Musings

DESCONOCIDO

A small wooden cross stands next to a cholla cactus in the desert of southern Arizona.  Across it is written a word in Spanish:  DESCONOCIDO.   In English, it means “unknown”.

To get to it, I and seven students from the University of Southern California trekked from a dirt road through a mile and a half of rough country.  Every one of us was scraped by spines of cacti or spikes of mesquite branches.  We slipped on stones, slid on sand.  All of us sipped regularly from our water bottles as the mid-day sun and the arid air wicked our bodies dry.

 

The cross marked the spot where bones of a human being were found by a member of the Green Valley Samaritans, a group of volunteers who put gallon jugs of water on trails where migrants cross into the United States from Mexico.  The volunteer called the county coroner to retrieve the remains, which so far have not been identified. 

 

DESCONOCIDO.  Unknown.  Around us were scraps of evidence about the story of the human being who died there.  Nearby were torn backpacks and shredded clothes and desiccated shoes and other belongings abandoned by migrants.  To the east, just a mile and a half away, could be seen the rooftops of houses in the retirement community of Green Valley, Arizona.   Did this person die of thirst within a short walk of water?  Did he or she become dehydrated, which causes confusion and disorientation, and wander off the main migrant trail into the rough, failing to see that help was so close?  Did he or she lose consciousness while still believing it was possible to make it to Tucson, thirty miles to the north, without being detected by “la migra”, the US Border Patrol?

 

169 people were found dead last year on the US side of the Arizona/Mexico border, mostly from exposure to the elements.  Our group, calling itself “CONOCIMIENTO” – “awareness” – was a week-long “alternative spring break” experience for USC students.  Most of us were part of the USC student Interfaith Council.  We explored the ways that faith-based groups - Green Valley Samaritans, No More Deaths, Humane Borders - prevent migrant deaths by putting water on the trails and by sending out teams to offer emergency assistance to migrants.   They do not transport migrants or advocate for illegal entry into the US.  They work to save lives and to inform the wider public about the humanitarian crisis that continues along the border.

 

Water supply placed in the desert - our group visited the site with Peter Dean, volunteer with the Green Valley Samaritans

In the Christian Bible, in the book of Acts, Saint Paul visited Athens and saw the statues of the Greek gods.  One statue platform was empty, and was inscribed with a dedication “to an unknown god”.  So there Paul gave a sermon in which he identified this “unknown God” as the one he worshiped.  “He made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.  Yet he is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’.”  (Acts 17: 26-28) 

 

I have often mused that Christianity, and indeed all other religions, would best serve and be served if we focused more on the “unknown God” rather than on our beliefs about who God is and what God wants.  What is unknown about God inspires us to ask more questions and keep our hearts open to further revelation.  What is unknown about God – and maybe that is everything – inspires us to use our imaginations, consider possibilities, stay humble, and seek ever more knowledge and wisdom.

 

DESCONOCIDO.  Unknown.  As we stood before that little cross, we imagined the holes that this person’s absence left in the hearts of his or her relatives and friends, perhaps on both sides of the border.  Our tears and theirs were mystically transsubstantiated into one.  What dashed hopes, what frustrated ambitions swirled in the air around that spot?  What desperation drove this person to take such a terrible risk?  The “coyotes”, or smugglers of migrants, are now mostly controlled by violent drug gangs, we learned.   Valarie James, an artist living near the border, collected belongings of migrants left in the desert and created next to her house a “santuario” displaying them.  In it we saw containers of birth control pills that had been left on the trails.  Women take the pills before making the border crossing because they assume they will be raped along the way by the gangster coyotes.  It’s very dangerous to get anywhere close to the US border on the Mexican side in the wilderness, because those areas are controlled by the drug mafias.  Then there is the danger of the US side, where the landscape and climate wear down even the hardiest young migrants in a matter of two or three days.  Many a migrant gives up and goes to a road in hopes that la migra will pick them up and save them from dying of thirst or heat or cold.  But sometimes the road is only occasionally used, because there are so many of them maintained by the Border Patrol.  So by the time la migra arrives, all that might be left are a few bones and scraps of clothing.  The zopilotes – buzzards – peck them clean of flesh. The pack rats decorate the inside of their nests with bits of bone and scraps of possessions.  Coyotes – the animal kind – drag away pieces of the remains.  Range cattle chew the bones for their calcium content.  The desert makes short work of a dead human body.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  No wonder that it is assumed that for every body found, there is at least one other migrant who dies without leaving a trace.  DESCONOCIDO.  Unknown.

