What Answers do We Have to Life's Big Questions?

Chapter 12    "WHAT ANSWERS DO WE HAVE TO LIFE'S BIG QUESTIONS?"
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"In music, one does not make the end of the composition the point of the composition.  If that were so the best conductors would be those that played the fastest and there would be composers who wrote only Finales.....it is a hoax, a terrible hoax.  They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and we were supposed to get to that end, and the thing is to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.  But we miss the point the whole way along.  It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance the whole way along."
                                     Alan Watts, philosopher  "On Life and Music"

One of our YouTube viewers in Florida wrote to me to ask: "I am elderly, how can I die peacefully without doctors, bright lights, and terrifying inner anxiety?" Progressives are in the business of reimagining what it means to be a spiritual person in a post-modern, scientific, information centered world but a world in which children are still born, people get married...or at least they want to where the law allows, and they still get sick and they die.

The church has historically been the gateway to life's transitions.  We bless or baptize infants, confirm or baptize young people who are coming of age and we perform the rituals around marriage and death. And as the traditional gatekeepers of these events, pastors are usually a part of people's preparations for marriage or for death, during times of crisis and of great joy.

For most of modern history the church and its clergy have offered pretty standard and predictable answers to life's big questions.  A great deal of that has been marked with humiliating hypocrisy.  We threatened even little children with the fires of hell unless they believed and behaved in just the right way and yet promised the family of virtually every deceased person that heaven awaited their departed family member no matter what kind of moral monster they might really have been.

We have allowed only persons of the opposite sex to be united in holy matrimony and we told them that they are to remain together under all circumstances until they are parted by death, as if the Lord God Almighty had some kind of sick pleasure in seeing people remain for their entire lives in meaningless or even abusive relationships.  I have felt nausea, standing in the chancel of a church asking people who are too young to know what they want to declare as their major in college to make a pledge to a living arrangement that cannot be questioned for the rest of their lives.  You only have to see what they have selected to have tattooed on very visible parts of their bodies to realize that they are not mature enough to making permanent decisions!

We have, for centuries, held out the ephemeral promise of eternity in heaven and people have taken what solace they could from pretending to believe it while doing everything possible to avoid having to test the hypothesis by actually dying.  Among the modern proverbs that I would have engraved in granite along our walls is this fundamental truth about progressive faith:  We have exchanged false certainty for honest uncertainty.

Sure, traditional religion had a clear and firm answer to most of life's questions.  The only problem is that we now realize that none of those answers were right, or at least they cannot be known with certainty.  With great faith and conviction ancient Egyptian kings had their bodies prepared so that their physical remains would be revived in the next world.  Thousands of years later their expertly preserved bodies are on display in museums all over the globe.  Neither their faith nor their magic worked.

There may be life after death but if there is no one knows anything about it and the best speculations of our philosophers and the personal testimonies of those who claim in clinical death experiences to have seen heaven (why is it that none of those people ever report on having seen hell?) can offer any objective, testable or repeatable evidence about it.  And so, while we cannot resist speculation and even hope when we are in the midst of grief for a deceased loved one, our desire cannot dictate the nature of the universe.  Hope is a good thing. Self-deception is not, however, the mission of the church.

I attended the funeral of a teenaged girl who was the granddaughter of a friend.  The girl and some other under-aged friends had taken a car joy riding in the country.  None of them having a license or driving experience, the end of their excursion was tragic and fatal for this one young women.  The family had no warning, no opportunity to even prepare for the horrifying news of the girl's death. The pastor who conducted the memorial was from a generally progressive denomination but she stood before the grieving family and confidently announced, "We do not grieve today because this young woman we have all loved is now enjoying a much better life in a much better place."

This is religious denial at its most heinously dishonest.  It not only denies all known reality it also denies the family their sacred right to grieve.  Some things in life are sad and we should not deny anyone their right to a full throated expression of their loss, their grief, and the anguish of their souls.  Grief is the logical reaction to a life cut short by untimely death.  What possible benefit is it for us to make the claim that the universe always balances the scales and makes every bad thing acceptable?  In choosing honest uncertainty over false certainty, we do not complicate the horrible losses in life with the guilt of trying, but always at least partially failing, to make ourselves believe that we should not be sad lest we appear to be doubting God.

Progressive faith is about honesty and meaning.  It is not our goal to take away spiritual comfort but to focus on the comfort of meaningful existence.  As one modern proverb says:  "Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin."

Traditional religion either specifically teaches or at least emphatically implies that the whole reason for existing is to attain to eternal reward and to avoid eternal punishment.  The philosopher, Alan Watts, challenges that view with the simple observation that we do not sing a song in order to come to its end.

By emphasizing the after-life, we devalue life itself.  By telling young couples that there is an implied ultimate goal to marriage which is to avoid getting divorced at all costs, undermines the value of a day to day shared life.

Watts specifically bemoans the message that we send to our young people that implies that the goal of education is graduation.  You get a degree so that you can get a better job because, somehow, happiness is found in career success.

This, he flatly says, is a hoax and a terrible one at that.  As a professor, I get to stand in front of a room full of students who have come to study the subject that I have found to be so very interesting that I have devoted my life to the study of it.  Even after two decades of teaching, I still engage in the fantasy that this semester I am going to encounter students who will share my enthusiasm for the study of religion and ethics. Mostly, however, I encounter young adults who have bought into the hoax.  What they often want from me is three hours of college credit with a good grade for the least amount of bother possible.

I wish that I could award each student an "A" on the first day of class and then spend the rest of the semester actually engaged in active learning though I fear that I might end up spending a lot of time alone and I'm nearly certain that my university would cease assigning me classes.  What Watts is trying to say to college students and to the rest of us by extension is that we should live life to its fullest and find both meaning and joy in it as we go.  We do not live our lives so that we may arrive safely at the grave.  The late journalist, Hunter Thompson said it quite eloquently:  "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up..."

Indeed, the only real answer to the reality of our mortality is to live as meaningfully as possible so that we may come to the time of our death as peacefully as possible.  This is not, however a matter of choosing reality over superstition.  It is also a choice of the present moment over anxiously living for an unknown future.

Buddhism teaches detachment while acknowledging that everything is connected.

That is, we are a part of the universe.  We are connected to every living thing and to ever race of humanity but suffering, anxiety, anguish comes from wanting to own, to hold onto anything or even to our own existence.  The mortality rate is 100% and as threatening as that reality can be, as soon as we accept that reality, it ceases to have so much power over us.

Should I ever marry again, I will hope that it is a relationship that will remain meaningfully intact as long as we both shall live.  I will work and sacrifice to make that come true.  I would not, however, remain in an unhealthy relationship beyond the reasonable point of becoming healthy just to avoid religious guilt or the public shame of failing in marriage.  Religious condemnation is almost always neurotic.  We need to celebrate love and promote healthy relationships, not forge chains to keep people in misery or abuse.

As I have grown older, my doctor begins to try to push me into ever more frequent and expensive medical tests to make sure that I do not have some undetected threat to my longevity.  I try to be a good patient and cooperate within reason but I recently assured him that, "I am not afraid of death."  My physician is an evangelical and the son of an evangelical pastor.  He looked at me and with an expression of shock, said, "I never hear that.  Most of my patients are in their 80's and they want me to do everything possible to make sure that they do not die.  I never hear from any of them that they are not afraid of death."  I think that is sad.

