Anywhere but here and now

I just finished listening to the Pensees or Thoughts on Religion by the French thinker and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Among other things, he designed a calculating machine, arguably a distant forerunner of the computer. 

He also apparently had a mystical experience of which he wrote 

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

For those of us out of the math world, he's best known for nuggets from the Pensees, such as "the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of."

This time around, I found his insights on the human condition to be brilliant and his theological musings a bit dogmatic, which is probably what he was going for.

He was a devout Catholic, although one accused of being a Jansenist heretic, (Jansenism was an almost Calvinistic tendency in the Church), but sometimes he sounds downright Buddhist. Example: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Here's a great passage from the Pensees about our chronic tendency to be anywhere but where and when we are that could have come out of an old school dharma talk:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Ouch. That hit close to home. 

 

Holy Saturday, or the Harrowing of Hell

This is reposted from 2013, with a few updates:

The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is an interesting part of the traditional Christian calendar. It symbolized the only day of the year in which Christ is thought of as being dead. By tradition, it is also the only day of the year in which the Holy Eucharist is not celebrated (except in cases of emergencies).

In Christian tradition, lots of interesting legends developed around this day. Some passages in the New Testament suggest that Jesus descended to the realms of the dead to bring liberation to captive spirits. Apocryphal gospels from the second and third centuries elaborated this theme. In the late classical and medieval period, legends bloomed about the "Harrowing of Hell" in which the spirit of Jesus trashed the place while freeing the souls of the virtuous. In Dante's Inferno, both the architecture and geography of Hell show the aftershocks of that cataclysmic event nearly 1300 years later.

I love the image of captive spirits who have long ago given up hope being suddenly and unexpectedly rescued by a power far greater than themselves or the forces that hold them down. We could use a good bit more of that.

Right now.

Gnats and camels

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post found that Christians, especially white evangelicals, were more than twice as likely to blame poverty on lack of effort by the poor compared with nonreligious Americans.

That’s a dramatic departure from the first 1,500 years of Christian history. Not to mention over a thousand years of Judaism before that.

In fact, concern for justice for the poor is one of the unique features of the Jewish religious tradition, out of which Christianity grew.

Apparently for some Christians, somewhere along the way, economic factors morphed from being a part of life to being the main event. And wealth got conflated with salvation and righteousness, while poverty was linked to sin and damnation.

That’s not how it all started.

Deuteronomy, the final biblical book of the Jewish Torah, states that “There should be no poor among you.”

Mosaic law called for periodic and radical cancellation of debts and redistribution of land to level social inequality. It wasn’t voluntary. The divine call was for justice, not charity. Landowners were even forbidden from gathering in all of their harvest; the remnants were to be left for the poor to glean.

The prophets regularly denounced the wealthy and powerful. To use just one of many examples, Isaiah asked: “What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?” They didn’t hold back from denouncing kings, including good ones like David and bad ones like Ahab.

As Thomas Cahill wrote in The Gifts of the Jews, “This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.”

This bias toward the underdog is also central theme of the New Testament, showing up as early as the song Mary sang in Luke after being told she would bear a child: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”

Jesus wouldn’t just say “Blessed are the poor.” He also said “woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.”

Here again, examples could be multiplied. Consider the epistle of James: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you ... Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.”

That continued in the Orthodox and Catholic tradition. St. Ambrose (337-397), who helped convert Augustine, said “You are not making a gift of your possessions to poor persons. You are handing over to them what is theirs. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself. The world is given to all, and not only to the rich.” And “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.”

St. John Chrysostom (349-407) preached “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.”

St. Basil (330-379) said: “Are not thou then a robber, for counting as thine own what thou hast receivest to distribute? It is the bread of the famished which thou receivest, the garment of the naked which thou hoardest in thy chest, the shoe of the barefooted which rots in they possessions, the money of the penniless which thou hast buried in the earth. Wherefore then dost thou injure so many to whom thou mightiest be a benefactor.”

St. Gregory the Great, aka Pope Gregory I, (540-604) said “When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.”

Say what you want about early and medieval Christianity, but bashing the poor wasn’t part of the deal.

In today’s world, far be it from me to deny that there may be a slacker or two out there (most of which are not poor). But myopic views of poverty neglect some huge events that have taken place in front of God and everybody for the last few decades.

These include the decline of unions and workers’ power; trade deals that benefit corporations not communities; tax cuts to the wealthy; budget cuts; a minimum wage lagging behind inflation, privatization, and the growth of big money in politics, all of which has led to record levels of inequality.

Studies have shown that most recent income growth has gone to the wealthiest 99.999 percent, even while the share going to low and middle income Americans has declined.