 

At the end of our week, we went to Tucson to the federal courthouse to witness Operation Streamline.  Fifty migrants, mostly young Mexican men, sat in the stand, with chains shackling their hands and feet.  Just looking at them brought tears to our eyes.  Frustration at losing the money they spent on getting to the border and that they paid to the coyotes, memory of the danger they stared down on both sides of the border, the indignity they suffered when captured, were evidenced on their faces as they sat in the huge courtroom.   Groups of them were led to the stand to answer the judge. “Culpable.  Culpable.  Culpable.”  Guilty.  Guilty.  Guilty.  There was no other plea to make: otherwise they’d be in jail and court proceedings for even longer.  Chains rattled as each was led away to be sent back over the border with a criminal record so that if they returned and were caught again, they’d spend a long time in jail.  As if a warm bed and three square meals a day behind bars were a fate worse than what they’d already risked to trim trees and dig ditches and weed rows of lettuce in America. 

 

The last group of migrant defendants came forward.  “How do you spell your name, sir?” the judge politely asked when confounded by what she read on the list.  “Your honor,” the man’s public defender lawyer said, “my client has no more than a first grade education.  He can’t spell his last name. ”  DESCONOCIDO.  Unknown. 

 

America has deployed an army to protect our country from dishwashers.  We have invested tens of millions of dollars alone in the judicial process of criminalizing people whose only intent was to mow our lawns so they could feed their families back home.  This policy isn’t working.  While undocumented immigration has declined tremendously, mostly because of the economic downturn in America, the people who do come across illegally are more desperate than ever, and the number of migrant deaths remains high.  They are escaping misery or mortal danger, or cannot stand to be separated from their family members in America any longer.  This much we know.  And we know there are at least some solutions.   We can pass the 2007 bipartisan immigration reform plan that would give a pathway to legal status for the over ten million undocumented people whose lives are centered in America and whose labor is needed here.

 

But what we don’t know stirs the moral imagination.  It lets us hear something like the sobs of mothers separated for decades or forever from their sons.  It lets us taste the terror in the hearts of young girls who get into the trucks of the coyotes and cast their fates over the border fences.  Our unknowing urges our hearts to beat with the fear of undocumented people driving well below the speed limit in unregistered and uninsured cars that might get pulled over by Arizona police who will ask for proof that they are in the US legally.   

 

What is “desconocido” – unknown - might be the cross that saves us, if it opens our hearts to feel, our minds to ask questions, and our feet to cross the border between how things are and how things could be.

Baboquivari, the sacred mountain of the Tohono O'odham nation, used as a landmark by migrants heading north

(To take action for border justice:  http://www.faithandimmigration.org/ .  To see Valarie James' work:  http://www.valariejames.com/commissions.html .  To see my journal of last year's CONOCIMIENTO trip, with references to the organizations we visited this year as well:  http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2011/03/sun-water-a-border-journal.html .)

Progressive Taxation and Christian Faith

 Some Americans believe that taxation is theft, and that taking care of the poor and vulnerable is the business of charity alone.  Others call for a "flat tax" which they claim is more fair than progressive taxation, which imposes a higher rate of tax on those of higher incomes.  Such ideas once represented a fringe of the political spectrum, but now they are expressed by serious candidates for the presidency.  Since religious language is being used to support these ideas, a theological rationale is needed for progressive taxation and an adequate taxpayer-funded social safety net.  To this end, here I present a "sound bite" and an "elevator speech": 

Sound Bite:  "We tax ourselves to do what God requires of us, because the sin of greed prevents our voluntary charity from adequately caring for our most vulnerable citizens."

Elevator Speech:  "Our nation's founders held the Judeo-Christian belief that all human beings are sinners.  So they created checks and balances in the Constitution to restrain our natural greed for power.  Our sin of greed also renders our voluntary charity inadequate, so through our democratic process we collect taxes from ourselves to meet the needs of our most vulnerable citizens.  Jesus said 'Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required' (Luke 12:48).  'Much' means that this requirement should have an equalized impact on people's lives, rather than being a flat percentage regardless of income.  So those of higher incomes should be required to pay a higher rate of tax."

Position Paper:  A very thorough theological argument for progressive taxation:  "An Evaluation of Federal Tax Policy Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics" - Susan Pace Hamill, Professor of Law, University of Alabama

Supporting facts demonstrating that charity is not adequate to meet human needs:

Housing: 

Habitat for Humanity (faith-based charity): total number of housing units built in the US since 1978:   30,000 units 

US Department of Housing and Urban Development:

 

Sec. 8 housing vouchers for low income families (30% of income paid as rent, rest of rent subsidized):   1,400,000 housing units annually  (millions more households are eligible for this subsidy but cannot access it due to the limited funds for the program.)

            

Food:

The total food aid provided to needy Americans by private charity amounts to 6% of all food aid provided by the US government.  (Source:  Bread for the World - a Christian charity)

       

Progressive Christians Uniting: PRAYER FOR USE IN CONGREGATIONS - "BLESSING OUR TAXES"  - April 15, Sunday, in churches around the US -
 

 

Ash Wednesday

On my forehead,

A sign of the cross,

Smudged in ash from the fire

That burned down the McMansion of my hubris,

And, with it,

The money I should have given away,

The television I used to numb my senses,

The carpet I should have been called on,

The doors I should have opened to others,

The envelopes I should have used

To send letters of love,

The wise books I shelved prominently

So that others would think I had read them,

The blank places in my photo albums

Where my darker moments should have been remembered,

The calendars where visits with the people who needed me most

Should have been scheduled,

The couch of my complacency,

The lounge-chair of my laziness,

The shirts I stuffed with my pride,

The moccasins I should have traded with others

So we could have walked miles in them.