I could protect myself from any exposure to divorce by never allowing myself to fall in love again but that seems like a very bad way to approach human relationships.  Life is a gift.  Why would we squander the years of our lives trying to find some divine life-insurance that would promise us eternal resuscitation but never be able to put that product up for examination?

As odd as what I am saying will sound in the ears of traditional Christians, it is neither a new insight nor in any way unique to modern thinkers.  Among the most ancient of our shared scriptures are the musings of the philosopher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes.  In chapter 8 the teacher advises:

8No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind, or power over the day of death; ....
15So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.

I always felt that my very puritan mother was suspicious of anything that might make one happy.  Her religion taught her to live in absolute rejection of all forms of pleasure in order to gain a place in heaven.  I think that is a bad bet.

Buddhist monks practice keeping a smile on their faces as a gift that they give to the world.  Even when discussing very serious things, they attempt, as an offering to others, to maintain a very cheery appearance which, frankly, can deny even death the ability to extort misery out of us ahead of its time.  I think that the writer of Ecclesiastes is right.  We will die one day and we cannot change that fact so between now and then we should attempt to do what we can to make the world a better place, adding meaning to every day we have, and we should dance our way through the living of our lives, not rushing to the end of the song.

This is not a matter of denial but rather it is a matter of defiance.  We will not let mortality rob us of life while we are living, nor will we allow the prospect of personal failure keep us from throwing our arms open to the potential of love, joy and success.

The most popular early teacher of Buddhism in the United States was the very colorful monk, Trungpa Rinpoche.  I will end this chapter quoting what he often demanded of his American audiences:  "You cheer up.  You cheer up right now."

The Real War on Christmas

Community Christian Church        Roger Ray, pastor
December 22, 2013   "The Real War on Christmas"

Matthew 1:18-25                                  
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah* took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.' 22All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
   and they shall name him Emmanuel',
which means, 'God is with us.' 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;* and he named him Jesus.

(video clip of Sarah Palin talking about her book about the war on Christmas)

It may be an oversimplification but, hey, I'm a preacher and what else are preachers really for?  Seriously, it is not far from the truth to sum up life this way:  If you are sad it is because you are thinking about the past.  If you are worried it is because you are thinking about the future.  The only time and place where you can actually be content and joyful is in the present moment, in the place where you are now.

The handwringing of conservative pendants about an alleged "War on Christmas," can be found only in the kind of sadness and anger they feel about having lost something from their personal past.  Christmas isn't what it used to be.  Fifteen years ago it would have been common for me to receive two or three hundred Christmas cards from family members, school friends, and church members.
Now, if we get one from anyone other than our insurance agent and the charities to whom we give donations, it is an anomaly.  The advent of the internet leaves most of us without an address book with real physical addresses in it and finding a postage stamp in the desk drawer can turn into a "Where's Waldo" investigation.

But Christmas has changed in other ways as well.  The world has become more polarized, more distant, less connected.  Businesses don't spend money on office parties and they don't give bonuses.  Neighbors don't know each other and are too suspicious or partisan to have an open house that might have people in your home who had political signs in their front yard this past year that were an affront to your own views.

And our world is more diverse.   For most of us, that is a good thing, ethnic, racial, religious and national diversity makes the world more interesting and it has certainly given us many better choices in our local restaurants.  But it also means that the dominant culture has to show some sensitivity in making room for our new neighbors.  Most of what the Sarah Palins, Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys are really bemoaning is the loss of an unchallenged white, Christian dominant culture.

They are grieving the loss of a past in which they indulged themselves in the fantasy, recently articulated by the Duck Dynasty star, Phil Robertson, when black people were happy being share croppers and gay people either didn't exist or we didn't have to pretend to be nice to them.  As the comedian Stephen Colbert said, "Of course blacks were happy back then, they even had their own drinking fountains."

Nostalgia is often not a longing for a literal past but for a cleaned up and sanitized past.  Like watching an episode of Andy of Mayberry set in what had to be the only small North Carolina town where there was not one single black person and where even the alcoholics were absolutely hilarious.

The dominant class in any country or century can be blissfully ignorant of those who are oppressed.  I would make the claim that I personally know more about the lives of the rural poor in Nicaragua than do two-thirds of the people who live in Nicaragua's capital city of Managua.  Truly, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.

The progress we have made in cultural diversity has forced America's dominant culture to open their eyes and recognize that even though Catholics and conservative Protestants still make up the majority of the religious landscape in America that they can no longer push the rest of us to the margins, either to coloreds only restrooms or to go stay in the barn out back and have your illegitimate baby with the cows and sheep and all of the other livestock.

The anxiety being felt by the traditionalists is that the future will find them even more un-empowered.  Several states are now doing everything they can to either block the poor, blacks and Latinos from voting, or to Gerrymander them into majority districts so that the powerful can hold onto the throne for one or two more election cycles.  These are fear based, desperate measures that are, essentially, admissions of their eventual defeat.

People used to complain about how Christmas had been commercialized.  Sarah Palin thinks that commercialization is one of the best parts of Christmas.
And retail businesses no doubt agree with Palin.  I have no particular beef with commercialization, in part because, even as suspicious as I am of our excesses in consumerism and capitalism run amok, I recognize that commerce is the root of all productivity and the engine of our economy.  I want our economy to thrive.... I just don't want all of the profit to go to the dominant culture.

The real war on Christmas is not, in any honest biblical sense, the removal of the manger scene from the courthouse lawn or the subtle change in greetings at the cash register from "Merry Christmas" to "happy holidays."  The real war on Christmas is the adamant fight of the rich and powerful to remain in unchallenged power forever!

We do not read the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus as if they were historical.  The stories told by Matthew and Luke are not literal accounts but they are, rather, essentially sermons...they are religious messages used to introduce their gospels.  Though we have grown up with a manger scene that tries to combine the two, they are distinctly different stories.

Matthew tells us that the holy family lived in Bethlehem where Jesus was born in their house.  They only fled Bethlehem out of fear of Herod after they were visited by some Babylonian astrologers who were apparently the only people who noticed the incredibly bazaar behavior of a star actually moving against the direction of all of the other stars in the sky and stopping over just one house.  Luke's story is equally fanciful, saying that everyone in the Roman empire had to leave their homes at the same time to go back to the place of their birth for a census, an event that would have been nationally as disruptive as if the stars suddenly began to move erratically around the sky and stopping off in small town neighborhoods.  

If you try to take these narratives literally they quickly start to look pretty stupid.  If, however, you read them in the way that Matthew and Luke meant them, they become quite powerful.

In completely different ways, both Christmas stories introduce Jesus as someone who is going to turn the world upside down.  The good news of his birth is not announced to the ruling class, or to the wealthy.  The angels didn't gather at the mall and the Magi were not giving interviews on Fox News.

In very different ways, both Matthew and Luke interpret the birth of Jesus in images that were defiant of the dominant culture.  The song Mary sang in Luke is something like the image we have recently been reminded of when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison and he stepped out into the public after sleeping on the ground and having nothing but a bucket in a cell for a toilet, after 27 years in which he was allowed only one 30 minute visit every year and could write a letter only once every 6 months.... he walked out of the prison into a crowd of supporters and raised one black fist over his head and said, "Power."

