Month: June 2008

As we approach the Fourth of July, I wonder what the future holds for the nation.  What would it be like for Americans to simply get on with the business of being Americans without paranoid fear of terrorists, illegal immigrants and national security; without feeling the need for hyper-patriotism celebrating our place as the rightful and only super power in the world; but with a deep recommitment to the ideals and values we treasure in our founding documents and find so easy to ignore or give away?

We are going through a difficult period of retrenchment that will change some of the fundamentals of our economy and our politics.  On the economic side it will not take long for China to surpass us as the world’s largest, most powerful economy, and she already owns a huge portion of our national debt.  For that reason alone China cannot allow America to fail, and I imagine that many will find it more than humiliating to discover that we have become so beholden to another.  But there is more than a silver lining to this scene.  Indeed it can be a golden lining. 

Without the burden of world leadership resting on our backs alone, even if that was never more than an egotistical delusion, just think of how we could redirect our political energies.  Remembering our Declaration of Independence, we could renew our commitment to building a nation free of oppression whether from unjust government policies or unjust personal actions.  We could become rededicated to equality of justice and opportunity for all. 

Remembering our Constitution, we could renew an effective balance of power between the branches of government with a special emphasis on the restoration of Congressional powers that have so easily seeped into the executive branch. Perhaps we could begin seeing the Bill of Rights as principles to be lived into with integrity of heart and mind rather than as political bludgeons with which to hammer one another into submission.

With conservation a priority, and easy credit a thing of the past, we could rediscover the joy of living as Americans in a society not consumed by out of control consumerism subsumed under piles of products and services of marginal value or utility.  It does not mean becoming a poor nation or anything like that.  It means being able to live responsibly into our wealth and abundance with a more equitable sharing of both with all.  It could mean a much freer free market economy rather than current system that seems so dangerously close to corporate socialism. It could mean a nation so confident and content with its place in the world that it would have no fear of living and working compatibly with as many others as are also so willing.

The problem with this vision is that it will anger those who can only envision America through the lens of pugilistic patriotism that hankers for a fight and suspects anything less as being un-American.  To put it bluntly, that kind of right wing nationalism has been the death knell of many an empire.  I’d not like to see that happen to us.  I prefer that we live into and up to the highest standards of our founding documents and become a bright, and highly respected, beacon of freedom in the world.  

I should be spending the early part of summer reading a fascinating and cutting edge thesis by a religion honors graduate whom I had the privilege of knowing and working with during his undergraduate years.  Instead, on something of a challenge from a friend of mine, I’m wading through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Belknap Harvard 2007).  A passage caught my eye this morning that I think speaks directly to the current internecine warfare within the Anglican Communion.  About the various hard-core reformists and their opponents of centuries gone by he writes:

The tremendous investment in reform and hence discipline, which inspires such a sense of their spiritual superiority in the breasts of Latin, and ex-Latin Christians, when they contemplate those of other faiths, or even other Christian churches, this immense effort seems itself to have obscured the essentials of the faith, and to have led to a substitution of something secondary for the primary goal of centering everything on God.

I follow a number of Anglican blogs and news sites. Most of them are consumed with demonstrating that they are the first to know and know the most about what is going on with Lambeth, GAFCON, Pittsburgh or any of a dozen other flashpoints in the world of Anglicanism.  I follow them because they are informative, and the occasional appearance of wry wit has some entertainment value.  But Taylor is right not only about the Church of past centuries.  In our own day we have “substituted something secondary for the primary goal of centering everything on God,” and that is to our shame.

I’ve been exchanging e-mail with a friend who is leading the anti-racism training in the diocese. As she has become more and more aware of the Indian culture that surrounds us and infuses the very character of the Inland Northwest she has wondered about how it is that we have such a history of crashing into and trampling down any culture that gets in the way of our own.  The “we” in this case would be the European based culture of that has been popularly understood as the normative standard for America.

I’ve been wondering about the same thing.  There can be no excuses, but it might be worthwhile to recall that it is only in the last 100 years or so that the world has come to a more or less common understanding that territorial expansion by conquest (and genocide in many cases) is not morally acceptable.  The first half of the 20^th century gave us two world wars at untold cost in lives and suffering to drive home the point.  Before that the question about the morality of violent conquest was simply not much of an issue.  

Sometime in the last year or so the Christian Century featured several essays recalling the pre Civil War argument of the plurality of Christian writers that slavery was endorsed by the bible and those who opposed it were heretics who were twisting the clear and obvious meaning of God’s holy Word.  

