 

But folks, Mills was a lot smarter than I am so don’t be too quick to dismiss what he said. You wake up every day with a certain amount of emotional energy, . . . let’s say you have a 100 units of energy that you can spend. You spend some just dealing with the people you live with getting breakfast and getting dressed. Maybe some in traffic on the way to work. Maybe some more dealing with staff and peers.

Then, imagine that you are a therapist and you have managed to make it to your desk with 80 units left and you are going to do an intake group of six new patients in the addiction treatment program, then go up to the floor and have individual meetings with patients for the next several hours. Maybe there was a suicide on the floor and the family of eight or nine people are waiting for you to go into a conference room to tell them that their dad won’t be coming home. You are going to have to borrow some of those emotional energy chips from tomorrow’s supply but then, your schedule tomorrow is going to look a lot like today’s. And when you get home, if you have family waiting for you, they will expect something from you too.

That was my job in my final year of my doctorate when Liston Mill’s was telling me that I just couldn’t begin to do what I thought I had to do everyday. I had three patients on my floor in the VA who had survived a suicide attempt. You can shoot yourself in the head and not die . . . I always had one or two of those on my floor, but I realized that I couldn’t remember their names. And I hated Liston Mills that day because I didn’t want for him to be right. . . but I knew he was.

So, you come here, and I ask you to be concerned about Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, George Floyd. I tell you about how the Taliban shot Malala in the face, about Asian women being trafficked for prostitution in local spas and massage parlors, and I talk about the poor being manipulated by predatory lenders, and tens of thousands dying from opioid addiction. And I try to keep all of those children in dog cages, separated from their families on the boarder, front of mind. Frankly, you are brave to come back here. I ask for a lot of your emotional energy. 

I know that preachers are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but I don’t really throw out a lot of comfort and I apologize for that. I have an assumption that spiritual people are always in training for an empathy marathon. As St. Bernard said, “I love that I may love, so that I may love.” That is, I am asking you to exercise your empathy, to make your loving heart stronger, to expand your grasp. But I know, sometimes you hear me talk about the #MeToo movement, then it is #BlackLivesMatter, and then it is #TransRights, and I’m sure that you have heard about black-trans people being sexually harassed, and so when I tell the very large and unmasked lady who is blocking the aisle at Sam’s that 120,000 people have already died from covid-19 and 2 million have been infected, when she replies with an invitation for me to kiss a frankly, shockingly enormous part of her anatomy, we can’t be too surprised. 

We started this pandemic four months ago with panic buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so that those who have no empathy for others, hoarded basic necessities until our retail supply chain was literally broken. Now it is devolving into the moral battle of the wearing of masks in public to slow the spread of the virus. Those of us who have been exposed to the spiritual training of empathy, immediately accepted the expert advice to wear a mask in public but noticeably, most people just didn’t. Why didn’t they?

There was a piece in our paper this week about how retail stores are getting trapped in the middle of what has ironically become a political divide. Customers at our local sort-of-hippy health food stores, Mama Jean’s, have gotten irate at clerks for wearing masks, vowing not to return if they don’t take them off? What is that about? 

Wearing a mask may not be a panacea, while there is lots of evidence to say that they help, they are anything but a certain form of protection, but why would someone insist that others not wear one? It has, in the most mind-numbing way, become a matter of politics. 

Most of you will remember that in 1982, almost 40 years ago, someone in Chicago put cyanide in Tylenol capsules. 7 people were killed in this senseless crime, all in the Chicago area. But people all across America stopped taking Tylenol. It forced the over the counter medication industry to turn on a dime, changing how they made capsules and how they packaged them, so that now we have tamper proof seals on everything from aspirin to seasoned salt and whatever that film is that they put on my cottage cheese carton. No one ever suggested that Democrats should stop taking Tylenol, but Republicans should take two every morning. 