 

On my forehead,

A sign of the crossroad

Where I can turn from the way of ruin

To the way of life.

Toward an Honest Pluralism

 

“The sheer range of religions represented led me to assume that they have few presuppositions in common. This assumption was supported by the fact that the main reason they meet is in order to learn about each other’s traditions.” Nate Gonzales, undergraduate student at the University of Southern California, made this astute observation in a paper he wrote about the USC student Interfaith Council, of which he’s an active member and for which I'm the advisor. (It might come as no surprise that he has been accepted into the PhD program in the sociology of religion at the University of Chicago.)

Rajiv Malhotra’s new book, BEING DIFFERENT: The Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, which will be discussed in the blogosphere at the Patheos Book Club on Mar 1, explores presuppositions in the relationship of Indian and Western cultures. Malhotra chairs the Board of Governors of the India Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.  His thesis is that Western categorizations of Indian culture, philosophy, and religion have been accepted not only in the West but also by Indians, thus marginalizing Vedic viewpoints that flow from the inside out. Hinduism itself was a construct of the British raj which blurred into one the enormous diversity of indigenous religious practices on the subcontinent. Can Westerners imagine Indians defining a religion called Jordanism that collapses Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into one entity based on geography? (This idea was expressed nicely by Phil Goldberg in his recent book, AMERICAN VEDA.) Malhotra argues for a distinct Indian alternative to the assumption that Western constructs should define and describe the whole world. His book is an eye-opener, if we recognize the inner vision that can see the seldom-examined presuppositions we use to define and categorize the world. Once that eye is opened, we can learn about each others’ traditions from the inside out.

He opens the book with an indictment against the limits of “tolerance” as a model for relationships among religions. All too often, he says, it becomes a Trojan horse for devaluing and even stifling the religions that are tolerated by faiths that claim ultimate superiority over all others. I would agree that this is a serious problem in Christianity. My own pluralistic position, that other religions can be as good for others as mine is good for me, is still a minority viewpoint in my faith. (Pluralism Sunday, the first Sunday in May, is a time when progressive Christians around the world celebrate religions other than our own.) How did the religion of Jesus, a humble servant, get so full of itself as to claim to be the only true religion?

Malhotra’s breakdown of the different ways that religious people subtly denigrate or degrade the religions of others is useful in explaining why tolerance isn’t an adequate basis for interfaith engagement. Real pluralism is a long way from the Pope’s viewpoint, in which other religions should be engaged, valued, learned from, but ultimately understood as deficient compared to Catholic Christianity. Malhotra argues forcefully, perhaps even stridently, for “mutual respect” to be the norm among religions. I think he goes too far in criticizing some religious leaders for failing to express pluralism in the exact terms he prefers. “Mutual respect” sounds too much like “tolerance” to me, when it’s clear that Malhotra advocates for a strong form of religious pluralism. And he doesn’t seem to recognize the existence of Christians who do practice what he preaches, suggesting that religious pluralism is categorically incompatible with Christianity. I can see why the culturally insensitive efforts at “inculturation” perpetrated by Western missionaries in India would give him this impression, but there’s more difference within Christianity than he appears to know.

Perhaps Malhotra works harder than necessary at “being different”, but he does put into stark relief the difference between a friendliness toward difference that effectively aims to eliminate difference, and a world where different world-views can exist and develop side by side. For many if not most Christians, to aspire to the latter requires a healthy stretch of the imagination.

 

 

Earth's Heartbeat

 

(on a hike at Devil's Punchbowl near Pearblossom, CA)

Mountain-shaped silhouettes
Mark the the tall pale stalk 
Of a spent yucca:
Are these its last lines of praise
For the land where it stands?

Above, the yellow pine
Sighs with the deep gratitude I feel
As wind vibrates
Its long-needled vocal chords.

Below, in the canyon,
Slabs of pale sandstone tilt sunward.
The fault line that lifts them
Carves a long notch into the mountains beyond,
And drives a crack 
Through my imagination.

A thin bright stream shapes the stone
With tumbling grains of sand.
A pinon tree lifts hidden water
Through roots, up its trunk, through needles, 
And into the air.

Slowing, I breathe scents of sage and pine.
This is the silence of the centuries
Between the last earthquake and the next.

No less alive than I
Is all I see, and the ground on which I stand.
Can I stop long enough
To catch the heartbeat of this earth?

