Musings

The Book of Genesis - Illustrated - Nothing Left Out!

Today I made a pilgrimage to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to witness the exhibition of Robert Crumb’s illustrations of the entire book of Genesis.  Crumb, that iconic cartoonist of the counterculture era, stumbled into this enormous undertaking over a period of many years.  In the end, he made it a straight cartoon illustration project, without the kind of humor and exaggeration one might have expected from him.  The display at the Hammer Museum shows over 200 frames, which include every word of Genesis.  The whole work is available in hardback book form as The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb (Norton, 2009).

 

Crumb spent a great deal of time researching the text, studying images from the Near East and from previous cartoon and film portrayals of the Genesis stories, and consulting with scholars.  The result is a blend of familiar biblical imagery with Crumb’s uniquely earthy and visceral depictions.  God is a magnificently stern figure, effulgent with impossibly long, white head and face hair: the classical anthropomorphic figure of the divine.  Just what one might expect from an old-fashioned illustrated Bible story book.  But for every cliché, a dozen astounding creative leaps are displayed.  Only R. Crumb could depict the genealogical recitations of Genesis 35 and 36 in such an intensely vivid, gritty, idiosyncratic manner.  Each named character is depicted as a cartoon image of what could have been the person’s real face.  They aren’t idealized.  They are ruggedly distinct from each other in their expressions.  More than anything else about Crumb’s “Genesis”, it is the richly unique facial features of each character that leap off the page and remind the viewer that Genesis is a book about a long line of unique personalities – including the imagined Godhead - each with particular proclivities, weaknesses, and strengths.  The unreal medium of the cartoon, in Crumb’s skillful hand, makes the story seem more real than I’ve ever seen it depicted.  I was amazed at my own strong emotional reaction to the images, an effect heightened by the sheer number of images displayed on wall after wall of the museum.

 

Indeed, little is left out of the depictions.  Sweat, dirt, blood, dust, and smoke are so carefully drawn that the viewer is almost as able to smell the scenes as to see them.  The stony landscape of Palestine is depicted in grainy detail.  Women’s nipples show through their garments.  The pores on men’s noses are dotted in with Crumb’s pen.  When the text says “he lay with her”, the cartoons show exactly what that means.  It’s as far from the aesthetic of a Sunday School play, with costumes washed in Tide and dried with Bounce, as one can get.

 

In his hand-written introduction, he says “I …do not believe the Bible is the ‘Word of God’.  I believe it is the words of men.”  But he goes on to say that when the Hebrew Bible was compiled in its final form, “the stories of this people, the Hebrews, were then something more than just stories”.  Something of the divine emerged from the book of Genesis through its recitation and writing.  Likewise, a new manifestation of divinity emerges in the way that Robert Crumb visualizes the words of the text.  The human potential for transcendence is vividly portrayed in the combination of the words and the artwork.  His cartooning reminds us that the characters of Genesis, like us all, are made, in the words of the Psalmist, “little less than God” (Psalm 8: 5).   Just as he beautifully depicts God giving the breath of life to Adam, Crumb’s art oxygenates the whole book of Genesis.  And with this work, R. Crumb himself rises above the limitations of his reputation for sexual, satirical, and psychedelic imagery.  It’s a breathtaking, and breath-giving, project - for him, and for the beholder.

Mecca: a poem

Dates dangle from the crown of the palm
Climb for a cluster at red-rimmed dawn
Add you dust to glowing wind
Make your plea to the whirling djinn

Walk the blade of a shifting dune
Breathe the mood of a cricket's tune
Keep the secrets of the sighing sands
Guard the shadow in your folded hands

Let shapes of distance boil in heat
And stones wear down beneath your feet
Let now mirage into a then
Until this once becomes again

Ever eastward may you roam
Till memory fails to call you home
Till minarets at sundown gleam
And what is real transcends your dream

Areas of Moral Murkiness

Dr. Paul Farmer is a legend in his own time.  His work in Haiti, providing health care in the very poorest areas of that poor country, and his creative, determined struggle to stop the spread of tuberculosis globally, have made him a hero in the medical profession.   He wrote that working in Haiti was what he termed an “AMC” – an “area of moral clarity”.  People were sick, they were poor, they needed medical attention desperately.  He and his team showed up and offered it.  The needs, and the needed responses, were blatant. 