I don't read the Christmas story as a record of history, of something that happened long long ago, something that I could never see or recover.  I don't see it has a matter of anticipation of some eschatological return of Christ, as surely the Roman church intended the Advent season to be.

I read it in the here and now, in this moment, as a source of joy.... as a defiant fist raised in a nation where the poor not only are not guaranteed a living wage but where they may not even be allowed to vote next year, as if voting mattered much to the empire where, as Congressman Bernie Sanders has recently said, "No piece of legislation can be passed unless it has the okay of corporate America."

In this present moment, we read this story out here on the edge of town, below the radar of the big steeple churches.  Our congressman couldn't care less about what we think or what we need.  The Chamber of Commerce and the Council of Churches shake one another's hands and assure one another that we're just a crazy fringe group.

That's okay, because I know that the angels sang to us about peace and justice and even the stars are lining up to affirm that the weak and the powerless, the homeless, the ones who can't afford to go either to a university or to a hospital, that Jesus was born for us..... not back then, but now.... today, right this minute.

Merry Christmas.

What is So? Wo What? So?

Chapter 10 WHAT IS SO? SO WHAT? SO?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

There are three "so's" I need answered in any research project.  "What is so?" "So what?" and "So?" Tell me what the facts are.  Tell me why it matters.  Tell me what should be done about it.
Dr. Todd Schaible

When I was a young pastor, serving a church in Louisville, KY, I taught a small Wednesday evening Bible class in the church basement for about 25 church members.  A few miles away, on the same side of town there was a very popular bar called the Toy Tiger.  To boost their Wednesday evening trade, at the same time that I was leading a Bible class, there was a competition at the Toy Tiger that they called "naughty nighty night."

I would often thank the two-dozen or so members of the church who chose to attend my mid-week class for electing Bible Study over the "naughty nighty" competition.  Just for clarification, one man did ask me, "You don't seriously think that going to the Toy Tiger was actually a viable choice for us do you?"

Of course, for any of my class members, the drive time would have been about the same.  They were all over 21and any one of them could have made the legal choice to avail themselves of some ribald entertainment if that had been their preference.  But for everyone in the room, including myself, our religious world-view did not include such entertainment as a viable option.

Though my theological education had pretty well extinguished any seriously literal view of a divine final judgment in which the fate of my eternal soul would be decided, sending me either into eternal reward or eternal torturous punishment, still, the shadow of a life time of training to believe that God, like Santa Claus, "sees you when your sleeping.  He knows when you're awake.  He knows if you've been bad or good," so we all inherently knew that we were supposed to "be good, for goodness sake."

We had grown up being indoctrinated into a moral universe in which the boundaries had been drawn by the Lord of the Universe from the heavens above.  We didn't have to struggle with complicated moral decisions about most things because clear bright lines had been drawn centuries before and written down in a book that we were not allowed to question in any serious way.

Progressive religious leaders invite people to lead a good life for the inherent reward of leading a good life, which is a rather vague sounding invitation to those who have always assumed that the moral universe had solid, concrete boundaries with heaven on one side and hell on the other.  Once the manipulative theological carrot and stick have been taken off the table, we have some serious thinking to do about who we are, who we want to be, and what is right and what is wrong.... Not because some supernatural theistic god in the clouds told us what is right and what is wrong, but rather, we are left to figure out what is, in an of itself, either right or wrong on its own merits.

I introduced this book talking about evidence-based faith.  I'm advocating for an approach to religion that is based on what is known and not on what Iron Age myths and superstitions tell us about the world. Physicists sum up the entire universe as being comprised of 12 different types of subatomic particles that are held together by four forces of nature, two of which we can see at work:  gravity and the magnetic force.  The other two are observable only at the atomic level and they have the unromantic names of "the strong force" and "the weak force."  You will never see them anyway so they don't really need poetic nomenclature but they basically hold atoms together and make them behave in a way that makes the universe possible.

Accepting this description of reality, we are all made, quite literally, of the stuff that was created in the heart of super hot stars.  The 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that give us our bodies are the same as the 12 particles of matter and four forces of nature that make up the chair you are sitting on, the bricks in walls around us, the trees, grass and streams down the road and the stars and planets in the heavens above us.

As cosmologist, Brian Swimme, as observed, "Four billion years ago Earth was molten rock.  Now it sings opera."  We are the product of millions of years of evolution.  We are the part of the universe that can now become aware of the existence of the universe and consider its meaning.... In fact, I would argue, we create its meaning.

Here is the big shift, the breath taking, dizzying, sometimes infuriating and frightening shift..... you were taught not to question.  You were taught to accept the Bible as the word of God.  You were taught that America was the greatest country in the world.  We were led to believe that capitalism was just a part of freedom and democracy and Christianity and that we were to defend all of the above with our very lives if necessary and to do so with virtually blind faith and absolute loyalty.
And that, men and women, is the opposite of where we are now.  The old unquestioning approach to life stopped working for most of us.  We read our way out of it, thought our way out of it, or we were pushed out of it through hardships and heartbreaks. For most of us, it was a combination of all of the above.

Now we understand that to really find meaning, we have to question everything.  We have not thrown away our sacred scriptures but we no longer read the Bible as if it was divine legislation.  Now we critically examine it.  Though science, through rational thought and critical thinking, we literally interrogate the universe to find out what is and what is not true.

I remember hearing the famous psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck, saying that anything we cannot question is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.  We have protected our religious idols from scrutiny and preserved them into the 21st century.  But no longer will we reject our gay and lesbian sons and daughters because some ancient nomadic sheepherder condemned homosexuality three thousand years ago and wrote it down in a book.

I introduced this chapter with a quote from Dr. Todd Schaible, who is the director of Burrell Mental Health.  About 15 years ago I had applied for and received a grant from the Burrell Foundation to conduct a research project into methamphetamine use in the Ozarks.  Todd called me into his office to talk about the project and he said to me that there were three essential questions we had to answer:  What is so?  So what? And, So?

That is, our research needed to discover the facts about what was leading to the rapid increase in use and addiction of this dangerous drug and further we needed to be able to clearly articulate why it mattered.  We needed to be able to tell the public and the municipal, county and state governments why they should care.  And finally, we needed to not just throw facts on the table.  Our analysis needed to answer the question, "So what can we do about it?"  What is so? So? And so what?

That conversation has never left me because I have applied it to my life as a pastor, as a journalist and as a college professor.  I don't just gather facts as if I were going to print a phone book or contribute to a data-base.  I need to be able to stand up in front a congregation, a classroom or write in a newspaper column or book what is factually true.  Then I need to be able to say why it matters and, finally, I need to be able to say what should be done in response to those facts.

If there is a single compelling reason for me to be writing this book about progressive faith it is to answer the "so?" part of this equation.  Many wonderful scholars and writers have described the reasons why we have made this dramatic shift in how we read the Bible, and what we now think about Jesus and other world religions.  I am indebted to the disciplined and insightful work of Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, John Dominc Crossan, Karen Armstrong and Springfield's own Charles Hedrick and David Trobisch for helping us all to understand this very clear and objective approach to what were the protected idols of our faith.