There was a known public health risk, everyone took precautions, the industry made adjustments and now, I’m sure, that if I hadn’t brought it up, no one ever thinks about those 7 people who died from cyanide laced Tylenol. Now, 120,000 people have died from Covid-19 and the suggestion that you wear a mask in public to protect others in case you are infected, has become a literal war, cast largely as a political left verses the political right and no part of this makes the least amount of sense. Why did we believe the experts about Tylenol but half of the country, and the majority of our locals, insist that their wishful thinking is more reliable than the advice of experts?

A sociopath is someone who lacks empathy. They will live in dangerous, sometimes violent ways, and they simply don’t care about the consequences. In grad school, I was led to believe that only 2 or 3% of society could be diagnosed as a sociopath, although, even then, we were aware than more than 25% of corporate CEOs were . . . but that is a topic for another sermon.

I famously had a showdown with the director of a Council of Churches agency that we have volunteered with for more than a decade. The last time I showed up at Crosslines to work with our team of senior citizen volunteers and I saw that absolutely no one, not staff or volunteers, were wearing masks, and I had a bit of a meltdown. I simply couldn’t believe that they expected members of my church, some of whom are in their 80’s, most of whom have underlying conditions that would make infection with the Covid virus almost certainly lethal, and the explanation I was given was that they were not required to wear them. I pointed out that it would make my volunteers 80 to 90% less likely to get the virus if everyone wore masks, and the response was an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. 

In a later email exchange, I carefully explained to the director why he is a sociopath. I have not had a reply. But if knowing that wearing a mask protects vulnerable people, cutting their risk of infection by 90% and you don’t wear one, if that makes you a sociopath then about 75% of the people who live around here are sociopaths. I want very much to go back to believing that only 2 or 3% of society are sociopaths. I don’t want to believe that most people in our community really would rather directly cause my death than to be inconvenienced by wearing a mask. 

Are they all sociopaths or are they possibly just emotionally exhausted? Maybe I’m not on their list of six or seven people that they can love today. Now, you may think that I was harsh for telling the director of Crosslines that he is a sociopath, I’m sure he thought so, but I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion.

https://www.psypost.org/2020/06/psychopathic-traits-linked-to-non-compliance-with-social-distancing-guidelines-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic-56980?fbclid=IwAR3KjBM131TJBaKNzJpgMELK8U7pdTWWIvZy_oY9MSpg4YkIi5IUTFqHNaY

In research done by the Personality Laboratory at Whitman College, they are providing initial evidence that certain antagonistic personality traits are associated with ignoring preventative measures meant to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus. I’m not the only one who sees a connection between refusing appropriate preventative measures and sociopathy. 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the U.S. government’s Coronavirus Task Force, said, ‘There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic. . .’ 

We don’t have a vaccine. We have some marginally helpful treatments, but most of what we have in the face of this pandemic is the same thing they had in the face of the Spanish Flu . . . everybody needs to wear a mask, stay home as much as possible, and keep at least six feet between you and everyone else. It is only the behaviors of the population that can alter the spread of the virus right now. And sadly, people are not generally choosing very compassionate behaviors.

The people who get it can be pretty testy about this. As this sign in a restaurant window offers, “To accommodate Anti-Maskers, we have provided a space 40 feet west where you can stare at your reflection in the window since, apparently, you’re the only person you care about.” 

I was in New York for a few days a couple of weeks ago visiting friends from there as well as from Russia and Brazil. My friend’s daughters already think that I live so deep in the Ozarks that it is still the 16^th century out here but sadly, the Ozarks was in the news several times during my brief stay. The mayor of St Louis literally provoked vigilante retaliation against Black Lives Matter protestors by reading out their names, addresses and phone numbers on the internet. 

Then when there was a demonstration on the mayor’s street, and a pair of very affluent, though even more paranoid and possibly psychopathic attorneys stood in front of their million dollar mansion pointing guns at peaceful demonstrators walking down their street. I appreciate the lawyer wearing the Hamburgler costume, I wish all lawyers would.

But then the coups de grâce was when the network news mentioned Joplin having a spike in virus infections from the meat packing plant near there and the reporter ended her report saying that the Joplin City Council voted against a mandatory mask ordinance and rolled her eyes like a teenaged cheerleader.