As The New York Times reported, “Only a few decades ago, the middle class and the poor weren’t just receiving healthy raises. Their take-home pay was rising even more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the pay of the rich.” Today, however, “The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.”

Ignoring these massive injustices while nit-picking at the real or imagined small flaws of low income people is pretty much exactly the kind of thing that Jesus had in mind when, using a drinking metaphor, he accused some misguided religious people of his own day of “straining out gnats and swallowing camels.”

Unfortunately, it looks like camels are still on the menu.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Gazette-Mail. Please be kind enough to overlook the fact that I put the two numbers in the wrong place.)

Three for the road

If you're trying to make sense of WV Governor Jim Justice's high profile party switch and what that means for WV, good luck--and you're in good company. Here's some basic reporting by Brad McEllhenny of WV MetroNews. And I think the Gazette-Mail's Phil Kabler hit most of the right notes with his column.

If you are up for some more amusing WV related news, check out this item from Vanity Fair that talks about the WV ACLU's hilarious brief about coal baron Bob Murray,  who made good on his threat to sue Comedy Central's John Oliver after somewhat less than reverent treatment on the tube. Giant Squirrel fans, you're going to love it.

Finally, it looks like Christianity minus the whole Jesus thing is alive and well in the USA. Sad.

It's not all bad (another installment)

There's been a lot of nastiness in the air over the Syrian refugee crisis. It was nice last night to attend an event at the Islamic Center in which Christians, Jews and Muslims stood together against hate and in favor of a humane response.

THIS MAY SOUND LIKE INSIDE BASEBALL, but an article in the Sunday Gazette-Mail by statehouse columnist Phil Kabler shows what happens when media is concentrated into a few very rich and very ideological hands. 

TALKING SENSE IN HUNTINGTON. This Herald-Dispatch editorial argues that mine safety violations should carry felony rather than misdemeanor charges. I'm with them.

The Harrowing of Hell

The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is an interesting part of the traditional Christian calendar. It symbolized the only day of the year in which Christ is thought of as being dead. By tradition, it is also the only day of the year in which the Holy Eucharist is not celebrated (except in cases of emergencies).

In Christian tradition, lots of interesting legends developed around this day. Some passages in the New Testament suggest that Jesus descended to the realms of the dead to bring liberation to captive spirits. Apocryphal gospels from the second and third centuries elaborated this theme. In the late classical and medieval period, legends bloomed about the "Harrowing of Hell" in which the spirit of Jesus trashed the place while freeing the souls of the virtuous. In Dante's Inferno, both the architecture and geography of Hell show the aftershocks of that cataclysmic event nearly 1300 years later.

I love the image of captive spirits who have long ago given up hope being suddenly and unexpectedly rescued by a power far greater than themselves or the forces that hold them down. We could use a good bit more of that.

Deep in their hearts they remembered hell

An illustration from the 1830s of early efforts to convert Swedes to Christianity a thousand years before.

I've been blogging about Beowulf lately, although you will also find links and comments about current events below. Another thing I find interesting about the poem is the issue of religion. It seems to me that there is a thin veneer of Christianity spread sparsely over a big pagan poem.

The narrator and some of the characters talk about God and an afterlife. There are references to the Bible, but mostly to the book of Genesis, with the monster Grendel and his ilk seen as children of Cain and with references to the Flood and to the "giants in the earth" who flourished before the deluge. But there is no explicit mention of Jesus or any New Testament theme that I could find.

The poem begins and ends with two stories of kingly burial which show more kinship to pagan funeral customs than Christian burial. Beowulf himself was right there with the boys from the Iliad in longing for fame in battle as a kind of immortality. There is little that is Christian in the overall ambiance of the epic.

It may reflect a time when the conversion process, whether of the Anglo-Saxons or the North Sea warrior societies like the Danes and Geats was early and tentative. In the poem, the Danes plagued by Grendel's predations seek help from pagan gods after all else fails:

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed
offering to idols, swore oaths
the the killer of souls might come to their aid
and save the people. That was their way,
their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts
they remembered hell.

In nature, estuaries are those interesting places where salt and fresh water meet and all kinds of interesting biological things can be found. Beowulf is a sort of spiritual estuary where the pagan mingles with the Christian in an interesting way.

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, 1798 style.

I THINK WE KNEW THAT. A panel charged with investigating the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession thinks it was preventable. I think they left out the part about stagnant incomes and growing inequality however.

MORE BUZZ ON MODERNIZING WV'S UNEMPLOYMENT SYSTEM here.

IMAGINING EUROPE, but getting it wrong. Not in a good way.