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I'll be speaking on THE BIBLE AND THE BRAIN - exploring how recent findings in cognitive science and in the evolution of human consciousness can inform the way we read the Bible - this Sun, Feb 12, 8:30 am at Manhattan Beach Community Church.

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For your progressive Christian calendar - events that will be celebrated in churches around the US and beyond:

February 12, this Sunday:  Evolution Weekend

April 15, Sunday:  Blessing of the Taxes

May 6, Sunday:  Pluralism Sunday - sign up your church to participate, now!

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Right after I wrote last week's "musing" about progressive taxation, President Obama quoted the same passage from Jesus that I cited: http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/02/obama-jesus-would-tax-the-rich-113274.html

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See a recent article by Diana Butler-Bass refuting conservatives' charge  that a "war" is being waged on religion in America. 

 

Shared Sacrifice, Shared Reward

"Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more." (Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, Luke 12: 48)

That's how it is in the kingdom of heaven, that realm of living imagination that inspires us to create it on earth. 

But here on earth in America today, Mitt Romney, a very rich man, paid an average of only 14% in tax on his income over the last two years. 

Low income Americans paid 15% on taxable earnings over $8,500 to $34,500.

Since 2003, Romney's investments, which produce most of his income, have been in a "blind trust".  He's not even making investment decisions.  Can it be said that Mitt Romney "earns" any money at all?  And if he's not really earning money through his own hard work and wits, how could taxing his income at a much higher rate have any impact on his level of ambition in the free-market economy?  (See more on this subject in a recent "musing" of mine, The Burklo Limit.)  Less money in his pocket might dull his political ambitions and campaign expenditures slightly.  But would that be an all-bad thing?

America has abandoned much of the principle of progressive taxation, in which the impact of taxes on people's lives is factored proportionally into the rates that people pay.  Under progressive taxation, lower income people would pay a lower rate, and progressively higher income people would pay progressively higher rates - thus somewhat flattening the felt impact of taxation among economic classes. 

There's a lot of noise in politics these days about instituting a "flat tax" - one rate for everybody, regardless of income level.  But nothing's flat about the effect that a uniform tax rate at Mitt Romney's level would have on the incomes of people across the wealth spectrum.  Lower income people might sacrifice buying higher-quality food in order to pay their 14%.  Paying taxes has viscerally-felt consequences for them.  But 14% is not even close to being a nutritional threat for rich folks.  Romney still would be a very wealthy man even if he paid the current top rate, 35%, in income taxes. 

What is the "much" that Jesus says will be required of those who have been given much?  It must be proportional, so that it is flat in tangible impact rather than in abstract numbers.

The Republican argument for low taxes on rich people is that they are the ones who create jobs.  "We all know that there's a reason we have low rates on capital gains. That's because it spurs new investment in our economy and allows capital to move more quickly," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said recently.  But the top marginal tax rate in the Eisenhower era was 90%.  Somehow the economy chugged ahead during that Republican administration!

A researcher with the business-oriented Kauffman Foundation, quoted recently in Miller McCune Magazine, said that only about 10% of the wealthy people of America are job-creators.  Yes, almost all job creators are wealthy people.  'Mom and Pop" small businesses don't grow the economy nearly as much as those businesses started by rich folks.  But only a small number of wealthy people invest in the start-up businesses that create substantial numbers of new jobs.  Why is our country rewarding with lavish tax breaks the 90% of the rich who do little or nothing to stimulate more employment of Americans?  Higher taxes from them could pay for public investments that do preserve and create jobs and improve the infrastructure for capitalism to thrive.

Winner-Take-All Politics, a book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010), documents that US government policy changes in the last 30 years have been the primary causes of a hyper-concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.  A long-term, highly-organized, massively-funded political effort to cut progressive taxation on the wealthy and eliminate regulation on the financial industry has compounded the assets of the very richest of the rich.  "Why has Washington made the rich richer and abandoned the middle class?  Because of the relentless effectiveness of modern, efficient organizations operating in a much less modern and efficient political system."  (p 115)  (See Bill Moyers' recent interview with the authors of this book here.)  "If the effects of taxation on income at the top had been frozen in place in 1970, a very big chunk of the growing distance between the superrich and everyone else would disappear." (p 49)  Hacker and Pierson lay most of the blame for creating much worse income inequality on the Republican Party, but also lay a large share on Democratic politicians who have become dependent on Wall Street money for their campaign funds. 

Mitt Romney accuses the President of stirring up class divisions in America.  That's a breathtaking statement from someone who had an income of $42 million dollars over the past two years, money that he gained almost entirely without working.  Americans are only now waking up to the results of a class war that has been waged against them for three decades.  The President is just responding to the people's anger about it.