 

I read about Paul Farmer when I was the founder and later the executive director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto.  Ours was an interfaith nonprofit that served low income and homeless people in the area south of San Francisco.  At first, our effort seemed like an “AMC”.  I had an invigorating sense of moral, and I daresay even spiritual, clarity about the projects we were doing together.  Hungry people needed to be fed.  Homeless people needed shelter and housing.  We got together and provided it.  What could be a purer expression of Jesus’ mandate to his followers to “feed his sheep”?  Our organization received a lot of support from the Palo Alto community.

 

And a fair number of homeless and low income people hated the Urban Ministry.  And hated me.  I had my life threatened several times by some of the people I worked so hard to serve. 

 

This anger amazed me.  I was not accustomed to being hated by anybody.  At first I externalized it as the moral failure of ungrateful, rude recipients of our charity.  But when I explored it, asked questions of those who were so angry, I began to see that what I had assumed was an AMC was really an AMM. 

 

Providing emergency assistance to homeless people, indeed, providing practically any kind of direct aid to poor people, leads us into “Areas of Moral Murkiness”.  On the one hand, a person can’t do much about his or her lack of employment or housing or education if they are hungry and homeless.  On the other hand, as soon as a person becomes dependent on direct aid, it can be a perverse incentive to stay stuck on the streets.  The relationship of charity tends to create a power relationship which can debase the recipient.  Every time charity is given, it is a reminder to the recipient of his or her lower status and dependency. 

 

So it was that I discovered that the Urban Ministry was part of the problem of homelessness.  I was part of the problem.  What seemed clear now looked murky.  I struggled with the huge disparity between the way the public saw our work and the way a significant number of our clients saw it.  I had to accept the humility of realizing that I didn't have the answers to the problem of homelessness.  And then I found that showing more humility made me more effective in being of service to homeless people. 

 

Was I willing to hang in there and deal with this newfound Area of Moral Murkiness, or would I quit and seek out a Area of Moral Clarity in which to work?  A number of events conspired together to induce a sort of conversion experience, a spiritual awakening, that enabled me to stay the course.  One of them was a fistfight.

 

One of our most loyal volunteers was a member of a local evangelical church.  She was a hard worker, willing to do the toughest jobs, and we could always count on her.  She ran our clothing distribution for homeless people at our daytime drop in center.  She could be testy at times, and overly preachy about her religious beliefs, but she was a good soul and we appreciated her. 

 

One day, a woman came to the drop in center whom we knew well.  She was a crack whore – she traded sex for cocaine.  She was rail-thin, sleep-deprived, and unpredictable in her behavior.  She had come to the drop in center to get some free clothing.

 

I stepped away from the drop in area for a few minutes, and when I got back, the homeless woman was crying and holding her bloody nose, and the volunteer was wailing with self-loathing.  They had fallen into a verbal altercation and the volunteer punched the homeless woman in the face. 

 

Both of them blubbered to me at the same time, each of them disgusted – not by the other, but by their own behavior.  The volunteer poured out her truth to me.  Her daughter was an alcoholic, in and out of the hospital several times for liver failure.  She had not been able to save her daughter’s soul, much less her body, from the addiction.  So she volunteered with us in hopes she could save somebody else.  Until she took a swing at a homeless woman, she had not been in touch with her own inner rage at herself, at God, at her daughter, and at the world for this problem she could not solve.

 

The crack whore poured out her confession.  “I can’t believe that I have gone this low,” she sobbed.  “Arguing with a church lady about how many free clothes I can have!  Who am I?  What has become of me?” 

 

They hugged each other while crying.

 

We had just strayed even deeper into the murk, with this incident.  Yet there was divinity in it.  The volunteer assumed I would fire her for her violent act.  Maybe I should have done so, but I detected that this was a profoundly transformative moment for her.   She stayed with us, a dramatically changed person – much humbler, sweeter, more compassionate, and no longer preachy and opinionated.

 

The homeless woman got on the phone at our drop in center and checked into a drug rehab program.  She had her ups and downs after that, but her demeanor was markedly different when she came to our drop in center.

 

Through that fistfight, I saw that man, and woman, do not live by bread alone, as was said in Deuteronomy and again by Jesus.  Dignity is more important than clothes.  Self-respect can get higher on the hierarchy of needs than a roof over one’s head.  A person’s sense of the divine word moving through their soul, a person’s inner certainty that he or she is the crown of God’s creation – knowing this, feeling this is step one on the road out of poverty.  The homeless woman was abruptly brought to consciousness of her inner dignity, paradoxically through a bloody nose.  The remorse of the volunteer who punched her had a big effect on her, too.  Seeing the volunteer cry changed the fistfight into an awakening for both of them.  To paraphrase I Peter 2: 24, by each other’s wounds, they were healed.  Without words, without theological explanation, they had received the gospel.  It is not a path I ever would recommend or condone, but in this case, it led to the light.