REFUDIATED. Four hundred rabbis have signed a letter protesting FOX "News" icon Glenn Beck for inappropriate use of Holocaust imagery.

OUT OF AFRICA. Ancient tools found in the United Arab Emirates suggests that some early humans made the trip earlier than previously believed.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Like the swift flight of a sparrow

The English church historian Bede, from a 1493 illustration.

The theme here lately is Beowulf, although you will also find links and comments about current events below. One of the interesting things about that poem is the light it sheds on religion in the Anglo-Saxon world.

It would seem that when these Germanic tribes invaded or migrated to England in the 500s, most of them were pagan and held to some variety of Norse religion, which survives in such places as the names of several weekdays (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after gods). An effort to convert them to Christianity got into high gear around the year 600, give or take a few.

Unlike in other places, it seems to have taken place without much in the way of martyrdoms on either the Christian or pagan side. Maybe one reason why Christianity appealed to them was that it offered a less dark view of the world than the old religion. In Norse mythology, gods, humans and the whole shooting match were expected to go down in a cataclysm known as Ragnarok.

According to the Venerable Bede (circa 672-735), an early chronicler of English church history, a pagan priest was consulted about the new religion and he was fairly open to it. Bede says that he described the human condition thus:

The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

If that isn't one of the world's best analogies, I don't know what is. But if I was the sparrow, I'd have stayed in the mead hall.

THIS IS OUR CONCERN, DUDE. Some economists warn that spending cuts and freezes advocated by President Obama and his "friends" in Congress could be the real job killers. Here's another take on it while we're at it, along with Dean Baker's response.

ROADBLOCKS. Here's Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, in a Rolling Stone article on the 12 politicians who are doing the most to block progress on dealing with climate change. West Virginia's senior senator made the list, which makes me wonder if our junior senator is jealous. One startling change from the past is that Don Blankenship didn't make the list this time. The former CEO of Massey Energy appears to be taking a time out. Thanks to Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo for the heads up.

WHAT I'M SCREAMING. WV needs to modernize its unemployment system now.

GOOD TO KNOW. Legislators in Utah may soon make the M1911 the official state gun.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, optimism in America is at a four year high (which may not be saying much).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A powerful mix

1898 political cartoon.

People have long observed how powerfully nationalism can motivate people, even those who have low status and little apparent stake in the nation in question. When World War I broke out in Europe, for example, there was widespread joy and euphoria on all sides. Even many political radicals who had previously vowed to oppose international conflict joined it.

Nationalistic enthusiasms (which nation is involved is immaterial) can override rational and religious considerations. Reinhold Niebuhr in his 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society, has a succinct explanation:

"The man in the street, with his lust for power and prestige thwarted by his own limitations and the necessities of social life, projects his ego upon his nation and indulges his anarchic lusts vicariously. So a nation is at one and the same time a check upon, and a final vent for, the expression of individual egoism."

In his view, it is precisely that mixture of selflessness and vicarious selfishness that give nationalism its power.

A LIVELY CREW greeted shareholders at Massey Energy's annual meeting in Richmond, Va.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS. A new survey about American attitudes towards things like capitalism and socialism finds some surprising numbers.

CHRISTIANITY AND CONSERVATISM. This article wonders how, given the Bible's powerful statements on social justice (yeah, I said those dreaded words), the two can go together.

OK, SO I'M SMIRKING. The state of WV is discontinuing it's redesigned version of Medicaid, which is something quite a few people I know will celebrate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Seriously but not literally

I guess one mark of a great theologian is that they have something to say even to people outside of their religious tradition. Several names come to mind in this context: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich. And Reinhold Niebuhr would certainly be on many people's short list.

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a pastor in the German Evangelical tradition. He followed in his father's footsteps and served as a pastor in industrial Detroit for several years, where he criticized the brutality of the factory system.

From 1928 until 1960 he taught theology at Union Theological Seminary and for most of those years was very active in political life. In the 1930s he supported the Socialist Party but later became something of a New Deal pragmatist and political realist. He has been claimed by people across the political spectrum, from progressives to neo-cons.

His theology is sometimes described as neo-orthodox, which takes the Biblical and Christian theological tradition seriously if not literally. Above all, Niebuhr takes the idea of sin very seriously indeed and applies it broadly to human social life.

I think one reason I like him so much is that this is one of the few areas in which El Cabrero is in the orthodox camp.

One of his most famous books is the 1932 Moral Man and Immoral Society, parts of which holds up remarkably well. More on that tomorrow.

GOING LOCAL. This item looks at the importance of local economies.