Perhaps this also will be the year when Americans wake up to the consequences of three decades of systematic dismantling of the ability of government to protect them from the excesses and failures of capitalism - and to protect capitalism from its own tendency to self-destruction.  All of us have skin in this game.  Today, when capitalism succeeds, rich people get richer.  When it fails, the taxes we all pay bail it out in order to prevent further economic damage.   As quoted by William Cohan in the NY Times: "Senator Christopher Dodd correctly said in April 2008, during the first Senate hearing about the unfolding financial crisis, 'We’ve socialized risk and we’ve privatized reward.'"

"And what if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a... tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem?  The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums.  He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards," said  Irving Kristol, neo-conservative journalist, in 1980.  This cynical plan for destruction of the capacity of government to serve the common good has succeeded.  Republicans bankrupted the country with tax cuts and an expensive war, leaving President Obama to clean up the mess... and then obstructed at every turn his attempts to clean up the mess.  Conservative leaders understand how to manipulate the voters.  If Republicans make a mess of government, that makes the people lose trust in government, and that just feeds their anti-government agenda.  They believe voters will blame Obama for failing to save the country from the worst recession since the Great Depression more than they'll blame the Republicans for stonewalling his solutions to the problem.

It's time for us to prove them wrong.  With our votes and our voices, it's time to put the heat on our politicians to return to a truly progressive income tax system to fund an efficient and effective government that serves the people and not just special interests.  It's time to demand sensible limits on the financial industry and on campaign finance.  These are mainstream, tried and true policies that have served our country well in the past and can do so again. 

"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics,"  said Plutarch, the 1st century Roman historian.  Our country may not be on its deathbed, but surely we are now experiencing the pain of a serious sickness in our democracy.  The interests of the many have been sacrificed for the interests of .1% of the people of this country.  And we should ask if the interests even of this tiny slice of the richest of the rich have been best served.  Henry Ford paid his auto workers more than the prevailing wage, so they'd be able to buy his cars and make him richer.  How much more comfortable everyone would be, including the richest, if lower and middle income workers had a lot more economic security in America?  How much easier life would be for capitalists if America had universal, single-payer health insurance!  Their companies would not need to pay for ever-more costly private insurance for their workers. 

The government's bailout of Wall Street, and the accompanying massive infusion of public money into the economy, was essential to prevent a bad recession from becoming a terrible depression that would have ruined most of us and severely whacked the assets of the wealthy. Let's not miss this teachable moment:  if the government doesn't properly regulate business, you and I will pay to pick up the pieces when the market implodes.  Preventing such debacles with a reformed economic and political system will benefit people in all economic classes.

We're all in this together.  Shared sacrifice, shared reward: this can be our mantra as the presidential election season begins in earnest. 

A suggestion: vote via the buddy system.  If you are someone who stays on top of public affairs, please lose your inhibitions and email your voting choices to everyone you know - early and often!  If you are on the other end of the spectrum, find folks you know and respect and ask them to be your buddies, getting voting advice from them.  From the grassroots up, let's work for real change - till the kingdom comes!

 

Why I'm an Agnatheist

A particularly useful book crossed my desk recently:  BRIDGING THE GOD GAP: Finding Common Ground Among Believers, Atheists, and Agnostics (Living Arts Publications, 2011) by Roger Schriner, a retired Unitarian minister and psychotherapist from Northern California.  In it, he describes the wide continuum of nuanced positions between "theism" and "atheism", blurring the meaning of both terms.   "The difference between belief and disbelief is often merely wordplay, a matter of semantics rather than substance." (p 80) 

There are many ways that God is understood in the Bible, that book so strongly associated with traditional theism.  Just which theism is displayed in which book, much less which chapter of which book, in the Bible?  There's the ineffable, mystical, unnameable I AM THAT I AM in the burning bush that confronted Moses in Genesis.  But also in Genesis are the three men who showed up for dinner at the tent of Sarah and Abraham.  The story indicates that these earthy, humanoid beings collectively were God.  In the second book of Kings, in the story of Naaman, God is described "henotheistically".  God was the god only of the land of Israel.  So Naaman, after being divinely healed in Israel, brought with him a cartload of dirt from Israel when he returned to his native Syria.  The God of Israel only had power over what happened on top of Israeli dirt, and he wanted to continue to have access to that power when he went home.  In the New Testament, in the book of Acts, Paul went to the Areopagus in Athens where stood statues of the Greek gods.  One empty spot was dedicated to "The Unknown God", which Paul said was the real God.  If the real God was unknown, did that make Paul an agnostic?  Early Christians were considered atheists because they did not worship the gods of Rome.  Such lack of reverence was as unthinkable for Romans as it would be for Americans to vote for an atheist candidate for president today!  

And on that subject, the current political contest leads a lot of Americans to puzzle if Mormons believe in God.  The Latter Day Saints church teaches that God began as a man who went through a process of spiritual improvement until he became divine, and that humans are intended to do the same.  It's a view that's foreign to a lot of Christians.  But there are many differing concepts of God among Christians, much as their pastors and priests might want to deny that this is so.  Those views reflect the variety of understandings that appear in the Bible and outside of it as well.  The God of the Mormons is just one of many that exist side by side, named by the same generic word.  And we can be sure that different Mormons have different understandings of God.  The realm of Christian theism has no clear boundary.