They have done a magnificent job of looking at the Christian religion and helping us to see what is so.  And they have done an admirable job of telling us why it matters.  And yet, each of them has felt the need, as religious scholars, to hardly speak of that third "so".... They have left it to us to figure out what is the "so?" of progressive faith.

So, you are backing your car out of the driveway and you have to make a decision..... church or the Toy Tiger?  More realistically, once we have been disabused of the superstitious beliefs in a supernatural theistic being who will decide right and wrong, who will send some eternal part of ourselves to either heaven or hell.... Once we are no longer captured in that intellectual and moral prison.... The question becomes:  Is life to be lived for personal gratification or is there a larger purpose?

If I sit down on a park bench to eat my sandwich and a homeless hungry stranger sits down next to me, do I devour my sandwich as quickly as possible or do I divide it and share it with the hungry stranger?

Nietzsche would tell you that you are weak to even consider sharing your sandwich.  Or, at least that is how Ayn Rand would interpret Nietzsche.  And at least to some degree, the way our economy has been run, the way banks, corporations and, sadly enough, our government, basically makes decisions, it looks like the Objectivism of Rand's school of self gratification is being lived out against the alternative view that I would call a spiritual world view based on a global perspective on ethics.

Scientific thought deals with facts but facts alone cannot determine ethical direction.  I've spent years inviting you to reject what cannot be known, what has only been presented to you as an assertion of truth.  There may be angels and demons, a heaven and a hell, there may be souls, ghosts and spirits but since we cannot objectively analyze any of these things, I have repeatedly said that it is meaningless to discuss them.

But at the base line of my progressive faith, I must acknowledge that there is a truth claim.  Between a life of selfish personal fulfillment, whether you find that at the Toy Tiger or on Wall Street, and a life lived to deliver the greatest good to the largest number of people is a fundamental moral choice.

The earth that once was primarily molten lava but now can rise up and sing opera, through conscious human beings, also experiences great pain and sorrow and we have the potential of experiencing deep joy and meaning.

The choice that I make..... the choice I hope that you make.... Is to answer that "so" question in a way that is not simply seeking personal gratification but is, instead, to direct your life in a way that gives the greatest good to the largest number of people.

I previously quoted Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that we are all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the universe atomically.  That is a scientific fact and I am choosing to credit that fact with spiritual meaning. I will honor my connection to every human being, to the earth, to the universe, by trying to reduce suffering, increase joy and to protect the integrity of life, the earth and the universe.
Owning my connection to the human race and to the earth we share, I cannot be indifferent about the fact that there are hungry people in this city, even if I am personally over fed.  I cannot be indifferent about the threat of waging war, even if I am far past the age of being personally recruited into any army.  The fact that I am employed does not dilute the fact that many are not.  Nor does my access to health care afford me the luxury of being indifferent about those who do not receive appropriate care.  The fact that my neighborhood is free of toxic wastes, that I have reliably clean drinking water and fresh air cannot make me indifferent about the poisoning of the soil, water and air on our shared earth.  Being white, male, heterosexual and American does not excuse me from the need for liberation from oppression for persons of color, for women, for those of all sexual orientations and races and nations of the world.  And the fact that I was free to choose where I drove my car this morning does not deny the fact that there are more than two million Americans in jail or prison right now, many of whom are incarcerated for reasons so wholly indefensible that it is a social crime for us to keep silent about it.

Once Nietzsche was freed from the domination of traditional religion, his choice did not make him the ubermensch, the superman, he thought it did. In fact, followed to the logical conclusion of selfishness and self-service, existence has no meaning at all.  Nietzsche did not leave the cave of religious superstition to evolve into a super human, he left it to de-evolve into meaninglessness.

The real ubermensch, the real heroes of post-modern existence are those who choose to take their liberty in hand and to live lives of self sacrificing service, kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

What Should We Teach Our Children About Religion?

Chapter 9 - "WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH OUR CHILDREN ABOUT RELIGION?"
Roger Ray, D.Min.

It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him:
--"I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I'm standing on one foot."
(Shammai) knocked him down with the builder's rule in his hand.
(The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte.
He told him:
--"What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!"
                                                               From the Babylonian Talmud

Most semesters I teach a course on Western Religions for Drury University.  The course begins with Zoroastrianism and from that early Persian influence, we talk about the chain of evolution from Persia to the familiar modern religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  I don't expect my students to remember very much about the seemingly exotic rituals and beliefs of Zoroastrianism but there is a core teaching that I hope will stay with them.

Zoroastrianism teaches that the good life is lived by having three things:  right thoughts, right speech and right actions.  I tell my classes that 2500 years of theological evolution has not added much to those three injunctions.  Like the story of the first century rabbi, Hillel, who taught a gentile that the whole of the Jewish faith is summed up in a version of what appears in one form or another in all of the great religions of the world, "What is undesirable to you, don't do to anyone else."

I think that it is helpful to be able to distill our faith tradition down to very brief proverbs.  Buddhism teaches detachment from greed and lust.  Islam holds both chastity and charity as core values.
Judaism revolves around concepts of justice and mercy.  Christianity teaches radical compassion.  But you can almost describe this sort of synopsis as being little more than "bumper sticker" spirituality.

If you ask yourself the most serious question, "What is it about your religion that you desperately want to pass on to the next generation?" you know that you need to find a way to express what we hold dear in a vehicle that will be evidently valuable and worth preserving.

It was not long after we started this church that young parents began to ask the question, "Do you offer any classes for children?"  When you don't have a denomination or a specific tradition, that's a lot harder to answer than you might think.  I ordered samples of Sunday School material from the usual suspects:  the Unitarian Universalists, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterian and Methodist publishing houses and the Unity movement.  What we specifically wanted to avoid was indoctrination into any one sect and what we found in the literature of what we thought would be kid-friendly denominations were all very obviously designed specifically to indoctrinate.

Denominations are dying.  They have outlived their usefulness and yet no institution is ever willing to see it's self go out of existence without a fight.  So each denomination's materials seemed to have the underlying purpose of making sure that the children who grow up in their churches will never leave them.... A program that has failed terribly for a couple of generations but that obvious fact has not yet affected denominational publishing houses.  

Thankfully, the Center for Progressive Christianity has made a noteworthy attempt in publishing "A Joyful Path," a series of Sunday School lessons for elementary students that focuses on behaviors more than they focus on beliefs.  It is not a perfect bit of curriculum but it sure is a step in the right direction.

We want to teach ethics without either using the motivational carrot of heaven or the stick of hell.  Without either fear or guilt, without any thought of personal reward, we want to pass along to the next generation a healthy spirituality that can inspire them to grow into what we would call "good people." Though, for me, "good" is always influenced by what Leon Bloy meant when he said that any Christian who is not a hero is a pig.

We are not interested in creating Baptists or Episcopalians; we're not even concerned about whether they choose to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.  We want to pass along the values of a healthy spiritual life, whatever that is for each of them.

We may have a valuable lesson to be learned from the church of the Reformation era when Catholics were regularly inspired by reading stories about the lives of the saints and Protestants were educated in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  They, of course, promoted the lives of people who died defending their virginity or in evangelical zeal but we should rehearse the lives of our modern saints who gave their lives as modern prophets of justice, tolerance, mercy and peace.