HARD SCIENCE. Here's some research on marital felicity.

ARCHAEOLOGY MADE EASY. New technology makes it possible to map ancient civilizations in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.

IT PASSED. NOW WHAT? Now that health care reform is the law of the land, it will take a lot of education and outreach to help people understand what it is and isn't. Here's what local groups in WV are planning to do.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Theological musings

El Cabrero has read (or more accurately listened to) several of Karen Armstrong's books on religion. Some are better than others and some interpretations seem a bit of a stretch but I enjoyed her latest book, The Case for God.

This book was interesting not so much in making a case for God but rather for providing a good survey of religious and cultural history. One insight from the book, however, hit home.

She notes that in the modern world people tend to interpret religious teachings in much the same way they do other kinds of statements, i.e. as more or less factual claims. This kind of literal approach can lead to the impoverishment of religion, either turning in into a kind of fundamentalism (itself a distinctly modern thing) or into something that many people find it easy to dismiss.

Older approaches to religion, on the other hand, embed teachings into rituals, disciplines and practices which place it in a special context.

I've often thought that orthodox Christian teachings separated from traditional practices and viewed as mere statements of historical fact raise all kinds of questions and problems but that these make perfect sense within the context of rituals such as the Eucharist.

Armstrong reminded me that this is the way it was meant to be in older approaches to religion. The modern reduction of religion to textual literalism and merely factual interpretation seems to be a degradation rather than elevation of religion.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. The recession may have motivated many Americans to do more even as they spend less.

1937 REDUX? During the 1930s, New Deal programs were scaled back when the Depression appeared to ease--which made it get worse again. In this op-ed, Paul Krugman warns this could happen again.

1994 REDUX? Here's E.J. Dionne on the 2010 elections.

WEIRD SCIENCE. Here are 2009's top stories from Wired Science.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Caught in another tale

Jacob practicing a little judo with the angel. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The official Goat Rope definition of a great story is that it is something you can find as well as lose yourself in.

(Sorry about ending that sentence with a preposition; that's a bad thing to end one with.)

The thing a about a great story, whether it's from the classics or folklore or something new is that it can sometimes illuminate situations in real life. Sometimes it's like you're not just reading literature, you're incorporating or enacting it or experiencing aspects of certain stories in real life.

After having spent several years sparring with various bureaucracies and their irrational policies, I feel like I haven't just read Kafka's work--I've lived it. In my more paranoid moments, I sometimes wonder whether the people who make up some of those rules are Kafka fans...

Similarly, when I'm trying to persuade people to work together to change something, I feel like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence and trying to get the other kids to do it. Enduring the worst of the Bush years was kind of like living in Oran during the plague in Camus' novel of the same title. Etc.

Sometimes, stories seem to bleed over into life easily and spontaneously. In other cases, we have to grapple with them like Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis. He held on for dear life as daylight approached and said "I will not let go until you bless me."

I think I just did the story thing again. Anyhow, the point is, it's often worth the struggle.

UNEMPLOYED AND UNCOVERED. Millions of unemployed workers aren't eligible for benefits under many state programs, but there are options from the stimulus package to expand and modernize coverage. This is something I've been working with folks on in WV. The state's unemployment rate went up again in March.

SPEAKING OF EMPLOYMENT, demand for green collar job training is growing.

STATE BUDGET CUTS could delay economic recovery.

RELIGION. Here's E.J. Dionne on the future of Christianity.

IMMIGRATION. The nation's two largest labor federations, the AFLCIO and Change to Win, have reached agreement on supporting comprehensive immigration reform.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Heirlooms

As noted in yesterday's post, traditional Buddhist teachings regard being born as a human as a rare and precious opportunity. Believe it or not, we could do way worse. Even more rare and precious is being born a human in a time and place where one can become aware of the Buddha's teaching or the Dharma.

By those standards at least, El Cabrero is pretty lucky. Although I was raised in and remain attached to the Episcopal Church, there was never a time in my life when I can remember not knowing who the Buddha was or at least what he looked like (according to traditional iconography anyhow).

My paternal grandfather spent many years in China, where my father and uncle were born. He wasn't a missionary, although he did become a priest when he returned. Though he died several years before I was born, the artifacts of his travels decorated the old family farm. Among these was a bronze statue of the Buddha and a prayer wheel. When my grandmother died, those were the only things I asked for.

When I was a child, while everyone at the old home place adhered to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the Buddha was always spoken of with deep respect, as were other elements of Chinese culture. I wound up being drawn to and equally comfortable with each. They are not identical, but I've found them to be complimentary and the tension between them to be interesting.