But, of course, as infections are going up here, our City Council is set to meet to discuss the same thing and the only question is whether Springfield will reveal itself to the world as being as stupid as our neighboring community of Joplin. Everyone knows that we should all be wearing masks whenever we leave our homes but there is an inexplicable resistance which, I have to be honest, really looks evil to me. But I don’t want malignant narcissism to be the explanation, no matter how much it looks like that. 

 In 1962 when The New Yorker decided to send the Holocaust survivor, Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Holocaust, she had to sort through some very profound personal emotions about the whole thing. She concluded that she would never again refer to “radical evil” because “radical” means that it goes to the very tip of the root and she found that evil was almost always much more shallow than that. Only good, she said, can be radical because goodness requires thought, decision making, intellect, it goes deeper than evil can. Evil spreads like mold on a society, infecting it, literally ruining it, but it never goes much deeper than the surface. 

Evil, she concludes, is thought defying and in our day, we can speak of it as being fact defying. She is saying that Nazism, the kind of malice and racism that caused the Holocaust was like a fungus that spread thinly across the surface of Germany and as much harm as it did, historically speaking, it didn’t seem to take deep roots in all but the most extreme of German people. When the war was over, very few people wanted to defend the agenda of the Nazis. 

I think we will see a similar distancing of conservatives from the Trump era early next year. I am reasonably confident at this point that Trump will be defeated this November, in spite of the Democratic Party’s best efforts at losing, and if anyone knows how to throw an election, it surely is the DNC, but I think that they will oust Trump in November and we will be treated to a 2021 version of  “I was only following orders” excuse from almost every elected Republican politician who failed to find a backbone for the past four years. 

The denial of science on the part of Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and our own accidental president, Donald Trump, has fed the virus, resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, but on the surface, it has given hundreds of millions of people permission to simply not take the threat seriously, to avoid distancing, mask wearing, and I have to suspect, hand washing, over the past 

 several months. I don’t want to believe that most of our neighbors are evil even though they all have to know that if only they would wear a mask that they could save lives by not spreading the virus. I don’t want to think that they are all stupid, even though I have wasted precious minutes reading social media posts by people who couldn’t pass a middle school science test if it was open book and the answers were underlined, who insist that wearing a mask is either of no help or is actually harmful. 

Not that I will ever be able to believe that only 3 or 4% of society are sociopaths again. I’m afraid that I have accumulated too much evidence to the contrary in the past few months, but I do believe that there is a third option, and that is that people, by and large, are emotionally spent. They are neither ignorant or malevolent, but they just can’t love more than four or five people, and they can’t care about #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, kids at the border, the uninsured, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the environment, the pipeline in North Dakota, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then wear a mask too. Most of that stuff is filed in the back of their minds somewhere along with the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in San Francisco 30 years ago. 

What we, as spiritually oriented people must remember is that what we want from other people is not the impossible . . . we’re not asking people to try to love dozens and dozens of people, what we’re asking for is for them to change some behaviors that will help out a lot of people they will never meet and about whom they will never know anything. And, excuse me, my brothers and sisters, but don’t we know by now that we can never judge anyone into changing a behavior. 

When we make people feel stupid, or judged, or labeled, they almost always just double down on their self-destructive behaviors. People change their behaviors when they feel safe . . . people will change their minds about something when they believe it is their idea. Conservatives will never adopt liberal behaviors and views in order to satisfy the demands of liberals . . . you see that don’t you?

Right now, the world is in the midst of a pandemic which is a medical problem that causes an economic problem. But, in Britain, Brazil, and the United States, we have politicians who see this medical and economic crisis as a political problem, and they are trying to respond to it as a political problem… with the bag of tricks politicians usually use . . . propaganda, lies, and electoral suppression. We must not be drawn into their political battle. As the old saying goes, never get into a mudslinging argument with a pig . . . you will get dirty and the pig likes it. 