Our church is adorned with images of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero, Black Elk and Cesar Chavez.

Our children should know how Sojourner Truth fought to end slavery, how Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis.  They need to know that even in the darkest days of our history, there were thinkers like Henry David Thoreau who were able to articulate a vision for how we could all be changed.

In our day we are way too interested in tearing down leaders, focusing on their clay feet, making ourselves feel better about ourselves.  But for all of the well-known faults of someone like Lyndon Johnson, our children should know how the Voters' Rights Act was passed.  They should hear about when our nation waged war on poverty before we started waging war on the poor.  We should tell stories about people like Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn who stood up to the powerful to speak the truth.

We should make certain that our children know the stories of modern saints like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.  And we should tell them the truth, not the white washed versions told only after they are dead.  Cities that now have a Martin Luther King highway never invited King to visit their communities and usually did what they could to keep him away.  He was investigated and threatened by the FBI, jailed frequently and held in contempt by many of the people who now speak of him as if they supportive of him all along.

Nelson Mandela was officially considered to be a terrorist by President Ronald Regan who resisted sanctions and divestment of apartheid South Africa.  Now, nearly a generation since Mandela was released from the prison where he was tortured and forced into hard labor for 27 years, everyone speaks of him as a modern saint but we must not forget that what made him important was not just because he lead South Africa in a peaceful reconciliation of the races.

He was in prison because he had started a militant opposition to the white government.  He was kept in prison only because he refused to renounce violence as a means of overthrowing that government.  He was nearly blinded by his 27 years on a island prison where he worked breaking rocks in heat that was often over 110 degrees but he would not renounce violence because he refused to surrender his human right to fight for freedom.

You will not hear in his eulogies today that he was a sharp critic of the racism in America and of our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and that he was a friend to Fidel Castro in opposition of American foreign policy.  But we should tell our children the truth.  The path to being a prophet is not simply a matter of talking about love and forgiveness even if those are our primary goals.

Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire.... That's why they killed him.  King was a threat to American apartheid, that's why he was so often beaten and jailed.  Mandela was a threat to the economic and civil oppression of the black population of South Africa and he was thought of as a terrorist before he was thought of as a saint.

Our generation makes heroes out of rock stars and professional athletes but we tend to want to tear down spiritual leaders and political reformers.  We need to get over that.  My New Testament professor at Vanderbilt, Daniel Patte, enjoined us to "preach the church to the church."  We should tell our own stories to our children.

They were born into a world with integrated schools, integrated neighborhoods, and equal opportunity employment.  We were not born into that world.... But some of us made the world change.
Our children should know that Mel and Ruth Miller turned their own home into a miniature United Nations, adopting children of color fifty years ago when doing so meant losing friends, jobs and personal safety.

Our children who have two mommies or two daddies might assume that this is normal but many of us marched in the streets and demanded equal rights for their families and have lost jobs, friends and suffered death threats for doing so.  They should know that members of our church serve and sacrifice for the homeless, for the rural poor of Nicaragua.  They should know that in the room where they get refreshments every week that members lead meetings on week days to help alcoholics and addicts to recover their lives.

Forgive me President Kennedy, but we both curse the darkness and light candles.  Our children should know that we expect great things from them.  We want them to be happy and successful.  We want their lives to be full of joy and love but we are not raising them to be a generation of happy consumers.  We are raising them to become heroes and to do that, we must show them how it is done.

Shall We Still Pray?

Chapter 8 - SHALL WE STILL PRAY?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays."  Soren Kierkegaard

"Substance over symbolism," is one of my regular mantras.  I am  convinced that religious symbolism is often used, not as a teaching tool, but to take the place of substance.  What is, after all, lighting a candle in honor of abused children compared with volunteering to become a foster parent?  Religious people have been trained through practice to make symbolic actions and to then tell themselves that they have done something.  This is nowhere more true than when it comes to the way that we speak about prayer.

I had said to my congregation, in a sermon about prayer, that telling someone that you would pray for them was the same thing as saying, "I have no intentions of actually doing anything to help you."  What is, after all, praying for someone to get well compared with bringing them a steaming pot of chicken soup?

Just a  couple of days later my father died in his home 500 miles from here. My congregants couldn't attend the funeral nor could they directly express their sympathy in the language of the church, which is usually a covered dish.  I speak "covered dish" and gladly accept that homemade food is the physical equivalent of love.  The normal church response would have been to have called or e-mailed to say, "You are in my prayers," or the modern tacitly more secular version of, "You are in my thoughts and prayers."  I suppose adding "thoughts" is a way that we can hedge our bets against the supernatural theism implied in intercessory prayer but, because of what I had said, my friends were nervous, even about that.

We no longer say intercessory prayers in our public services because we do not believe that God works like a giant Santa Claus in the clouds.  But that is not to say that progressives have eschewed the practice of prayer.  As Kierkegaard said so succinctly:  Prayer does not change the one to whom we pray but it does change us.  We pray, not to give God information that God might not have known nor do we assume that God is an ogre who must be pestered into charitable action.

In Alcoholics Anonymous literature, people who are in recovery are encouraged to increase their conscious contact with God as they each understand God to be.  Even the ancient mystics of Christian spirituality spoke with disdain about prayer that was either supplication or intercession or even prayer that used words.  Let me briefly describe three types of prayer:
There are discursive prayers, verbal prayers such as what we say in public or perhaps at our dinner tables.  Then there is meditation and contemplation.  There is not general agreement in the distinctions that I am making but for my own purposes, when I say that I am meditating that means that I am thinking about something.  If I attempt contemplation, I am specifically and intentionally silent and am I am trying not to think about anything at all.

Discursive prayer is where everyone starts- whether they are repeating a rote prayer, reading one written in a liturgy or composing their own feelings and thoughts in words.  The act of praying is an acknowledgement of our spiritual world view, of our connection to one another, to God and to the universe.  Discursive prayers can be prayers of praise, confession, thanksgiving but mostly they are intercessions.

The four noble truths of Buddhism teach:
That life is full of suffering and that suffering comes from our desires, our attachments.  The end of suffering comes from learning to let go of our attachments, to learn how not to desire or love things. The fourth noble truth is the invitation to follow the way of the Buddha in prayerful contemplation.

Though I intellectually discourage praying "for" something, I don't want to be dishonest, like most people, whenever I am scared or worried, I still do.

I don't actually believe that my silent prayers work in the way that we were taught to believe when we were kids. Regardless of my intellectual beliefs, my anxieties about my loved ones or fear for myself manage to get composed into earnest prayer as naturally as the way our body will produce adrenaline when we see a barking dog charging us. I think that is normal but we should not let it recapture our minds in the prison of magical thinking.

When we speak of prayer, I hope that we will concentrate on the kind of prayer that really can change the one who prays.

Meditation is a form of prayer similar to what I believe that Buddhists mean when they speak of mindfulness.  In fact, we have examples of parallels between Buddhist "mindful walking" and the Christian practice of praying the "stations of the cross" or a labyrinth.  Trappist monks today will typically have a small crucifix on the wall of their cell and a simple icon, either of which can be the focus of hours of meditation.  A person in meditation is striving to think deeply, prayerfully, about one thing.

Many people will take a single verse of scripture and reflect on it during a long meditative walk.  During my graduate school years when scripture was too closely associated with my academic work for me to peacefully and calmly meditate on a verse from the Bible, it was my habit to read through the sayings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) until I could find a single sentence that was meaningful to me and I would spend hours walking through the grounds of the monastery where I went on retreat, just thinking about that sentence.

During most of our waking hours we are either thinking about the past or anticipating the future.  Meditation is a way of becoming centered again in the present moment.  In recent years I have discovered much of the calming and centering effect of my former monastic prayer retreats in my weekly practice of yoga.

I don't know if everyone else in my class has to concentrate anything like as hard as I do to achieve some of those yoga positions but I have found yoga to be an excellent means towards meditation and I do not hesitate to call it "prayer."  Again, some people may simply be exercising just as someone might just be taking a walk but either done intentionally, mindfully, as meditative prayer can make the experience something that strengthens our spiritual awareness.

For the sake of brevity I will not say more about this but I do want to point you in the direction of Matthew Fox who has written and spoken on this topic brilliantly.

Many of you have heard a few clips of his on the Living the Questions series but you can find several of his talks on YouTube and his books are very worthwhile.

Finally, there is what we call contemplation. Contemplative prayer might be the most unlikely and yet the most needed in our modern society.  Many of us can scarcely so much as go to the bathroom without the company of our smart phone or tablet.  My generation has gone from three channels on a black and white TV set in the living room to having media in endless varieties in every room and even in our pockets.  Silence is nearly intolerable.  We have to have something to distract us, entertain us, to make certain that we are never simply alone and still.

We have 24 hour news channels though none of them have more than 30 minutes of hard news in a day.... It is mostly fluff, distraction. We hear more about Miley Cyrus' twerking butt than we know about why there is a civil war raging in Syria. We have the world's knowledge at our finger tips on the internet but the majority of traffic on line is still just pornography. For the most part, our distractions fill our time, our minds, our souls, our character with junk.... Maybe even poison.

There is an old story about a young novitiate pestering the abbot of his monastery asking, "Father, how can I draw near to God?" and the abbot would reply, "Shut up and go to your cell."  Having received this reply several times and feeling entirely brushed off, finally the monk complained, "Father, why will you not help me?"

And the old man said, "I have told you, you will draw near to God if you will be silent and still, alone in your room and in the silence your cell will teach you everything you need to know."

Again, this is very similar to the Buddhist notion of emptying.    There is a Buddhist story about a seeker coming to one of the old masters and asking him to teach him the spiritual path.

The master invited the young man to sit down to have tea with him.  The master began pouring tea in the student's cup but continued pouring after it was filled until tea was running all over the table and onto the floor.

The student asked, "Master, what are you doing?"  And the wise one replied, "You come asking to be filled when you are already full of many things.  How can you find the way until you can be empty?"

If we have become spiritually dull, insensitive and unaware, I suspect that this is not a failure on God's part.  If we fill up our lives with entertainment, work, distractions and even with good things, how will we ever find meaning?

We pray, not because we want to ask for favors from a magical Deity in the clouds but because we want to heighten our conscious contact with God and with one another.... We pray as an alternative to becoming a product of what comes at us through all of the screens we stare into night and day.

In the last first century, Christians chose to follow Jesus because the Jesus message offered an alternative to the empire.... An alternative to warfare, slavery, service to the aristocracy. Today, to choose what most people are rejecting..... to choose a spiritual life and not one of those embarrassingly self-serving magical incantations to keep you out of hell or get you into religion, but to choose a rational, intelligent, progressive spirituality is to choose as our first century predecessors did, we are choosing not to become the product of advertisements, pornography, the culture of Hollywood and entertainment.....we are rejecting the dominance of the 21st century empire that is a marriage of corporations and governments.

Capitalism is not our religion.  Military power is not our security. We have chosen another way.  If we are good enough at it then we will be able to show the world that there is an alternative.  They have the money, the media, the military and the majority but we are not defeated.

What do We do When We Gather as a Community?

Chapter 7 - WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE GATHER AS A COMMUNITY?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

"This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool....."  Soren Kierkegaard 

Christian liturgy should intensify the "cognitive dissonance" between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.
Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment

Just seven years ago there were a couple of dozen people meeting on Sunday evenings to talk about why we didn't go to church anymore and to consider what we could do with our spiritual instincts.  We read books together about religion and social justice.  We were liberals, we were progressives and so we had little difficulty in setting aside traditional Christian beliefs and embracing a scholarly approach to the Bible and the historical Jesus.

We quickly and easily agreed on the priorities that should be a part of any spiritual community..... working to save the planet, fighting poverty and prejudice, working for the civil rights of minorities, gays and lesbians and immigrants...working for international peace and inter-faith dialogue.  With each essential priority we named, there was always at least a little bit of looking backwards.  We talked about how the churches we had left had disappointed us in these areas.

After several weeks of conversations, one brave lady stood up and asked in a very demanding way, "Why don't we just start our own church?"  A bit of electricity moved through the room but it died out just as quickly when I began to ask my friends what we would do when our new church gathered.

Would we sing hymns?  If so, what kind of songs would we sing?  Would we have corporate prayers?  Would we practice communion, baptism or any other sacramental or ritual observances?  In a group of about 25 people, it became evident that we couldn't get more than three or four to attend any church service that we could design.

This may seem like the least interesting chapter in this book and yet, I assure you, if your intention is to create communities around progressive faith, this will be the highest hurdle you have to jump.  After several months of conversation, we decided that we would give starting a church a try.

Our experience paralleled much of what I have heard about other new church starts.  There was a lot of coming and going in the first two years for all of the reasons we had identified in our pre-church conversations.  There were those who wanted a church that was open and affirming, pro-marriage rights, etc. but who still wanted pretty traditional evangelical theology and practice.  Others were quite firm in their post-theistic views and were quickly disdainful of any religious ritual or use of words such as "worship" or "Lord" that had followed us from our traditional roots.

I have no uniform service suggestion to make here for how progressive churches should gather.  In the end, when we started our little congregation, our first service looked a lot like my last service in a formal denominational worship service.  My theology had evolved but my habits took longer to change and they are, in fact, still changing.

Though we had some interfaith and some no-faith participants from the start, most of us have come from either Catholic or Protestant traditions.  Both consciously and unconsciously, we brought some assumptions with us about what it meant to have a church service.  My liturgy professor at Vanderbilt was a strict, formal, high church Presbyterian who could be aptly described with the words John Steinbeck used to describe Liza Hamilton in "East of Eden" - "...a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken...with a sour Presbyterian mind and code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."

For twenty-five years I was a liturgical purist, adhering to the formal traditions of the church and rejecting all forms of syncretism with American culture.  I have no excuse for why it took so long for me to realize how absurd this was.  The ancient church seasons and holidays were predicated on the harvests and traditional observances of the cultures that gave birth to them.  The timing of the spring wheat harvest in Palestine, that is the root of the early celebration of Pentecost, should not carry more weight with us than our nation's observance of Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving or even Mothers' Day.

Many popular hymn tunes were not sacred in origin, some were even quite colorful drinking songs in their earliest incarnation.  We owe no fealty to hymns that, though familiar to us, articulate a theology contrary to our own.  The issue is to find some balance in which we give ourselves permission to honor our heritage while being free to grow, learn and change.

One of the great architects of progressive thinking is Bishop John Shelby Spong, who still often appears in public in the clerical collar he wore as an Episcopal bishop.  Marcs Borg, who has done as much to de-mythologize our understanding of the historical Jesus as any author alive today, still speaks in very devotional Christian language.

In our church, we have slowly evolved away from much of the language and formal practice the church traditions of our past.  We never sang the traditional doxology but we did sing a gender inclusive version of it until a member of our church asked, "Why are we singing a Trinitarian song if we don't believe in Trinitarian theology?"  There was no rational explanation beyond the fact that none of us had ever consciously thought about the Trinitarian nature of the doxology.

We have since written new lyrics that are focused on our faith community but the new version doesn't pack the nostalgic punch of the more traditional one and, as some observe, without some vestiges of our former experience, our gatherings do not "feel like church."  Still, the next generation of progressives will not likely want to hold onto theologically sanitized hymns and prayers.  My suspicion is that they will not continue our observances of communion, they will probably not want a hymnal at all, nor will they preserve the cross or the clerical vestments that some of us still need to make our gatherings look and feel enough like what we associate with the practice of faith to stay connected to our community.

We freely blend the reading of scripture with the public reading of passages of philosophy, theology, science or other wisdom sources.  We blend traditional religious music with secular music. And though we primarily come from Christian roots, we now freely blend the literature and conventions of all world religions in our gatherings because we are trying to foster and strengthen our spirituality but not sectarianism.

We may be one of the only progressive churches in the world that begins our Sunday service with a chanted Psalm text.  I have argued in favor of holding onto this because, for me, it marks the movement from ordinary time into a time when the community is gathered for the specific purpose of being the church.  We still have congregational singing and prayers because, we believe, the blending of our voices in unison is a way of both becoming and expressing community.

Our services maintain the traditional four fold movement of formal liturgy:  Gathering, Proclamation, Thanksgiving, Going to Serve though any one of its parts would seem rather different from what you would experience in a Catholic, Episcopal or Lutheran church. We have eschewed the use of such words as "praise" and "worship" because we do not believe that there is an ego deficit Deity enthroned in the clouds who needs, wants or would enjoy our worship and praise.  We strive to avoid religious language that would in any way encourage or institutionalize gender or sexual prejudice, dominance or triumphalism..... which, of course, cuts out most of the hymns we know by heart!

While many progressive churches have given up on offering classes or even including sermons in their services, we have doubled down on both.  We believe that the teaching function of the faith community is central.  We cut a lot of corners to save money but we have invested heavily in guest lecturers and seminars because we are convinced that critical thinking and a well-informed membership is vital to our success.

As the progressive movement was starting to find its legs at the end of the 20th century, two books made an important impression on me.  The first was a little volume by Leander Keck entitled, The Church Confident and the second was Marva Dawn's Reaching Out without Dumbing Down.

Both argued that our gatherings should be theologically rich, instructive, intelligent and that we should strive for excellence.  Keck very specifically decried the lack of beauty in the world and pleaded with us to infuse our gatherings with art, music, poetry and even architecture that can feed our starving souls, indeed, astonish us in a way that changes us, enlarges our vision and awareness.

Though they did not quote the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, I think that both Dawn and Keck would have said "Amen" to Kierkegaard when he praised those who had stopped going to church because in refraining from attending public worship as it was in his day, they were at least avoiding publicly insulting God.

Our public gatherings, by the simple fact that we are gathering, promotes the building of community.  Some of the most important parts of our Sunday mornings take place around the coffee pots and in the church aisles.  If, as St. John of the Cross has said, we pass every other test but fail the love test, we are still failures.  Our gatherings should nurture friendships and break down the walls of indifference and anonymity.  The language we speak to one another should be obviously seasoned with sincere love and a cherishing of one another's humanity.

But what happens between prelude and postlude should include instruction, inspiration and moral challenge.  While much of what happens under steeples in America seems intent upon slowly killing parishioners with boredom, Richard John Neuhaus said that "liturgy should intensify the 'cognitive dissonance' between the community of faith and the world surrounding it."
There are things going on in the world about which we should be shocked, grief stricken, and provoked into action.  Most of those things will never make it into the media but they sure better make it into the liturgy.                                    

On a perfect Sunday, those who attend our gatherings will learn something, experience a sense of awe and wonder, and they will leave this hour feeling more closely connected to one another and more determined to go into the coming week prepared to bear prophetic witness to justice and to serve in sacrificial and meaningful ways to being healing to the world.  We won't get all three every week but if we fail to consistently get one or two of them then we should just quit and turn this place into something more useful, like a used car lot or a flea market.

The modern church should take its prophetic voice in society seriously.  If they lack the courage and insight to be prophetic they should at least be of service in an exemplary manner.  But the old saying that you should either lead, follow or get out of the way applies nowhere more than it applies to churches.

Perhaps the old motto of the French Foreign Legion is not too much of an over statement:  If I falter, push me.  If I stumble, help me up.  If I retreat, shoot me.

What is Church, Synagogue, Mosque or Temple to Us Now?

Chapter 6 - WHAT IS CHURCH, SYNAGOGUE, MOSQUE OR TEMPLE TO US NOW?
Roger Ray, D.Min.

We are all connected
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
-Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist)

M. Scott Peck, the late psychiatrist and self-help author, wrote a book about creating community called A Different Drum.  It is regrettably dated, having been written in the midst of the Cold War.  However, his chapter on "Patterns of Transformation" is as helpful as anything in his more famous book, The Road Less Traveled.  He describes the movement from childhood chaos into institutional, dogmatic religion followed by a time of questioning and doubt.  The persistent and the fortunate find their way beyond that emptiness into a fourth stage of spiritual evolution, one that is a more mystical approach to faith that offers a synthesis between what can be known and the sense of awe and wonder associated with a spiritual perspective on life.

I hate to brush over this important observation but if you will allow me a very brief summation.  Children are born into a frightening universe full giants and in which they have little or no control over anything that happens to them.  In many instances, they resolve the fears of early childhood through incorporation into a formal, institutional religion that gives them solid answers to the big questions of life and very distinct marching orders about how to live in a way that makes you one of God's best friends and avoids any eternal conflict with the universe.

Those answers, however, don't hold much water when they are critically examined.  Most people do not dismiss them outright but they move their importance way down so that they can remain tacitly Jewish or Christian or Muslim and in that way they hold onto a bit of divine fire insurance without letting institutional religion mess their lives up too much.  If people took traditional Christianity literally, we would see a lot of people selling everything they own, giving the proceeds to the poor and living their lives like ascetic monks.  But we, in fact, rarely see anything other than symbolic devotion to the weightier demands of traditional faith.  Most people hold onto a symbolic fragment of religion, sometimes using it to excuse their own failings and sometimes using it to pass judgment on others but rarely allowing it to change their own lives.

Sadly, most institutions of religion are fairly happy with this arrangement.  They are holding onto members who at least visit now and then, offer some financial support and good will that allows the institutions to continue to exist.  But the more persistent critical thinkers will find the courage to swim against the current of family and society and be entirely dismissive of the truth claims associated with religion.

Most of Northern Europe and the coastal North America have arrived at this third stage.  Middle America is following suit.  That was certainly Scott Peck's own journey through his childhood and evolving awareness in medical school and psychiatric training.  But he was one of the ones who were not willing to simply live in perpetual skeptical individualism.  He pressed on to find a faith that embraced both science and a more mystical awareness of our connectedness to one another and to the universe.

I had the chance to have a brief personal conversation with Peck in the late 1980's.  He advised me to get out of the ministry as soon as I could.  He said, "There is no spirit left in the institutional church.  You need to find a better way to help build community in the world than you can possibly do in a church."  It was not the advice I was expecting from him and now, twenty-five years later, I think that I can say that he was both right and wrong.

I don't have much hope for denominational Christianity or in much of what goes on the institutional mosques, synagogues and churches of the 21st century unless they are willing to undergo radical transformation. They cannot have a future while they remain attached to ancient myths that fly in the face of modern science.

Institutions of religion tend to discourage critical thinking in favor of unquestioning loyalty.  Even many churches that publicly boast of being open to those who doubt or question seem to have a fairly short period of tolerance before some level of conformity to traditional superstition and magic is expected of them.

It is horribly disappointing that so many great minds were presented, early in their lives, with a choice between reason and belief, between religious superstition and science.  Richard Dawkins said that he was raised in the Anglican Church and only left when he was in his mid-teens.  He realized that the theory of evolution presented a more plausible explanation for how the world came to be in its current form.  He not only abandoned faith in favor of science but he has also devoted passionate energy to publishing aggressive attacks on religion, imploring other people to give up on faith entirely.

He said, "There is a new wave of reason sweeping across America, Britain, Europe, Australia, South America, the Middle East and Africa where superstition had a firm hold."  I hope that he is right but I do not believe that wave of reason needs to sweep away all forms of spiritual communities.  In fact, I am depending on that wave of reason to help us to become healthy again.

But Dawkins is not alone in turning his back on religion in favor of rational thought and scientific inquiry.  Recognizing that the religion of our parents and the doctrinal claims of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam simply do not stand up to the light of reason, necessarily gives us an experience of loss.  It is not that traditional religion has no value.  In truth, it had tremendous value to us at one point in our lives and we give it up with a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth!

Every day I talk with and receive mail from people who are both hurt and angry that they have been lied to, deceived, manipulated, and made to feel guilt, shame and fear by religious authorities, family members and friends.  And yet, they still somehow want to salvage something of their faith tradition but you can hardly blame them for having trust issues.

It is entirely understandable that when you realize what a mental prison that religious superstition has been that you want to run and have nothing to do with anything that uses the language of church, synagogue, mosque or temple ever again.  At the risk of sounding a bit ironic, I believe that the future of the church is absolutely dependent upon large numbers of people adamantly rejecting and vacating the institutions that have perpetuated these Bronze Age myths.

It is difficult for anyone to receive what progressive faith has to offer until they have the courage to let go of the security blanket of a familiar though out grown religion.  Most of the members of the progressive congregation where I am the pastor spent several years in that "in between" region, having left traditional churches and having little reason to go in search of something that was simultaneously rational and yet open to spiritual perspectives.  Only gradually have my peers allowed themselves to reconsider being a part of an organization that is defined as being a church.

For many of us, the question of "Why bother?" with any kind of church or spiritual community is a question with no clear answer.  When I left denominational ministry, I vowed never to set foot in a church again and I am not entirely free of those sentiments, even as I sit here writing this book.  Institutions of religion have promoted wars, violent oppression of the poor, minorities, women, homosexuals, the divorced and even those who were just free thinkers.  The victims of religion number in the billions, even today, as gay people try to live straight lives to conform to the expectations of their faith community, driving many to suicide, substance abuse, infidelity and violence.

Young men and women have their critical thinking skills curtailed by religious insistence upon forcing themselves to pretend to believe what is clearly not rational.  The young grow up with confused feelings of self-loathing, fear of their own bodies and neurotic guilt for having feelings and appetites that are purely human.  And that is before we even get into the matters of church politics where so many of us have been tortured as employees of the church.

What brought me back to church was a need to be connected.  Humans are pack animals, after all.  We have an existential longing to be connected to one another, even though, after millions of years of evolution, we do not appear to be especially good at doing it.

The last few years that I was in the employ of a traditional church, I found the greatest meaning in the relief work we were doing on the Louisiana coast with Hurricane Katrina victims and among the poor of rural Nicaragua.  When I left parish ministry, I found that I listened to the news with an entirely different perspective.  In the days following Katrina's devastating landfall on the gulf coast, I was able to pull together a team of volunteers, raise financial support and head down to the coast to help.  As an individual, learning of natural disasters produced sorrow and sympathy but left me without any reasonable means of personally responding beyond my meager individual ability to send contributions.

In community, I am able to be involved in what Bruce Cockburn called, "kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight."  I am a part of a volunteer team that takes hot meals to hundreds of the unsheltered homeless of my hometown every week.  On my own, my efforts would be, at best, symbolic and sporadic.  In community, we encourage one another, inspire one another and plan together so that any Thursday or Friday morning of the week our church is found among the most desperately poor of our city.

The comedian, Jon Stewart, has said that "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies." I am afraid that in most cases, when we are not a part of community, our convictions largely reside in our own heads.  They are not even hobbies.  They are just opinions.
They may be passionately held and expressed opinions but they are much less likely to become meaningful action unless we are united with others of similar convictions.  I am confident that if the congregation where I am now the pastor suddenly ceased to exist that most of the good work we do for the poor of our city would just stop happening.  We remain disciplined in meaningful service only because we remain in contact with one another.  Those who abandon the church may have very similar views and opinions as ours but as loners, they are of little use in actually doing anything.

Secondly, and I must ask for some grace in how I am going to say this.  There are very few things that I can claim as being original to me but I have one theory of psychology that is my own.  And to get the full impact of it, I need to ask for your permission to say it in a rather crass way.  I call it my, "theory of asses."  And it is this:  Everyone will be just as much of an ass as the people around him will allow him to be.  Without close community with others, we can all become pretty self-centered and self-serving jerks.

In the academic world we champion the concept of "peer review."  That is, anything you discover in research or come up with in terms of your own theorizing or creation must be subjected to the critical review of the other professionals in your field.  Peer review is not perfect because sometimes your peers are asses themselves.  But any substantive progress in science, medicine, physics, and, I would argue, even in art and literature, are dependent upon peer review.  We need each other to provoke one another to good deeds, to check one another when our egos or our ideas become irrational.

Being in a faith community keeps us in a kind of peer review.  Buddhism teaches that the greatest of illusions is our sense of separation.  Interesting then that scientists, specifically, physicists are starting to sound like Buddha when they speak of how connected we all are.  I believe that the church has a future because it can be an expression of that great human connection and because, when we are connected we really can change the world for the better and in the process we will inevitably find that we are also being changed for the better.

And that, my friends, is not something that will happen on Twitter or Face Book.  I'm staying in church because I need it and as irritating as I can be, I sense that at times you need me too.  Together we will become better people while we help to give birth to a better world.