A wise old priest once told me that creative tensions were what made things like Gothic cathedrals work and that Christianity itself was the product of creative tensions between the Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions.

THE (GLOBAL) PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. A worldwide study of the subjective sense of well-being finds that it tends to be higher in places with less poverty, better health care and access to education. Who would have guessed?

A VERY UNMERRY BIRTHDAY. NAFTA turned 15 on Jan. 1. Ordinary folks on either side of the US-Mexico border weren't big winners.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. From the Wall Street Journal, here is a brief description of some rare but interesting neurological disorders.

THESE ARE YOUR BEES on drugs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LOVE AND HATE

Caption: Sometimes these guys get on each other's nerves.

The guiding thread through this week's Goat Rope is social conflict and how it works. You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

It has long been observed that there's a fine line between love and hate and that sometimes people have some of both kinds of feelings for people they are close to. Freud called it ambivalence. As he wrote in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,

Almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time--marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children--leaves a sediment of feeling of aversion and hostility, which have first to be eliminated by repression. This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in large units. Every time two families become connected by marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighboring towns, each is the other's most jealous rival.

The closer the relationship, the more occasions for conflicts of interest and often the more intense the conflicts. As Coser said,

Closely knit groups in which there exists a high frequency of interaction and high personality involvement of the members have a tendency to suppress conflict. While they provide frequent occasions for hostility (since both sentiments of love and hatred are intensified through frequency of interaction), the acting out of such feelings is sensed as a danger to such intimate relationships, and hence there is a tendency to suppress rather than allow the expression of hostile feelings. In close-knit groups, the feelings of hostility tend, therefor, to accumulate and hence to intensify.

If conflict does break out in such a group,

it will be particularly intense for two reasons: First, because the conflict does not merely aim at resolving the immediate issue which led to its outbreak; all accumulated grievances which were denied expression previously are apt to emerge at this occasion. Second, because the total personality involvement of the group members makes for mobilization of all sentiments in the conduct of the struggle.

Speaking of love and hate, one interesting feature of conflict between groups is that it can, with time, bring the opposing parties closer together.

SHAME ON PRESIDENT BUSH for vetoing expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program. In his statement on the subject, the president spoke of the dangers of a federalized health care system. Last I heard, he enjoys federal health care benefits. Yesterday, El Cabrero participated in a press conference protesting that decision. Here's the Gazette coverage.

All of WV's congressional delegation supported CHIP. Gov. Manchin issued a statement that said in part: “I have joined with other states in writing to the president to urge him to sign this legislation into law, and am disappointed in his decision to use his veto power."

NO U.S. TORTURE POLICY 'ROUND HERE. Just the same thing with a different name.

MORE ON THE LOGAN COUNTY VIGIL in support of Megan Williams can be found here.

IMAGE PROBLEM. According to this interesting item from Time, some Christians are giving Christianity a bad name. That problem has been around a while...

IF I'M READING THIS RIGHT, Massey Energy is suing two law firms that represented them and lost. So like...what will happen if the guys filing this one lose?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CONFRONTATION

Icon painted by La Cabra.

A while back, El Cabrero received a challenge from a Goat Rope reader to write about five things I most admire about Jesus. It took me a while to rise to that challenge. This is day five. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

A note on method: I'm confining my remarks to events that happened during Jesus' natural life, although I believe there was and is more to the story...

This last post is about the last days of his natural life.

If Jesus had decided to say in Galilee and confine his activities to peasants in rural villages, he would probably have had a much longer life. But, as one of the gospels puts it, "he set his face to go to Jerusalem:"

Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day, for it is impossible that a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem.

I don't pretend to know what his thoughts were when he made that decision--I'm not even sure what mine are most days. But whether you look at it as a religious or purely historical question, it seems clear that he knew that going there in the way he did and acting as he did would provoke the ruling elites of his day, both Roman and Jewish, to retaliate. And he knew that this retaliation was often drastic.

The Domination System of his time, to use the words of theologian Walter Wink, did not take kindly to challenges. Come to think of it, the Domination System of our time isn't too crazy about them either. And the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed and enacted (see the post "The World Turned Upside Down "earlier this week) was nothing if not a challenge to the domination system.

The timing of the last Jerusalem trip was critical also. It was the festival of Passover, which was kind of like Christmas, Easter and Independence Day all rolled into one. The feast had political and subversive implications: it celebrated the liberation of the children of Israel from slavery and bondage in Egypt. The Romans were on high alert and Jerusalem was heavily garrisoned with soldiers.