There are those who want for us to believe that there will be a medical resolution to the pandemic within the next six or seven months, as either a vaccine or effective treatments, or both. I hope that they are right. But the fact that there are several corona viruses and there are no effective vaccines for any of them is not encouraging. HIV is a virus and in 40 years we have not come up with a vaccine, though we have had pretty good treatments for several years.

Covid-19 may be a part of our world for a year, or two, or a decade. Church may never be the same. Concerts, restaurants, movie theaters, may never be the same. The one thing that we can do to help the world maintain meaning, joy, romance, and culture, is to change our behaviors. And, if I may quote our friends in the AA movement, sometimes you have to fake it to make it. Maybe your heart just isn’t full of compassion and empathy right now, but you can fake it until you do feel it. 

Maybe you are emotionally spent and you just can’t care about the off chance that you are asymptomatic and throwing off a deadly virus onto unsuspecting strangers, but just pretend, just play along for a minute, learn how to talk to people from six feet away, through a mask. Make it fun. Draw a picture on your mask. Buy a superhero mask. Just choose to pretend to be a better person than you are right now and if you can keep it up for a few weeks, the surprising thing is, you will wake up and realize that you are a better person and you never want to go back to being the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, narcissist that you were before. No one really wants to be a sociopath. 

I know you may find that hard to believe, so I’ll invite you to prove me wrong. Do the right thing for a month and see if you ever really want to be who you were before. Find one that matches your eyes.

“What is the Nature of the Mystery otherwise known as God?”

“What is the Nature of the Mystery otherwise known as God?”    July 19, 2020

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor          

click here to see the video

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
--Albert Einstein 

I started my college career as a philosophy major. A fairly surprisingly large number of comedians have degrees in philosophy. And there is a reason for that. You can get a degree in something like English Literature or European History, and three or four years after you are out of school, you have pretty well forgotten everything you briefly knew in college. But as comedian Steve Martin, also a philosophy major, can demonstrate, studying philosophy will pretty much mess you up for the rest of your life. Especially if you studied this guy in the middle of this ancient Greek tryptic, Plato, whose entire body of a work consisted in endlessly long dialogues about the meaning of words. 

Being fairly exacting about the meaning of words has made me quite a misfit in most religious conversations. For a philosopher, when other people are making religious proclamations, they often sound like school children watching a fireworks display . . . everything they say amounts to “ooooooooo” and “aaaaahhhhhhhhh,” but they aren’t really saying anything. 

It’s especially frustrating to me when I have written several books that I would like very much for progressive people to read closely but not many do, and some popular gurus write books with important sounding phrases and a sort of  “self-help” kind of intonation that we have tended to call, in academic circles, a sort theological masturbation but if you demand of them, “what does that really mean?” what you find is that it is almost entirely balloon juice. . . and those books sell like hotcakes and I would be lying to you if I told you that doesn’t frost me at a very existential level. 

There are terms that are bandied about among progressives that I would like to try to define in a way that can allow us to have a meaningful conversation about who we are, what we believe, and exactly how we are different from either traditional religious people, or, for that matter, how we are different from either cabbages or kings. 

I’m going to try to hit this and move along quickly, so quickly that Plato would be embarrassed. But basically, traditional religious people are theists, they believe in the existence of a supernatural god who is, in almost every respect, a person, with emotions, a will, some scary judgements, and an episodic history of getting involved in human history. 

The presumed opposite of the theist is the atheist who has concluded that there is no reason to believe in the existence of a “divine other” and they try to avoid contact with religious people whenever possible. 

The agnostic is someone who very honestly concludes that the whole subject of god is beyond human knowledge and so, they have simply taken their playing piece off the board of religion and wish to be regarded as neutral, sort of the Switzerland of theology. 

Progressives, arising out of the academic study of religion, are often described as being post-theistic, not that they have just gotten over the whole god business, but they have gotten over the trying to force themselves to think of god in terms of being a person. Which forces me to mention two more terms . . . I can only beg for your indulgence:

Anthropomorphism is the portrayal of something, animal or mineral, as being a human when it is not. You can see examples of this, mostly in children literature, in which an animal of some sort is portrayed as speaking and wearing at least some sort of human clothing, as the Walrus in the famous poem embedded in Alice in Wonderland’s account of the Walrus and the Carpenter. 