I think that many atheists are really awetheists.  They are people who experience the same kind of reverential wonder and respect for life and the highest human values that we associate with religion at its best.  Awe is their God, though they don't use that terminology.  I use Christian language to describe the deep humility I feel when I mindfully encounter the miraculous natural world around and within me.  For me, God isn't supernatural; God is the essential creative nature of the universe.   Some Christians say that this makes me an atheist.  Some atheists get upset when I tell them what I mean by the word God, and they say that I'm not a Christian!  They don't want to be associated with the supernatural God they associate with Christianity, and don't want to be confused by the possibility that non-supernatural theists like myself can be Christian.   Such conversations lead me to wonder if I am an agnatheist: someone who is agnostic about whether or not there is really such a thing as an atheist.  

BRIDGING THE GOD GAP offers a breathtaking array of places to stay, or at least visit, along the road between theism and atheism.  But Schriner's breakdown of the choices is hardly exhaustive.  The human experience of God, or the Ultimate Reality Formerly Known As God (URFKAG), defies definition by its very nature.  Pondering that is enough to make an awetheist out of me!

 (An understanding of God which I've found to be helpful is elucidated in process theology, a school of thought founded by the mathematician and philosopher of the early 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead.  For a brief introduction to it, check out this interview with Phil Clayton, process theologian at Claremont School of Theology.)

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Mark your progressive Christian calendars!

February 12, Sunday:  Evolution Weekend
April 15, Sunday:  Blessing of the Taxes

May 6, Sunday:  Pluralism Sunday - sign up your church to participate, now!

How I Make Meaning of Life

(This "musing" appears in The Interfaith Observer online magazine this month.)

My wife and I drive out of the city.  On the way, we share stories with each other.

We laugh about how complicated and intertwined the tales of our lives have become with each other, and with and among the people we know.

We are amazed at how disparate events and people come together over time, in surprising combinations.

We get out in the country and see a lonesome hill and we get out of the car and climb it. 
At the top we hold hands and take deep breaths.

We walk down the other side, and at the bottom is a pile of rusty junk.

I collect some of it and put it in the car.
I'm not sure why I pick it up, but I sense there are reasons.

At home I put the junk in a cardboard box in the garage.

On a Saturday morning, I drive alone to the desert mountains and hike along walls of pale stone.
I pluck a stem of sagebrush and crush it under my nose with my fingers.

I wonder how that scent floods my mind with memories of other hikes in other landscapes.

I ask:  Do those moments, stored and now released, belong to me or to those times and places?

Am I but a wind blowing through wilderness, making pine needles moan and cottonwood leaves flutter?

Need I be anything more than these questions I ask as I pause on the trail?

At work, I listen to a student tell me that she doesn't know why she is alive, and can't find other students who will listen to her predicament.

I listen to a university staff person tell me about having an affair and how it made a mess of her life.

I make vegetarian pizzas and serve them to students in our Interfaith Council as they discuss what they and their religions have to say about life after death.

I lift chairs off stacks to arrange them in a patio where I will be leading a memorial service for a student who committed suicide.
I fuss with image files to fit them in an e-newsletter.

At home, I read a story to our five-year-old granddaughter, and then we chase each other around our apartment and yell.
I edit an academic paper for my daughter, who is in graduate school at the university where I work.

At church I feel the tears welling behind my eyes as we stand in line to receive communion.
A mystery is being completed in us as we eat bread dipped in wine.

I get a call telling me it's time to drive 400 miles north to my home town because a friend of mine is dying.

I sit next to the hospital bed and stroke his forehead and chant peace and love into his ear as he dies. 
We were friends for 44 years.

On a Saturday afternoon, rummaging through the garage, I find the rusty junk in the box and take it out. 

Without a plan, I assemble it in different ways, to see what could be made of it all.

A steel spring, a metal strap, a corroded piece of a toy Tonka truck, and a rusty little tube.

Finally I'm pleased with a construction of the pieces.  With tin-snips and epoxy glue I put it together.

I call it my self-portrait.

I take it inside our apartment and put it on a shelf and stare at it.

It gives my life a meaning
That makes me laugh.

Mormon Reckoning

America is entering a Mormon moment as a former bishop of the Latter-Day Saints, Mitt Romney, takes front-runner place in the race for the Republican nomination for the presidency.  I welcome the religious reckoning that is bound to result.  Mormonism shines an ultraviolet light on Christianity in America, revealing features that are unseen under the rest of the spectrum. 