Aside from many verbal confrontations with opponents that last week, Jesus engaged in two explicit acts which would have been seen as provocative. The first was his entry into Jerusalem, celebrated now as Palm Sunday. As Marcus Borg puts it,

Jesus' action was based on a passage from the prophets that spoke of a humble king who would enter Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey. He would be a king of peace who would banish chariots, warhorses, and battle bows from the land and command peace to the nations (Zech. 9:9-10). By riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey, Jesus enacted his message: the kingdom of God of which he spoke was a kingdom of peace, not violence.

The meaning of Jesus' mode of entry is amplified by the realization that two processions entered Jerusalem that Passover. The other procession was an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of a very different kind of procession: imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison at the Temple Mount...

The next day, Jesus created a disruption at the Temple, traditionally called its "cleansing," when the gospels say he overturned tables and drove out money changers. At the very least, this indicates that he viewed the Temple system as an unjust one that fed upon the poorest of the faithful.

It didn't take that much in those days to bring down the wrath of the ruling powers and this was more than enough...

Each of the gospels contains slightly different versions of the trial of Jesus. A very likely scenario, however, is pretty simple: there were standing orders to crush any disruption or display of resistance.

The punishment meted out to Jesus is telling. Crucifixion in the ancient Roman world was a punishment aimed mostly at rebellious slaves and those who threatened the legitimacy of the ruling order. And, to his eternal credit, Jesus really was and is a threat to the domination system of his and of every era.

Crucifixion at that time was as much spectacle as punishment, a prime example of the theater of empire and cruelty. Crucifixions took place in public places, on highways, prominent hillsides, or at heavily traveled crossroads. The message was simple: cross the empire and you die this way.

Many victims of this punishment were never even properly buried; instead, their bodies remained tied to the cross long after death as an example to others why might try to challenge the social order. This was, in the minds of many, a punishment worse than death.

What happened after the crucifixion of Jesus is beyond the scope of this post. Everyone must choose his or her own interpretation. My own best answer is to echo what was told to the disciples in the gospels when they came to anoint Jesus' body on the Sunday morning after his death: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He has gone before you..."

IF SPIDERS REALLY CREEP YOU OUT, don't read this.

HEALTH CARE CRISIS. This Charleston Gazette op-ed from John Sweeney and Kenney Perdue of the national and state AFLCIO, respectively, is about the need to expand health coverage to more Americans.

SUFFER THE CHILDREN, AGAIN. From the same source, here's a good op-ed by Renate Pore about the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TURN OF A PHRASE

Icon of the Archangel Michael.

This week on Goat Rope, El Cabrero is responding to a challenge from a reader to write about the five things I admire most about Jesus. The hardest part was figuring out where to start.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The fourth thing I'm going to write about is Jesus' way with words. Official Goat Rope verdict: he had one. Big time. Whole libraries have been written on the sayings of Jesus and more could and will be written. I'm going to focus today on his awesome one liners.

My personal favorites include some of his comic visual images, like when he nailed hypocrites who made a show of religion while neglecting simple justice and compassion:

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

And speaking of camels, let's not forget this one:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God

.

How about these for cutting through the #$&%:

No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth, that will defile you.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

To save your life is to lose it; to lose your life is to save it.

Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Exalt yourself and you will be humbled; humble yourself and you will be exalted.

I could go on and on but I'm sure the Gentle Reader knows where to find more.

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS. In light of the new Census report on poverty, health coverage, and incomes, the American Friends Service Committee calls for new priorities:

Congress should redirect the $720 million a day the U.S. is spending on the Iraq war to programs that reduce poverty at home, urged the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responding to Census Bureau data released today.

“For $720 million, we could provide over 400,000 children with health care, or over a million children with free school lunches,” notes Joyce Miller, the American Friends Service Committee assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. “America’s shameful poverty rate should lead everyone to ask ourselves how we want to spend our tax dollars — on war or on education, health care, job training, affordable housing, and the like.”

CONSIDER THE LILIES. Did you ever want your own Spiderman suit? As in a real one? A group of Italian scientists say nanotechnology could make it happen.

MORE ON THE CAMEL/NEEDLE'S EYE THING. CEOs of major U.S. companies made more in a day than the average worker in a year.

MORE ON THE WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS THING. Here's an interesting essay by David Korten on rethinking the meaning of wealth in terms of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about five things I most admire about Jesus. This is the third installation. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

The third thing I'm going to highlight is what could be called Jesus' program. He called it the Kingdom (Greek: basileia) of God. As the Gospel of Mark puts it,

Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Then as now, there was all kinds of debate on what the term meant. For John the Baptist and many others before and after, it was God's coming apocalyptic judgment of the world, a cataclysmic divine intervention in history. It seems that for Jesus, the Kingdom had a present as well as future aspect. At least in part, it was something not just to wait for but to do. The Kingdom is a verb...