And similarly, Personification is the portrayal of aspects of nature as being a person. The most ancient strata of religions tended to give personhood to the earth, the sun, the oceans, rivers, etc. 

Many people in our day have tried to project personhood onto Senator Mitch McConnell but I am convinced that this is a mistake. But I digress.

Portraying god anthropomorphically, as a person, with super power, eternity, being all knowing and all seeing and omnipresent, but still very human in having emotions, judgements, loves and dislikes, preferences and things about which the divine person was quite disdainful. 

This worked in more primitive societies when they assumed that the earth was the center of a fairly small universe and that people were the crowning accomplishment of creation. What frosted the church of the early 17^th century about Galileo, and it seems quite innocuous to us now, but when he reversed the assumption that the sun revolved around the earth and explained, painfully convincingly, that the earth revolved around the sun, as did the other planets, then humanity itself was dethroned and our all too small and human gods along with us. 

Galileo only opened the door to astrophysics and what followed him in successive generations of scientific inquiry revealed that the universe is incomprehensibly large and that our system of planets orbiting a star is only one of billions and billions of solar systems and that the whole of the earth is just a speck in the cosmos. 

This horrible awareness robs our human pomposity of anywhere to hang our bloated sense of our importance in the universe. As modern science engaged modern theology in dialogue, we have progressively given up on the notion that god is a superhuman in the clouds, and, I hope, we are giving up on the notion of god as a person at all. 

If I say that what god is, is simply a part of the isness of existence, not a person or an entity who has a place or a form, but a spirit that unites and animates the universe but is not conscious being who cares if you are American or Russian, gay or straight, fat or thin . . . though, having failed at a thousand diets, it starts to seem that maybe god wants me to be fat . . . but again, that is a topic for another day. 

In this, I believe that the author of the ancient book of Exodus deserves some applause. When Moses asks the deity behind the burning bush who or what that deity is, the response was simply, “I am.” 

Three hundred years before Galileo invented the telescope that got into trouble with the pope, a 13^th century German theologian, Meister Eckhart wrote, “God is not what you think or even what you believe, because God is a word unspoken, a thought unthought, a belief unbelieved. So, if you wish to know this God, practice wonder, do what is good, and cultivate silence. The rest will follow.”

You see, Eckhart was a mystic. He wasn’t the first one and thankfully not the last but he was so profound, standing, as it were, on the threshold of the scientific age, he, a Roman Catholic theologian could say, “God is a word unspoken, a thought not thought, a belief unbelieved.” Now I’m going to sound like an elementary school kid at a fireworks show….. “oooooooooo,” “aaaaaahhhhhhh.” God is not a person, a thing, an entity, but an isness, integral to existence, but neither creator nor puppet master. 

God is, to use the language of Exodus, the “I Am” about whom little can be sensibly said but Eckhart says, knowledge of God comes in three things:  the practice of wonder, a life lived in doing good, and in, well, keeping your mouth shut. . . no, that’s too harsh, practicing silence is, at its root, a practice of humility . . . don’t assume that you know stuff that you need to tell other people. Practice silence. 

The church of the past three hundred years knows more about Thomas Aquinas than it does Meister Eckhart because people like Aquinas embraced the growing wisdom of the enlightenment while fortressing traditional Christianity with academic language and purposeful defenses . . . it didn’t make him right, it just gave the church license to go on talking about heaven and hell, souls, angels, sin and tithing. 

In our church, we don’t use the word “worship” because we do not believe that there is an enthroned ego-deficit supernatural theistic god who expects to be worshipped. We don’t use the word “praise” for the same reason, there is not an ego-deficit deity enthroned in the clouds who needs to be praised. 

We don’t offer prayers of intercession because we do not believe that god is a theistic take on Santa Claus or the tooth fairy who bestows favors on those who ask in the right way or are persistent enough in the asking. We are careful about our language because we want to be careful not to perpetuate a pre-Galileo world view.  