In the last few years, I have become acquainted with the progressive theological and social movement within the Mormon world.  It's much bigger than the public perceives, if it is perceived at all.  There is a wide range of thought within the membership of the LDS on matters religious and political.  There is a loyal opposition to its leadership's positions on same-sex marriage, homosexuality, women's limited roles, and other issues.  The online Mormon "bloggernacle" on these topics includes dropout (or "Jack") Mormons, temple-ready, tithe-paying Mormons, Mormons who take the Book of Mormon literally, Mormons who don't, Mormon Democrats, and Mormon Republicans.  Journals like Dialogue and Sunstone make space for respectful but critical viewpoints about the church.

This lively contrarian community within the LDS world results in part from the fact that the Mormon church has a theology, but few theologians.  The top leaders of the church, some of whom I had the occasion to meet a few months ago in Salt Lake City, are chosen primarily for their gifts as managers, not as scholars.  There is no LDS seminary, and there is little scholarship within the church to compare to what is found in the Catholic or mainline Protestant traditions.  An integral part of Mormon theology is the principle of personal revelation.  Each Mormon is expected to come up with his or her own "testimony" that the Church is "true".  And while there are clear Mormon doctrines, the LDS Church is not preoccupied with interpreting them.  That task is largely left to the personal relationship between the individual Mormon and God.

As a result, a substantial number of Mormons have quietly consulted with their Maker and concluded that the Book of Mormon is mythical.  And they have found a way to hold that view while staying loyal to their church.  Their church is "true" for them in ways that might not be "true" for other Latter-Day Saints. 

It's not hard to see how they arrive at that conclusion.  The text and Joseph Smith's account of its discovery are fantastic.  He claimed to have translated the text from the "Reformed Egyptian" - a language that never existed - into English, using "peep stones" called Urim and Thummim.  The book suggests that Jews settled in Meso-America and that Jesus visited this continent after his resurrection.  There is no sound archaeological or historical evidence for any of these claims.  The book was written in grammatically incorrect King James English, long after that version of the language had become antique.  While there are a few pearls of wisdom in it, and its vision of a Christianity indigenous to America is intriguing, a leap of faith as wide as the Grand Canyon is required to take it literally.  (Check out the LDS Church's own list of most cherished Book of Mormon passages, to get a sense of how many cups of non-Mormon beverages you'd need to finish the whole book.)  Consequently, many Mormons cherish the book as part of their cultural and religious heritage, while understanding that it cannot be taken as an historical record of the events it describes.

For evangelicals to argue that the Book of Mormon is a false gospel, they must give the same kinds of reasons that theologically progressive Christians present for not taking the Bible literally.  Smith's story of the appearance of the golden plates of the text of the Book of Mormon is no more fabulous than it is to take the miracle stories in the Bible as facts.  Non-Mormon Christians have been in the habit of taking the Bible literally a lot longer than Mormons have been doing it with their book.  But the duration of an obsolete belief system is no argument for maintaining it.

Many evangelicals are outraged that Mormons don't believe in the Trinity, and that they believe that God was a (married) man who became divine.  But what's any weirder about these doctrines than the arcane doctrine of the Trinity?  How do you explain the difference such theological disputes make in everyday life in 2012?  Plenty of loyal Mormons take their church's doctrine with a grain of salt. 

Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA, recently wrote in the LA Times that "I do not believe Mormonism is a cult. However, I am not convinced that Mormon theology deserves to be classified as Christian in the historic sense of that word. I have serious disagreements with my Mormon friends about basic issues of faith that have eternal consequences. These include issues regarding the nature of God, the doctrine of the Trinity and the character of the afterlife. But I have also learned that in some matters we are not quite as far apart as I once thought. In any case, such theological differences don't preclude a Mormon from being a viable presidential candidate, in my view." 

I don't find the term "cult" useful in describing any religious groups.  But apparently Mouw does, and if Mormonism doesn't fit his definition, why?  Just because they've become "mainstream", as he says, in business and culture?  He fudges a bit about whether or not Mormons are really Christians, and he only hints at hellfire as a possible consequence of their beliefs.  Does he agree with the oft-cited phrase that a cult is just a religious group without political or financial clout?

In the interests of maintaining a conservative alliance, many evangelicals will be challenged to follow Mouw's example and downplay theological issues for the sake of promoting a common political agenda which has no biblical basis.  Already for many evangelicals, political purity trumps theological purity.  Notice the peace they have made with the Catholic Church, which they used to vilify.  Rick Santorum, an uber-Catholic, has become an honorary evangelical!  For the sake of teaming up with Mormons to fight abortion rights and same-sex marriage, topics about which Jesus said nothing, will evangelicals cut Mormons slack on matters theological?  They do so at their own doctrinal peril. 

If Romney becomes the nominee for the Republican Party, count on a national year-long teach-in about the Mormon faith.  Republicans will have to make Mormonism look good, and that's going to make Republicans look bad to the millions of fundamentalist Christians who are convinced that it is a terrible heresy.  Some fundamentalists will take a break from politics altogether, seeing how it co-opts and trumps religion.  Other conservative Christians will be nudged toward a more pluralistic, less dogmatic stance.  (See how it plays in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in this article by my friend and colleague Loren Seibold.)  Romney's Mormonism is going to result in a healthy confusion among conservative Americans.