As John Dominic Crossan wrote,

In the beginning was the performance; not the word alone, not the deed alone, but both, each indelibly marked with the other forever.

For Jesus, the Kingdom meant the rule of the God of justice and compassion. It was the opposite of the kingdom or empire of men which was based on state violence, political oppression, economic exploitation, and religiously sanctioned injustice.

In the reign of God, the poor were blessed and the rich were cursed (Luke, ch. 6); the first were last and the last were first; women, children, the unclean, the sick, the outcasts and sinners were welcome, while the self-righteous were self-excluded. Equality replaced hierarchy and service/mutual aid replaced domination.

Jesus taught a subversive wisdom that turned the world upside down. But it wasn't all teaching. Jesus and his followers, together and in pairs, would go from village to village in Galilee proclaiming and enacting the kingdom.

What did it look like? People ate together, sharing whatever they had. The hungry were fed. The sick, who were often considered to be ritually unclean and isolated, were healed. Whatever that meant physically, it meant they were once again included in the life of the community. Those believed to be possessed with evil spirits were exorcised and restored to mental health.

As Marcus Borg puts it,

...the kingdom of God referred to what life would be like on earth if God were king and the kingdoms of the world, the domination systems of the world, were not.

And it involved acting as if that were already the case.

Obviously, this could be dangerous even if we didn't know the rest of the story. It would be dangerous today. Jesus warned his disciples, "If you follow me, you carry a cross."

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING FOR WHAT IS RIGHT. Here's a piece on the right to organize by economist Dean Baker, who recently visited El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR. There actually was a little in WV. When the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty, income, and health coverage, it reported that the poverty rate here dropped. El Cabrero is still going through the data but it looks like poverty fell in WV at more than twice the rate than it did for the nation as a whole--.7 percent compared with .3 percent.

We're still very poor compared to the rest of the country and have lots of problems and work to do, but ingratitude is a sin. We just need to build on this progress in the future. And this is another reminder that the Chicken Littles of WV, who have made a business of saying that everything is all bad here all the time, are off. We are the Little Engine that Could.

COUNT THE COST. But when you look at what Census figures say about the nation as a whole, it's easy to see we have major problems. The slight drop in poverty at the national level still leaves us below where we were in 2001. There was a slight increase in median household income, although wages of year round individual workers actually declined. The big news is the jump in the number and percentage of the uninsured, which went up 5 percent to 47 million Americans or 12.3 percent. The number of uninsured children went up from 8 to 8.7 million or from 10. to 11.7 percent of all children.

Here's a summary statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And by the way, the $720 million we are spending (or will spend) every day of the Iraq war would go a long way towards dealing with some of these problems.

WOE UNTO YOU in the Bush administration who want to make it harder for children to receive coverage from the Children's Health Insurance Program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TRI TRI AGAIN

Caption: The swimming is the hardest part.

In a little less than a week, El Cabrero is going to try something stupid. You may well ask, so what else is new? Let me be more specific.

Next Sunday, I'm planning on trying to finish a triathlon, a questionable action under any circumstances, with a (literally) broken heart. How broken? Let me put it this way: when I read an article about Dick Cheney a while back, I learned his heart (or functional equivalent) had an ejection fraction of 35%, which is 5% better than mine.

One of the symptoms for my condition is "sudden cardiac death," which sounds like it could be serious under certain conditions. Earlier this year, I got a shock box installed, which may come in handy when cars need a jump start.

If I had a different heart, I'd use it, but as Donald Rumsfeld, mad poet of destruction, once said, "You have to go to war with the army you've got."

The fact that I wound up with this condition shows that the universe has a sense of humor. I've always been physically active, haven't smoked in years, am not obese, and only drink as much alcohol as is absolutely necessary.

In the three years before I had bypass surgery in 2004, I'd done two marathons, three triathlons, three Charleston Distance Runs (15 milers), two half-marathons, and several smaller races.

Like Dylan said, "They'll stone you when you're trying to be so good."

Paradoxically, though, finding out my heart was almost totally blocked made me feel a lot better. I kept wondering why I was getting slower and slower. The news did wonders for my self esteem. After all, anyone can finish an endurance event with a functioning heart, but it takes a real man (or an idiot) to do it with a crappy one.

NEW NOTES. One blog that is always thought provoking is Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree. Here's the latest.

OTHER VOICES. An interesting development over the last year or so has been the emergence of evangelical voices that have broken with the religious right on issues such as poverty and climate change. This latest example is even more surprising.