 

Now, getting that inner knowledge, that inner certitude of one’s essential divine value, happens in many different ways.  Some people hear the gospel story, it uplifts them and transports them, and that is the turning point.  It happens other ways for other people.  St Francis of Assisi reportedly said, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.”

It happened when I worked with a group of tenants in the "skid-row" type hotels of Palo Alto, to get a change in the city housing policy so that the hotels would be preserved.  One of them was purchased by a developer who wanted to convert it into office space.  I gathered the hotel residents of downtown Palo Alto in a church social hall and laid out the challenge before them.  If this hotel was allowed to be converted, it would be a matter of time before the rest were shut down, too, depriving all of them of irreplaceable low-income housing.  When they stood up, one by one, and spoke at the city council meeting, there was a dignity and a power in their voices that made me weep.  These were people who felt like nobodies, the very poorest people in an otherwise affluent town, and suddenly they knew they were somebodies.  I knew they'd never be the same after that moment.  They won their cause.  The city changed its policy, and the threatened hotel was purchased, improved, and protected by a  low-income housing organization. 

 

The Areas of Moral Murkiness into which I stumbled led me to advocacy for social change.  Lots of Christians stay away from getting involved in politics.  It’s too messy, too murky, too morally muddled.  It involves compromising the purity of one’s Christian calling to serve.   But our faith calls us to go beyond the safe zone where we can feel good about ourselves all the time because we’re doing such wonderful work.  If we are really about following Jesus, it’s going to take us to the halls of city and state government, it is going to take us to Washington, it’s going to take us to confront the seats of power around the world. 

 

Church-based charity is still essential – it’s the front line in the struggle.  It’s where we meet the issues face-to-face.  But having met the people who suffer from systematic injustice, we are then called to stand with them and go the distance and address issues at a political level.  Charity and social activism go hand-in-hand.

 

Over the course of those years, I learned that the word “homeless” is not a very useful one.  Many times, I noticed that there were plenty of house-ful people in Palo Alto who were emotionally and spiritually home-less.  They had roofs over their heads, and good incomes, but they lived far away from family and had few if any friends, and had no real involvement in the local community.  And there were quite a few of our houseless folks at our houseless drop in center who in fact had a strong sense of being at home in our community.  They knew the streets intimately, they knew which dumpsters had good food in them at what times of the day, they knew where to get vital supplies like cardboard and scrap foam for making shelters and beds, they knew the cops on a first-name basis, they knew lots of shop owners.  A lot of our houseless Palo Altans knew more about the town than the people who lived in its houses.  In fact, on many occasions, I heard volunteers tell me that they never really knew Palo Alto very well until they came to work at our drop in center.  Working with us, getting to know the houseless but homeful folks on Palo Alto's streets, helped them feel like they truly lived in our town.

 

This is hardly an argument for considering homelessness as something less than the terrible crisis that it is.  On the other hand, it reminds us to question our assumptions about it, it reminds us to move beyond our facile clarity about it, and step into the murkiness, the many-layered reality of poverty, with its many ironies and paradoxes.  There’s more to home than a house.  And more to wealth than money.

 

“And a scribe came up and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head."”  Mt 8: 19-20.  Jesus was, technically, homeless.  But this is the same Jesus who said his Father’s house had many mansions.  Was Jesus a homeful man who was houseless?  Do we put Jesus into the same social class targeted by emergency shelters and drop in centers?  Jesus didn’t own anything but his cloak, tunic, and sandals.  Yet he enjoyed wonderful hospitality, often eating very well and sleeping in comfortable quarters.  Was he poor, or rich?  If we met him today, would we categorize him as a charity case?  Would he be one of the billions of people living on less than $2.50 a day? 

 

The answers to these questions elude us.  These questions lead us deeper into murk, and farther from clarity.  But that is what happens when we do what the scribe said he was going to do, and follow Jesus wherever he goes.  We follow him into the humility that comes with our ignorance about the nature of social problems.  We follow him in following those who suffer, rather than arrogantly assuming we know what is good for them.  We follow him in discovering what is homeful about the houseless, homeless about the houseful, poor about the wealthy, rich about the poor.  We may be rich in resources but still poor in understanding, blinded by our sense of superiority, crippled by our misplaced faith in our assumptions.  Into the unknown, into the unfamiliar, into tasks of compassion and action we never dreamed we’d engage, the Christ leads us….