It was not until the early 1950s that the armed forces were integrated and then not very well.  The 1964 Voting Rights Act was, for all practical purposes, the true end of the Civil War when the nation came to a grudging agreement about a new moral standard for what it meant to be an American.  This slow and often painful transition is not an American phenomenon.  Every tribe and nation on the face of the earth is in the same boat.  The fact is that the last 100 years have been, perhaps, the most revolutionary in the history of humanity and we have still not got it sorted out.  

So I think the answer to my friend’s quandary is that we are in possession of a new moral standard that says it is sinfully wrong to crash through other peoples’ cultures demolishing them as we go, but we do not yet possess the know how or habits of the heart to stop  doing it.  The anti-racism training being conducted in our diocese is part of the process of bringing us another step or two along the path.

The big stumbling block at the moment, it seems to me, is that our early efforts at integration assumed that everyone wanted to and would become a white middle class American.  That didn’t work.  Now we are trying to figure out how to live with understanding and respect for one another’s ethnicities and cultures in a way that will lead to a synergistic melding in a new normative America.  That scares the living daylights out of some.  It was hard enough crafting the synergistic American out of Northern European immigrants.  Doing that with people from other cultures and ethnicities looks harder and more dangerous because it means that the old “we” will drift farther away from the European ideal.  Obama’s candidacy is, if nothing else, going to a major test of that fear.  

James Michener had hopes that a new “golden man” would become the normative American and saw glimpses of that in post-war Hawaii.  Arthur Schlesinger lectured that lust, love and sex would eventually make progress where legislation could make little.  My own family is a good case in point.  My spouse and I come from good Celtic, Anglo, and Norman stock, with the occasional sneaky Saxon thrown in as well.  But some of our grandchildren, nieces and nephews are a mix of European, Asian and Pacific Islander.  Our two Anglo grandchildren are being raised in Taiwan speaking Mandarin and English.  We may not be synergistically melded but I suspect that we are on the way.  I can’t quite see the “golden man” of Michener, but Schlesinger sure got it right.

 

Have you ever read one of those how to talk to your teenager articles in magazines of dubious editorial content?  Ha!  What a lot of nonsense!  Who are those writers?  We drove one of our goddaughters to camp today, not to be a camper but a counselor.  She is a delightful seventeen year old full of spirit whose ability at non-stop talking with her friends is without parallel.  We began and ended the trip with happy hugs and words of love you.  In between, with her iPod firmly embedded deep in her skull, we got two hours of occasional one word mumbles about something unintelligible to our attempts at conversation.  Now and then I’d turn around to see if she was still breathing.  In contrast, I got a phone call the other day from her sister  asking for my immediate if not sooner response to her important question that she rattled off at tongue tripping light speed.  I have no idea what she said.  I saw her the next day and whatever it was had been long forgotten and of no further consequence.  We have a niece who is 200 to 400% better, which is to say that she has been known to endow us with two to four words spoken in succession under the glare of her mother’s encouragement.  We love them dearly and look forward to resuming conversation in another couple of years.  At least that’s the way it worked with our own children.  (We shall see if SS let’s me keep this post up)

Four fully restored WWII planes were flown into a neighboring city’s airport for a three-day display. A B-17, B-24, B-25 and a P-51 were available not just to look at but to get close to and experience inside and out. Three of us drove over to take a look for ourselves, something of an old boys’ day out.  The planes were frighteningly magnificent.  There is a certain deadly beauty to implements of war.  These bombers, the biggest of their day, are, truth be told, small, cramped, noisy, cold, slow and strictly utilitarian.  The three of us who went are all over 65, and it was our fathers who flew in these things.  Here and there among the crowd were other men in their 80s and 90s.  A few wore caps attesting to their old units.  Limping on a cane, an old man gained the strength to stand erect, his eyes became clear and bright, and the life he led over 60 years ago came flooding back as if it was almost here again.  It wasn’t that he was proud of those days or that there was something heroic to tell, he just wanted to talk to anyone nearby and tell them the stories of England and weather, flak and machine guns, of his coming home and others not.  There is nothing romantic about war, and no one could have delighted in flying in these things.  But to have done it and lived is a story that needs to be told and honored. 

Perhaps we pass too easily over some of the psalms of David, or try too hard to make them over into paeans to Christ.  More often they are the remembrance of the horrific experience of battle, the cost and waste in human lives, and surprise at having survived to tell the tale.  I suspect that it is human nature first to give thanks to God, then to ponder the question of why others did not survive to give the same thanks, and then to find a way to attribute the whole thing and our part in it to the will of God for the good of the whole.  To do anything else would be too awful to contemplate.  But maybe later, much later, in the remembrance of old age, there are those don’t thank God, don’t blame God and don’t claim to have done God’s will.  They just need to tell the story, and that is enough because it is everything.