So there's good news for progressive Christianity in America's imminent reckoning with Mormonism.  Romney's candidacy is going to make people ask questions.  Do political and social agendas matter more or less than theological doctrines?  If America is a Christian nation as defined by evangelicals, can it be governed by a Mormon?  Can any one religion or sect claim to be superior to all others?  More people will question whether the Bible should be taken literally, as they see how hard it is to take the Book of Mormon factually.  People will ponder whether their critiques of Mormonism might apply to their own religious beliefs.  And progressive Mormons will be connected with the larger progressive Christian community, leading to fruitful friendships.   

Epiphanies

 

An awakening. An opening into higher consciousness.  A discovery.  A parting of the fog of confusion, revealing a new kind of clarity.  Webster’s says that an epiphany is a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something. What an enticing definition!  It makes me eager to get an epiphany right now.  How about you?

In the context of the Christian church calendar, Epiphany is January 6, the day celebrated as the time when the wise men visited the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem.  It’s the sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of Christmas to three guys from somewhere in Iraq or Iran.  They were the first non-Jews to “get it” about Christmas.  Think of it! Jesus was barely born before his message was out of the Jewish box.  Hmmm – isn’t it about time that his message got out of the Christian box?

I love this story for a bunch of ephinaneous reasons.  Yes, I made up that word, epiphaneous.  That’s what happens when you have an epiphany: you expand your vocabulary.  For one thing, I love this story because the three wise men show up with really weird gifts.  Normal folks might think:  let’s get Jesus a rattle, or a rubber ducky, or get his parents a couple months of diaper service.  No, these supposedly wise men traveled many hundreds of miles on camelback to deliver gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Gold – sure.  Valuable then, valuable now.  That’s not so strange: at least for Mary and Joseph, it was probably a welcome sight.  But frankincense and myrrh?  Used as burial spices, at the time.  Yes, valuable:  Mary and Joseph could have traded them for something useful.  The three wise men were like those relatives or friends who feel compelled to give you stuff for Christmas, except they are truly clueless about who you are, what you want, what you need. 

 

Another thing I love about the story is that the three wise men apparently didn't become Christians after meeting Jesus.  They already had a religion, and they didn't give it up.  They followed the star because their own religion suggested it.  Faithfully following their own religion got them outside of the box of their own religion, even while they continued practicing it.  Maybe that’s something we can emulate today. By following Jesus in a serious way, he’ll lead us out of the Christian box and inspire us to explore other religions and become better global citizens.  He'll lead us to be humble about our religion, even as we continue practicing it.

The recipe for epiphany is simple, but still challenging.  It is about showing up:  physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  That’s what the three wise men did.  They did not just send gold, frankincense, and myrrh by Fed Ex and then just email a Christmas letter from Baghdad.  When they discovered that the star was hovering above a rude and crude manger, and that the so-called king was a peasant child, they still showed up in person and presented themselves. 

Are we present?  Really here?  All here?  Did your body show up, but your mind is someplace else?  Did your mind show up, but your body get left behind?  Are you awake and aware of your whole self, here and now?

The way to have an epiphany starts with being all here, and being awake to your inner and outer worlds.  If you are awake to your feelings, your bodily and mental experiences in the moment - if you are aware of what is going on in your mind and body right now, then you will be awake enough to have a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of things.  What are we really thinking?  What are we really feeling?  To what are we really paying attention right here and now?  Facing the truth about ourselves, reflecting our emotional and physical reality back to ourselves, lovingly, without judgment: that enables us to be present, body and soul, at the manger.

When we take a good look at ourselves in the spiritual mirror, we begin to experience higher consciousness.  This is the kingdom of heaven Jesus was talking about: the heaven’s eye view of ourselves and the world around us.  When we take this God’s-eye view of ourselves, lovingly and without judgment, doing an inventory of our inner worlds, then we are able to perceive the meaning of what we observe.  

I do quite a bit of counseling for students at USC in the course of my job, even though I’m not officially a counselor.  I find myself asking students questions to nudge them to examine their inner lives – lovingly, and without judgment.  Just paying attention to their inner worlds, just describing their inner experience, is enough to trigger epiphanies.  Suddenly they make new connections among their experiences and feelings, and make fresh sense of their lives. 

It’s New Years, when we hear all that talk about resolutions.  I say, forget about who you ought to be, what you ought to look like, what you ought to weigh.  New Year’s resolutions are almost always about there and then.  This New Year’s, let’s look at here and now.  Who are you, really, now?  Look with clear spiritual eyes.  Pay full attention to your present reality, with love and acceptance of what is.  If you can do this, you’ll be empowered to make whatever changes you need and want to make.  You'll be epiphany-ready!  Be here now, and you’ll be ready to go there then... in 2012, and beyond.