The Friendship Contract

When I worked at Stanford University as the ecumenical Protestant campus minister, some of my student friends suffered from bipolar disorder.  It's relatively common among people with unusually high intelligence.  Bipolar disorder, once known as manic depressive illness, often first manifests in young adulthood.  So on a couple of occasions, when I saw them exhibiting signs of the problem, I counseled students to seek psychiatric help.

 

One such student went through a long and very difficult episode with her disease, which had been diagnosed when she was in high school.  After she got a new therapeutic regimen in the hospital, and learned some new coping skills, she went back to school and graduated.  She has had few problems since. 

 

One of her techniques of staying mentally healthy particularly impressed me.  She had plenty of friends, but they had not been terribly sensitive to her needs and issues related to her disease.  So she instituted a "friendship contract".  When she was first getting to know a new potential friend, she would give them a piece of paper, or send them an email, with the contract:  If you want to be my friend, here's what you need to know and need to do.  If I start talking or acting strangely, call me on it - ask me what is going on and if I am taking my medication.  If I suddenly stop talking to you, stop showing up, become anti-social, do something about it - I might be going into a bipolar depression. Here are the medications I take, and when I take them.  Here's my psychiatrist's phone number.  Call if you notice something strange.

 

When she showed me the contract, I signed it and then I said, "You know, everybody needs one of these!  Not just people dealing with mental illness."  Her idea is a brilliant one for us all.  Everybody needs friends who will speak up when they sense something isn't quite right.  We all need somebody to seek us out, if we should suddenly fall off the social radar.  We all need friends who don't just throw up their hands when the going gets rough, but roll up their sleeves and try to be useful.  It helps to get specific about the kind of intervention and support that we need.

 

Of course, friendship can get tricky if we intervene too much in each others' lives.  Few of us want friends who are going to take over and boss us around.  But neither do we want friends to fail to show concern when we appear to be in crisis.  Sometimes we let our friends down when we go too far in protecting their privacy.

 

Each of us draws the line at a different place, so what a great idea it is to speak up and tell our friends what we hope from them in tough times!

I admire the "friendship contract" that Jesus specified for his disciples.  He let them know what he wanted from them.  He spelled it out in detail:  stay with me, watch with me, pray with me, preach with me, heal with me, continue my work after my death. To be sure, they broke that contract repeatedly.  But his "contract" with them was ultimately unforgettable.  Even after he was gone, they tried to follow it with each other.  His is an example for us to emulate in expressing to each other what it really means to be friends.

Hooked

I was waiting at a bus stop in Los Angeles a few nights ago.  Absent-mindedly, I glanced down on the sidewalk and saw a shiny glimmer.  It was a steel ring, about three inches in diameter.  I shifted my gaze away, but then my eyes returned to focus on it. 

A happy recollection warmed me as I picked up the ring from the sidewalk. 

Annually, for many years, I was on the staff of a  week-long summer church camp for teenagers at Cazadero, in the mountains above the Russian River in northern California.   I led church family retreats at the camp on weekends at other times, as well.   Time at Camp Caz was the occasion for staff and campers to have soulful conversations.  It was a place where you could drop the mask you wore back home, be who you really were, and say what was really on your heart and mind.  And that happened often while playing the ring game.

The ring hung from an oak tree near the outdoor dining patio.  It dangled on a thin rope hung from a high tree branch.  On the trunk of the tree, a metal hook was screwed in place.  The object of the game was simple, but not easy to achieve: you stood ten feet back with the ring and tried to swing it onto the hook.  Young and old alike found it challenging, sometimes maddening. 

It was fun to take turns trying to get the ring on the hook. Success was accompanied by back-slaps and hugs.  Failure, especially when repeated, was the focus of howls of mostly good-natured frustration, particularly when the ring clinked on the hook without hooking. The game had an obsessive quality to it.  You just couldn’t stop playing it until you got the ring on the hook at least a few times.  So it locked you into a good chunk of time with another person, creating an opportunity to learn a lot about each other. 

I spent many an hour with kids aged four to sixty-four, two of us at a time, taking turns swinging the ring.  And as we stood by the oak tree, standing in sun and shadow on dried, golden leaves, we’d have chats about everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. 

I got hooked, so to speak, on the spiritual magic that happened in those moments, when people opened up with each other and listened with open hearts.  I got hooked on the belly-laughs, the whoops and the howls, that happened by the oak tree as we played the ring game.  Just like the compulsion of playing the ring game, I never tire of being with people who accept each other just the way they are.

It doesn’t take much to create a place and a space where love can happen.  It costs hardly anything but time.  All you need is a little patch of dirt, a scruffy tree, and a dollar’s worth of hardware.  Or less, if you find a ring on the sidewalk.

Soon I’ll be setting up the game behind the apartment in Hollywood where my wife and I now live.  There’s a scrubby pine that’s just the right shape and size.  I am grateful to whomever dropped that ring at the corner of Jefferson and Hoover, for reminding me to share the loving, accepting spirit of Camp Caz, wherever I go and with everyone I encounter.

Interspirituality

Here at the University of Southern California, part of my job as Associate Dean of Religious Life is to staff the student Interfaith Council.  This group of 15-20 students from many different religious backgrounds gathers every week for an evening of discussion over dinner.  The students share about their faith traditions and spiritual journeys, and with fascination learn a great deal from each other.  For the past two meetings, for instance, they have been playing their favorite spiritual music to each other on their computers and phones.  We’ve listened to black spirituals, Coptic Easter anthems, Arabic Muslim and Indian Sikh chants, and rock tunes in which students find soulful inspiration.

Most of the students in our group identify with one or another recognizable faith tradition.  But several do not.  These students are nonetheless intensely interested in religion and spirituality.  Since we usually have newcomers at each gathering, the students go around the room and identify themselves.  Last year, one of our unaffiliated students described himself as “interspiritual”.

That was the first time I’d heard the term.   Since then, other students in our group have adopted this identity. 

It intrigues me.  It's different than the word "interfaith".  People sometimes struggle to understand what interfaith work is really all about.  Interfaith worship – what can that possibly be?  A formless mush of scrambled doctrine?  A theological curry?  A cacophony of conflicting chants?  If “inter” means between or among, does that mean that “interfaith” is nowhere or nothing in particular?

In my experience, interfaith relationships are richest when people bring to the table the distinctive uniqueness of their religions, while being deeply intrigued by the particularity of the faiths of others.  That place of fascination, curiosity, and soulful engagement is the “somewhere” of interfaith work.  It includes beautiful, meaningful worship events that do not gloss over the significant differences among faiths, even while celebrating the commonalities. 

But an increasing number of Americans – now nearly 25% of young adults – have no traditional religious identity.  What do they bring to our dinner table on Tuesday evenings at the USC Office of Religious Life?

They bring their own stories of engagement with the ultimate questions: why am I here?  who am I, really?  how shall I live, and for what/whom?  They bring their own language and imagery of expression of their souls' journeys.  They bring a willingness to try out disciplines of spirituality they've never experienced before.  Maybe they are not ready to commit fully to one traditional path.  But they aren't afraid to risk that outcome by exploring existing faith traditions. They are eager to know the souls of other people, and the great Soul at the heart of us all.  Maybe that is why the word "interspiritual" makes more sense to them than "interfaith".  They want to be between and among, and even within, the spirits of those around them, people from all manner of religious backgrounds, or no religion at all.  They don't see their spirits as existing in isolation.  They feel affiliated with people of many faiths or no particular faith, so they don't feel compelled to officially affiliate with any one religion.  They aren't lonely in their lack of formal religious belonging.  They have found ways to connect deeply with others beyond the bounds of sectarian identity.

My students have helped me understand myself as an "interspiritual Christian". I identify strongly with Christianity, and at the same time I see myself as fully "among and between" faithful people who follow religions different than my own.   Not only does my Christianity not get in the way of interfaith relationships, it actually enhances them.  Because I am steeped so deeply in my faith, I can introduce it to others who are curious about it.  And every time I learn something new about other faiths, I learn more about my own.  Comparing and contrasting with elements of other religions, I get a more detailed three-dimensional (maybe even four-dimensional) view of aspects of my religion that I never noticed before.

"Interspiritual" students have something in common with "generic Christian" students I meet on our campus.  The trend among evangelical Christian young people is to avoid any extra denominational or other religious label except "Christian".  When I worked at Stanford, we watched the statistics over the years as freshmen indicated their religious preference at the start of their college careers.  Every year, the number of Methodists, UCC's, Presbyterians, etc, went down, while the overall number of Christians stayed about the same.  Denominational identity is clearly the wave of the past.  Part of the students' preference for being "just Christian" is a reflection of their unawareness of distinctly different, but equally valid, ways of being Christian.  They have no idea that, in fact, their beliefs and practices are sectarian within the Christian faith.  There is no such a thing as truly "generic" Christianity.

But their impulse to keep the label simple also may be related to the motivations of "interspiritual" students.  A lot of Christians are trying to be spiritual but not religious, too.  They really want to avoid anything that could divide Christians from other Christians, and to get at the heart and essence of the faith without getting bogged down in details.  They know the "devil" is in those details.

There's no getting around the devil in the details - we all have our particularities and peculiarities, both in religions and as individuals, no matter how we try to deny or avoid them.  But hopefully our desire to be "interspiritual" - to connect deeply with each other at the level of the soul - will carry us past those devilish details, and into the heart of the Great Spirit we all share.

 

Miracles and Myths

(This is a letter I sent to a member of a church where I preached recently.  The conversation began with a letter to me from the member, politely but firmly objecting to my statement that the miracle stories in the New Testament were mythological.  This is the second round of our correspondence.)


Thanks for the letter - again, I am enjoying this exchange with you.

In your last letter, you offered examples of extraordinary events experienced by people today.  These suggest for you a "third way" between taking all of the Bible literally and rejecting all the miracles described in the scriptures.  What is the rubric for choosing which fanciful stories might be true and which ones should not be taken literally?  Doesn't this set up a standard of veracity that applies to the Christian scriptures but not to the rest of experience?

I don't suggest that extraordinary events are impossible.  On the contrary, I myself have experienced some unexplained, remarkable things that would fit nicely in your list of such reports.  I view these events not as supernatural miracles but rather as events that are as yet lacking in explanation.  These events don't prove, nor do they even suggest, that God acts supernaturally nor do they suggest that we should look at the biblical miracle stories as something other than myths.  They simply reveal that not everything that we experience has been explained yet by science and reason.

If there is such a thing as a myth at all, the miracle stories in the Bible fit the definition.  For one thing, many of the stories have literary functions in the biblical narratives that strongly suggest their fictional nature.  For instance, there is the story of the Gerasene man from whom Jesus cast out a "legion" of demons.  The word "legion" refers to the Roman occupation army.  The story says that the demons were driven into a herd of pigs who then ran over a cliff to their deaths.  Jews don't eat pork, so it's clear that the pigs were being raised to feed the Romans.  The story isn't about a miracle that proves Jesus' divinity.  The story is about the great social issue of Jesus’ time and place, which was how the Jewish people should deal with the foreign military occupation of their country.  If we can find a satisfying explanation for the story which has nothing to do with its factuality, why would we bother to read it literally?  Why would we need to suspend our good common sense about what is real and what is not, since the story has its own power and value in any case?

The story of Jesus walking on water fits the commonly held definition of a myth because it is factually implausible and because it has value apart from its historical veracity.  In it I find a beautiful illustration of finding faith in turbulent circumstances, and also a depth-psychological image of mastery of the “sea” of the unconscious realm of our lives.  The story corresponds remarkably to imagery very commonly reported in night-time dreams.  In any case, if he indeed walked on water, there would be no reason to account for it supernaturally.  It would be no more or less of a miracle than the shimmer of hummingbird feathers.

Abandoning concern about the factuality of fanciful Bible stories needs to be accompanied by whetting interest in the power of biblical mythology.  Myths can have life-changing impact on people.  For me, the real “miracle” in Christianity is how its mythical stories have transformed the lives of millions of people over the centuries.  These stories don’t lose any of their impact at all by being understood as fictions.  On the contrary, by liberating ourselves from concern about whether they really happened or not, we can focus on what really matters about the stories: the ways they hold up mirrors to our own spiritual journeys.

The culture that prevailed in the New Testament era had little interest in the kind of fact-checking and scientific analysis that prevails today.  Outside the Christian community, as well as within it, stories abounded of paranormal events, resurrections, miraculous healings, and the like.  Such reports were given less skeptical scrutiny than they'd get today, so I think it stands to reason that most if not all these stories were confabulated.  We care much more today about historical veracity than people did in that era. Libraries in the first century didn’t have “fiction” sections separated from “non-fiction”.  All the more reason to begin with the assumption that the miracle stories are mythical.

I think this topic is an important one because it has such profound consequences for the future of the Christian tradition which both you and I treasure.  Over the last few centuries, science and reason have shrunk into a little corner the realm once attributed to the supernatural.  What used to be acts of a God outside of nature are now mostly understood as acts of nature itself.  It is hundreds of years past time for Christians to recognize that God and nature are one, and that the more we learn about nature, the more we know of God.  Unless we do so, the faith will get stuck in a smaller and smaller corner.  Already, nearly ¼ of the young adults in this country have abandoned organized religion altogether – a number that keeps growing.  They see a disconnection between supernatural Christian doctrines and the reality of the world around them.  So I believe it is time for straight talk about our faith, especially with young people.  It is time to keep the heart of the religion and drop the dogma that obscures it.  That way, we can pass along the essence of Christianity which you and I cherish.