Anyone who has read more than one Louis L’Amour novel knows that there is only one plot, and that it always has the same set of sub themes.  One of the sub themes is the hero’s recognition that the way of life of extreme individualism that makes room for him to be the hero and the villain to be the villain is coming to an end. The future belongs to the polis and the rule of law. 

It might be good if more citizens recognized something else the hero comes to understand, and that is that those who insist on adhering to the cult of extreme individualism become little more than parasites living off the structure of society that provides him or her with the freedom, protection and resources needed to act as if one was truly the lone, self-sufficient individual.  None of that is particularly harmful in and of itself.  In fact it gives us interesting, romantic characters to enjoy, a picturesque life-style that can give us vicarious satisfaction, and sometimes the hero really does save the day.  It also gives us villains of one sort or another. 

But if the cult of individualism becomes too dominant there may not be enough left to hold a democratic society together.  That is when it can be most easily manipulated by those who are not afraid to seize the reigns of power.  Promising security from “enemies,” stripping away freedoms in the name of preserving them, and perverting justice in the name of justice is simple if you can convince all the complacent (or angry) individualists that they need not worry about such matters and can go about their own self-centered lives because the important things are being taken care of for them.

That is why politics is important. It is why every citizen needs to know how government works at every level and be willing to stay informed on issues, candidates and platforms.  It is why we cannot afford to be misled by bumper sticker mentality or television personalities working off of Orwellian scripts.  A democratic society requires community, and community requires an engaged electorate committed to the ideals of the common good. I’m not sure what the critical mass is for that.  I know not everyone will participate, but these last eight years have frightened me with how easy it is for a few well organized people to corrode the underlying principles of American democracy while convincing a majority of those voting that they are the ones who can be relied on to protect them.  And the majority of those voting have increasingly become a worrisome minority of those eligible to vote.

Among other things, I’m the local Fire Dept. chaplain.  I responded to a house fire last night.  It was not big, and except for the smell of smoke and the need to turn off power until an electrician can do some rewiring, not much harm was done.  Just the same, it was a traumatic experience for the elderly couple who live there.  I’ve got a routine at these scenes:  find out where the family is, check on how they are doing starting with the those standing closest to the action and moving back to the those farthest away.  As I go I ask questions about their well being, is everyone accounted for, do they need to contact anyone, are they on any medications or under a doctor’s care.  I answer their questions about what is going on, why is this or that happening, and what will happen next.  Eventually I ask if they have a pastor or are a part of a faith community that would be of help.  The answer I got last night was fairly typical.  

Is there such a thing as an abusive parishioner?  Recently I got involved in a conversation about abusive patients and whether a doctor could, or should, fire them. About the same time a young colleague in his first solo pastorate brought up the question of when and how it’s time to tell a parishioner that he “is a jerk” and to knock it off because he is making worship and congregational life unpleasant for others. 

The church is working hard these days to learn how to break down barriers, be more extravagantly welcoming to all, and to reach out to those who have been marginalized by society in order to proclaim the good news of God in Christ and invite them into the fellowship of the body of Christ.  That puts a pretty heavy burden on pastors, and it calls into question the exact role of boundaries. In the days of Christian Europe, and to some extent in the more imaginary Christian America, persons who were known to be “notorious sinners” were excommunicated with the intention that they might be led to penitence and reconciliation.  Vestiges of that kind of congregational discipline continued well into the last century.  But today, with a few exceptions, that kind of boundary enforcement is not only unknown but even abhorrent to some.

So what are the proper boundaries?  Who should be the judge and enforcer?  Can a pastor “fire” a parishioner?  In my lifetime I’ve heard of it happening only twice, at least in any public way.  What is the right way to do it?  How about the chicken’s way out?  Before my retirement, and in the recent upheavals in the Episcopal and Catholic Churches, several of “my” parishioners started attending a local Catholic Church while several of theirs were showing up in our place on Sunday mornings.  We two pastors talked it over and toyed with the idea of a prisoner exchange except that we each got to choose the ones we didn’t want back. 

Not long ago I wrote a letter to the editor at the NYT about airline service.  It didn’t get published.  No surprise there, but I’m going to share it with you anyway because I think it speaks to something important not only about airlines but about any form of engagement with customers, clients or worshipers.  So here goes.