STICKING TO THE RELIGION THEME, here's an op-ed on the subject from yesterday's Sunday Gazette-Mail by Perry Mann in which he suggests that churches should do more to deal with the problems of this world.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GRACEFULLY STRUCK, PLUS MINE SAFETY AND WORKERS' RIGHTS

El Cabrero has been on a theological jag this week, with a special focus on the work of the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

To recap briefly, Tillich had a way of bringing new meaning to old religious terms that have accumulated a lot of baggage over the centuries (without sacrificing the old meanings). Yesterday's post looked at his ideas of sin and grace as discussed in his sermon "You are accepted" from the book The Shaking of the Foundations.

For him, sin is a state before it is an act. Specifically, it is a state of separation which is the fate of all people. It is something that inevitably happens to us but also something to which we contribute by our own actions. By separation, he meant our alienation or estrangement from other people, from nature, from ourselves, and from the Ground of Being (which many folks call "God").

This would also apply to

the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other,and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened.

But if sin or separation is a pervasive reality, it isn't the only one. There is also the reality that can sometimes be experienced when separation is overcome. His word for that is grace:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.

In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. We experience the grace of understanding each other's words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation. We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. We experience the grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between man and nature. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belong to life.

And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self- complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life. We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say "yes" to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.

Official Goat Rope verdict on Tillich: dude was pretty good. Too bad he didn't know how to break up his paragraphs...

WAY TO GO, JOE! Thanks and congratulations to WV Governor Joe Manchin for signing on to a letter to the U.S. Senate in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. This bill, which passed the House this spring, would allow workers to join unions by signing cards authorizing representation. It would also increase penalties for employers who illegally attempt to punish or intimidate workers trying to organize. The letter is here.

A LITTLE WIN FOR MINE SAFETY. From today's Gazette,

A Boone County man won a $2 million jury verdict in a wrongful termination lawsuit against a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary Thursday.

Rocky Allen Burns, 55, of Madison, sued Independence Coal Co. in May 2006, alleging that his firing in October 2005 was the result of his reporting safety problems at the Justice No. 1 mine to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

There's more here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SIN AND GRACE, FIRE, COAL, AND CATS

Caption: This man suffers from the sin of vanity. He's not very graceful either.

Welcome to Goat Rope. El Cabrero is on a theological tear this week, with a special focus on the great 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. You will also find items about current events here as well. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

Hamlet has still got to be my favorite Shakespeare play. There are so many nuggets to mine in that rich seam. One of my favorites has to do with the theme of sin and grace.

When the troupe of players arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet asks Polonius, who is kind of a dork, to see to their hospitality. Here's the clip:

LORD POLONIUS My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

In other words, if we all got what we deserved, we'd be in deep doo-doo (that would be the consequence of sin). Grace involves the hope that we might get off a little easier.

The ideas of both sin and grace have built up a lot of baggage over the years and have often been trivialized. Tillich had some interesting ideas about them. This is from his sermon "You are accepted":

There are few words more strange to most of us than "sin" and "grace". They are strange, just because they are so well-known. During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced... But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence...

I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word "sin", but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word "sin", "separation" . Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder". In any case, sin is separation.... And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being.... We know that the fate of separation is not merely a natural event like a flash of sudden lightning, but that it is an experience in which we actively participate, in which our whole personality is involved, and that, as fate, it is also guilt.... It is this which is the state of our entire existence, from its very beginning to its very end.... Existence is separation! Before sin is an act, it is a state.

We can say the same things about grace. For sin and grace are bound to each other. We do not even have a knowledge of sin unless we have already experienced the unity of life, which is grace. And conversely, we could not grasp the meaning of grace without having experienced the separation of life, which is sin. Grace is just as difficult to describe as sin... In grace something is overcome; grace occurs in spite of something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage. There is something triumphant in the word grace : in spite of the abounding of sin grace abounds much more.

(Note: if you think those paragraphs were long, you should have seen them before I cut them. Good thing he didn't write plays, huh? That would have been a sin.)

FIGHTING FIRE. Here's to the memory of nine South Carolina IAFF union firefighters who died in the line of duty this week.

ON A CHEERIER NOTE, here's a priceless WV cat rescue item fresh from the headlines:

PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (AP) - It took two fire trucks, five firefighters, several animal rescuers and about 250 gallons of water to rescue a kitten that refused to come out of a West Virginia storm sewer drain.

COAL. The Natural Resource Council has recommended increasing funding for coal research and devoting more of it to studying its environmental impact and worker safety, according to this Gazette item by Ken Ward.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED