Month: March 2008

I’ve written on this before, but articles, posts and bits of news keep bringing me back to it. It’s been said that generals and admirals are always prepared to fight the last war, and while I think that is very unfair to generals and admirals, I do think it is true about a great many of those who feel passionately about some particular cause or overly confident in some particular success. It seems that, as we age, we are often too comfortable in continuing the passionate fight of our youth in spite of the fact that conditions, events and issues in conflict have changed, sometimes radically.

One colleague is as deeply passionate about the fight to ordain women and give them equal treatment with men as she was thirty years ago. By that I mean that she is still fighting that battle as if the same terms and conditions applied today as they did then. She seems unaware of the magnitude of change that has occurred over the last thirty years. Many acquaintances, more male than female, but including both, are still deep in the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War, and treat every political event as a continuation of that struggle. Democrats continue trying to resurrect Kennedy, while Republicans are afraid to move away from Reagan. Some of those I counsel reveal that they are still preparing to refight the battle they had in high school or college, and are certain that every perceived threat of conflict is an echo of that very moment.

The downfall of many rising stars in corporate management and ordained ministry is that they were once creative and had tremendous early success in meeting new challenges, but they have continued to use the same tools and strategies that worked so well then even though the playing field has changed and a new game is under way. We used to joke about executives and pastors who had only two or three years of experience, but they had it ten times over.

As the old saying goes, you cannot drive a car by looking only in the rearview mirror. The disciplines needed to look ahead and anticipate what might be coming are not complicated or hard to teach, but I confess that in all my years of teaching, very few ever paid much serious attention to learning them. It does require a good study of history to discover not only what happened but why and how, and from the view of the losers as well as the winners. We need to be in conversation with the voices of the past, but it also requires intentional scanning of the horizon to see what is happening out there that is different. It requires an examination of those differences to see what, why and how they are different. And it requires some reasonably clear sense of how all of that will affect us, our organizations, and the goals we have been trying to reach. I do not think that the skills and energy needed to do that reside only in the chain of next generations. I do think that we have a tendency to get lazy and complacent, and that is our key problem. Lent is a good time to think about that.

The leader of the separatist movement to begin a new denomination apart from the Anglican Communion is a fellow named Akinola, the current archbishop of Nigeria. From my point of view he is an out of control, power hungry, greedy, megalomaniac in whom Christ is completely hidden if not absent altogether. But in a conversation on another website (In a Godward Direction) I said that he is, after all, Nigerian not American, and we cannot understand him until we can put ourselves into the soul of a Nigerian, and, more particularly, into the soul of his own tribe. What followed were several responses claiming that, as (Anglican) Christians, we all share one faith in God through Christ that gives us a common language and way of understanding each other. On that basis we are free to judge him in the name of Christ, and our judgment is one that all right thinking Christians will agree with thanks to our common Christian language. I find that incredibly naïve, and am astonished that otherwise intelligent, well educated people fail to see that our idea of what it is to be a Christian is so interwoven with who we are as Americans, with our foundational myths and legends, with whatever ethnic heritage we claim, with our history, with all of that and more, that the language of Christ we claim to be common is common only to us, and we even disagree with each other about that. I find it exceedingly curious that these commentators, most of whom would self declare as politically liberal, are in lockstep agreement with George Bush that our way of seeing the world must be the way all right thinking people see the world, or at least they should, and perhaps if we explain it better in slow, loud English, they will. I doubt that we are alone in that self-deception. I imagine that all peoples everywhere suffer likewise. But because of America’s power position the world today, it is we Americans who come off as the arrogant ones of enormous hubris who desire to impose our ways on others. That means that American religious leaders cannot separate themselves from the tangled web of American foreign policy, and the image of American life and values broadcast to the world through television and movies. Only through some effort to understand all of that will it be possible for true conversation between the peoples of Christian faith to take place, even within the Anglican Communion.

March is a ridiculous month. I can’t imagine why it was invented or what demented mind came up with the idea. Some say it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, or is it the other way round? In either case it implies a certain intentionality that I believe does not exist. March is the very icon of chaos. It has absolutely no idea where it is going because it doesn’t know where it came from or where it is. March is freedom without purpose and only in the most absent-minded way manages to drunkenly stumble out of winter toward spring without the least intent of doing so. Nevertheless, the bulbs in our garden are starting to send up shoots. Willow trees along the creek are beginning to turn a pale sort of green. Birds no longer flock to our feeder fighting for position in the same aggressive numbers. The day dawns earlier and slides more gently into night at a more reasonable hour. March is the hormonally driven teenager of months and must be endured until it mutates into a saner April. I wonder if October behaves the same way in the southern hemisphere? What does any of this have to do with theology? Could it be that March is also the icon of the spiritual journey most of us are on?