Good to be in conversation with you!

Jim

Progress and Patience

A master of the art of pursuing the possible:  that’s how many folks have described Senator Ted Kennedy since his recent death.  Perhaps his recognition of his own character flaws made him willing to delay the perfect in order to craft passable legislation that advanced civil rights, education, health care, and social services.   He understood that patient cooperation often would serve the public good better than grandstanding with purist positions.

In my work, I have found no tidy boundary between the virtues of pursuing the possible and realizing the ideal.  Sometimes, in order to achieve even incremental change, I have had to lead by articulating a pure vision.  Other times, the cause was best advanced by avoiding a hard and fast delineation of the most desirable outcome.  And, sometimes, I have had to change course between the two approaches.  Always, one must keep one’s inner eyes on the goal – no matter how far-off its realization may seem.

Social progress is hardly a smooth process.  It’s one step backward, two steps forward, two steps backward, three steps forward.  What looks like failure may have within it the seeds of victory.  Likewise, some victories are set-ups for later failure.  Taking Ted Kennedy’s long view, we can pay attention to these subtleties in order to cultivate patience, prudence, and perseverance. 

Tonight, at 7:30 pm, Roberta and I will be part of a demonstration at Hollywood and Highland in LA, supporting comprehensive health care reform.  I want a universal, single-payer, public health insurance system.  I think that as long as for-profit companies are in the game, there will be too little of every premium dollar going to actual health care.  If everybody is forced to buy private insurance, that’s a cure for corporations, not people.  We need to speak out and speak up for the ideal system we want – now more than ever.

Citizens pressing for the “perfect” solution will make it much more likely that our politicians can agree to the best possible solution.  If we take to the streets and demand a full-scale universal public insurance system, it’s more likely that, at the very least, a public insurance option will be part of the reform package.  The citizen campaign for single-payer, universal health care is an example of idealism in the service of realism.  If we get single-payer, we should be ecstatic.  If we get just a public insurance option this time, we ought to be happy, and campaign for more incremental improvements into the future.

“Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8: 24-25)   And work for it, too, we might add to St. Paul’s words… adding persistence to patience, idealism to realism, for the sake of the common good.

Who Is Your Jesus?

By current standards of journalism and historical analysis, we know hardly anything about Jesus.  The stories in the New Testament were written by people who belonged to the religion that followed him.  They had “axes to grind” – they were hardly impartial observers, and it is obvious from the four gospels that much of what they wrote about him was mythological.  The only roughly contemporary non-Christian writer who mentioned Jesus was Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century.  One short reference to Jesus in the "Antiquities of the Jews" appears to have been inserted by later Christian editors of Josephus' work, and the other brief reference is to a Jesus who may not have been Jesus of Nazareth at all .

The Jesus Seminar (www.westarinstitute.org) is a big group of eminent scholars of biblical and Near Eastern studies who have spent many years evaluating the early Christian texts in quest of the historical Jesus.  They produced “The Five Gospels”, a version of the New Testament stories about Jesus and his sayings, including the early but non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.  Taking a cue from the popular “red letter editions” of the New Testament, which put Jesus’ words in that color, “The Five Gospels” uses a color-coding scheme to indicate the likelihood that any particular quotation was that of the real, historical figure of Jesus.  Red was for the highest likelihood, pink for some likelihood, grey for low likelihood, and black for virtually no likelihood that Jesus actually said it.

“The Five Gospels” displays very little of the color red, and only a sparing use of pink.  The red passages are reserved for the most enigmatic and counter-cultural words attributed to Jesus – those hardest to interpret.  The logic of the scholars is strong:  the quotations that are least obvious in their meaning, and the most offensive to cultural norms of the time, are the ones that might have set apart Jesus from the other popular rabbis and religious leaders of his era. 

The Jesus Seminar’s carefully considered conclusions underscore how very little we know about this historical figure who is so central to Christianity, and to Western and even global civilization.  This leads to a corollary: since we know very little about the real Jesus, most of what we say about him is the product of our collective and personal imaginations.

The process of imagining Jesus started in the first century and hasn’t stopped since.  The famous creeds of the church that defined Jesus, still recited in Catholic and Protestant churches, were cooked up hundreds of years after Jesus’ death.  And the commonplace descriptions of Jesus today, in words and in images, are the product of much more recent flights of fancy.  Conservative Christians will protest that there is but one Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and forever, but in fact they revere many distinctly different versions of him.  They are in denial of the fact that mostly they created him for themselves – as have all Christians throughout the milennia.