Specifically, we are trying to foster less of the old man in the clouds image of god and more of the wonder and awe of real mysticism, not magic and not science denying, but more wonder, as Galileo said, trying to make the religious people around him understand that he was not robbing them of faith but rather gifting them with a spiritual, a mystical wonder, he 

 wrote:  The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

I don’t grow grapes but I trust that Galileo would allow me to appropriate his insights to say, in the midst of a pandemic, surviving a collapsing economy brought on by incompetence in high offices serving some inscrutable dynamic between Russia, China, and the USA, still, I walk into my back yard and the sun has ripened blackberries that were green and red yesterday, and tomatoes that were green and hard when I saw them two days ago are now luminescent red. 

Damn Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and Bozo Bolsonaro too, but while I was watching MSNBC, a single bean grew a vine that yields hundreds of beans. The kale I planted and have harvested twice already, keeps growing back. And, good for me, I actually like kale. I know a bit about botany and agriculture but I do not let that dampen the awe and mystery I feel every time I look at my little garden. And I will wallow in that mystic union until I am ready to leave my garden to go and fight against all forms of tyranny, fascism, racism and oppression. . . the political kind to be sure, but especially the religious kind.

Every time the church falls back into talking about an anthropomorphic god, replete with rewards and punishments and sacred texts, we are never more than a step or two away from homophobia, misogyny, classism, racism, maybe even nationalism and slavery. So I wish that progressives could get their heads straight and their language nailed down in a way that avoids that slippery slope of bad theology. 

When we first begin to leave the cage of traditional religious thinking, we don’t give up on praise and worship all at once. We don’t give up on bibles and prayers and sacraments all at once, but we try to recast them as being friendlier, kinder, less judgmental, less dominating and more liberating. But the problem is that the cage is still there.

I feel like I need to be concrete about this, but I want to be specific in the nicest way possible. When progressives fall back into anthropomorphic language about god, they may do so with a very compassionate and well-intended purpose, but they are still lending credence to the judge on the throne in the clouds.

I want to use the rather unorthodox Lutheran pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, as an example. I know a lot of people who really like her work and she has gained a great deal of notoriety in the progressive movement. And, clearly, she practices compassion and she preaches a psychologically aware message . . . but may I point out here that in her language, when she says, “I think God is wanting to be known . . .” that she is casting god as a person who, like you and me, has preferences and a certain relational itch. And that is just one theological twist away from saying that God wants you to do this and to not do that, to marry this person and not that person, or to be Christian and not Muslim. 

And I like Nadia Bolz-Weber and I don’t mean that she does this and Richard Rohr doesn’t, because he does and so does Robin Meyers. Again, all pillars of the progressive movement but, lacking a precision of language that I really long for. Once you give yourself permission to start telling people what god thinks, what god wants, what god likes or what god hates, you are just polishing the cage that you are going to put people back in, and simultaneously giving people to do their own projecting, announcing that whatever they like, feel, prefer, or wish is true because god told them so. What makes any one of us go “oooooo” and “aaaaahhhhh” may have more to do with, as Scrooge said, some undigested bit of potato than of spirit. We need to be clear and thoughtful about something as important as this is.

The one kindred spirit whom I have never met but whose work I admire is Canada’s Gretta Vosper. She never falls into the language of an anthropomorphic god but lately it seems like she has taken to describing herself as being an atheist. I don’t doubt that a lot of progressives describe me that way but, Gretta, I don’t think that you have to be an atheist to reject anthropomorphism. We can live with our faith in the midst of the mystery with a god who is a word unspoken, a thought unthought, and a belief unbelieved. 

One of our listeners with whom I correspond recently described himself as a Christian without Jesus, a Buddhist without Buddha, and a Muslim without either Muhammad or the Quran. I like that. We are spiritual people without creed or sacred text or sacrament. We are seekers who live in awe and wonder, and try to do good things for others, and, I hope, we try to avoid saying silly things.

I offer this message as a conversation starter, and not a conversation ending. I may not be able to reply to all of your objections or corrections but, it isn’t me that you need to come to terms with anyway.