So why not get honest about it?  Why not own the fact that the Jesus we follow is mostly a figmentary personality, based on only the flimsiest of factual details?  Why not liberate our imaginations to refine a version of Jesus who speaks for and through us today?

I don’t fault the early Christians for inventing the Jesus that they followed.  On the contrary, I admire their inspired, visionary creativity.  It is a wonderment that such a personality was invented in that time and place.  The early Christians had powerful insights, which may or may not have had their source in the historical personality of Jesus.  They envisioned a society based on the law of love rather than one based on harsh, rigid rules. They discovered the non-violent power of compassion to bring justice and peace to oppressed, suffering people.  They saw beyond the boundaries of gender and race and caste to envision a caring community that would embrace everyone.  They wrote all these remarkably progressive, positive values into the character of Jesus in the gospel stories.

So we get to imagine Jesus for ourselves, in our own historical context.  Building on the creativity of the early Christians, we can envision a Jesus for today.

Who is your Jesus?  What does he look like, for you?  What is he saying, in the context of the world that surrounds you?  How does he interpret the old messages attributed to him, for current circumstances?  What does he have to say for our time about warfare, medical ethics, sexual morality, and economic justice?   What would he do, how would he act, how would he change the world today?   Can you envision his mannerisms and expressions, the winks of his eyes and the chuckles between his phrases?  Can you see him mixing with the people around you now?  How does he fit in, or stand out?  Just what kind of character is Jesus – for you, for today?

Who is the Jesus who inspires you to love more than you are able to love today?  Who is the Jesus who makes you reverently humble before the Source and Goal of your life?  Who is the Jesus who makes you question authority so you can envision a world that is much more humane and divine?  Who is the Jesus who gives you courage and strength to work for the greater common good?  Invent that Jesus for yourself.  You’ll be in the company of all the other saints of the faith through the centuries who have used their imaginations to create a Jesus in whom they could have faith and devotion, a Jesus they could follow in love and service to the end.

Good News, Old and New

“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."”

And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."   -  Luke 4: 16-21

The Christian gospel is both old good news and new good news.  The gospel of John says it was there at the beginning of the world.  But it is not stuck between the covers of an old book.  The gospel appears among us today, in fresh form, energized by its past form but not trapped by it.

Jesus took the sacred book of the Jews and read it to the people in the synagogue and declared to them that it was being fulfilled before their eyes.  The old good news of liberation from oppression and suffering, old good news spoken by the prophet Isaiah in his time, had become new good news.  Not just being declared by Jesus, but demonstrated by him in fresh ways, in a new context.

Jesus touched lepers whom he was not allowed to touch, according to a strict interpretation of the Jewish law.  Jesus talked to women in public, which he wasn’t allowed to do according to the standards of the Pharisaic Judaism of which he was a part.  Jesus healed the child of a Roman army officer, which was an outrageous affront to those Jewish people who opposed fraternization with Gentiles, especially with Roman soldiers.  St Paul said that in Christ there is no east or west, no Jew or Gentile.  It is hard for us today to appreciate how outrageous these early Christian words and actions were in their day.  And what good news they represented in that time.

We are called to do the same thing for the Christian scriptures that Jesus did for the Hebrew scriptures. Unfetter them from the museum of the past, and extend their promises and possibilities for our time, extending healing and inclusion and peace and justice even further than did Jesus’ early followers.

So we get to use our imaginations.  We get to extrapolate from what Jesus did in his day and visualize what a character like Jesus might do in our day.  A character who is ahead of our time, just like he was ahead of his time.  A character who is still moving, still progressing, still extending the boundaries of inclusion and access to the sacred dimension of life.   Jesus went far beyond the Old Testament’s rules in extending compassion in his time.  It is up to us to go far beyond the New Testament in extending love and healing to the world around us now.  Jesus was a progressive Jew; early Christianity was a progressive form of Judaism.  Today we are challenged to be progressive Christians.

Progressive Christianity is about making new good news out of the old good news.  Let me offer an example.  Jesus offered “universal health care”; he was eager to offer healing to everybody who asked him for it.  And it was “single-payer”:  he paid on the cross, to cover everybody.  He healed people even if, and especially if, they had pre-existing conditions like leprosy or mental illness.  That’s the old good news.  What would be the new good news?  I think it would be for us as citizens and as Christians to become activists for health care coverage for all.  The California Council of Churches is lobbying for a single-payer, universal health insurance system right now.  And they need our help!  (See more at www.calchurches.org and at www.californiaonecare.org .)

So may we progress further forward, following the One who is always ahead of our time, making new good news out of the old.