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. 

 

Bible yes, Bible bill no

My late mother was something of a militant member of the Episcopal Church ... to the extent that’s even possible.

She wasn’t a literalist and was tolerant of people with different faiths or none at all, but she was fierce in her religious affiliation. In fact, that’s probably the main reason she married my father, who was the son of the first priest at St. Andrew’s in Oak Hill.

The marriage was kind of a bust, which indicates that this might not be the best criterion for mate selection.

Among the things that resulted from that union was my existence and the experience of being dragged to church, usually involuntarily, by my mother.

(There’s a vicious rumor that Episcopalians never read the Bible, one which I must now quash: we sometimes do, just in case we make it to “Jeopardy!”)

But seriously, getting brought up in that kind of environment is kind of like being marinated in Bible sauce. Most Episcopalians aren’t fundamentalist and don’t read the Bible as a science book or guide to criminal justice when it comes to stoning people to death for minor offenses, but the book comes with the territory.

A typical service consists of readings from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, a psalm, a reading from a New Testament epistle and a passage from the gospels. Most of the language of The Book of Common Prayer — which is one of the places the English language goes to show off — is biblical.

If you get dragged there enough, it just kind of seeps in, whether you want it to or not.

I noticed growing up that a lot of people I knew seemed to worship the Bible as if it was a divinity but had pretty vague ideas of what was actually in it.

This reminds me of the Bible story in Acts, where St. Paul chides the Athenians for worshiping “a god unknown.”

Eventually, I began reading it voluntarily, regardless of where I was in terms of religious belief. I’ve read it during the times I’ve been observant and during the times it seemed like the universe was random and purposeless. But I always read it.

The stories, sayings and metaphors stuck. I find myself using them all the time (almost as much as references to Bob Dylan lyrics or lines from “The Big Lebowski,” not that I’m suggesting equivalency). They have influenced my life to a great degree.

Biblical literacy is a key to understanding our culture and traditions. The book, or rather books, is/are treasure troves of words and images.

It’s impossible to understand the great speeches or writings of our tradition without a basic knowledge of it, from William Shakespeare to Abraham Lincoln to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Still, I have problems with the recently passed legislation that puts biblical instruction in public schools. It still must be signed into law by Gov. Jim Justice.

To state the obvious, not all students are Christian. But it goes beyond that. The interpretations likely to be presented will probably reflect only a pretty thin slice of diverse biblical traditions.

It’s likely to be tilted toward a nationalistic, white, Protestant, evangelical interpretation. There probably won’t be a lot of discussion of the more ancient biblical interpretations from Coptic, Orthodox or Catholic Christianity. I doubt there will be a lot of the freedom and justice-loving interpretations from African American church traditions or those from Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa or the island nations. There probably won’t be a lot of biblical commentary from the Talmud or Mishnah of Judaism.

And it’s a safe bet that classes won’t resemble those in nonsectarian universities, where the Bible is treated the same as any ancient document, with comparisons with contemporary texts, the historical record, anthropological research, archaeology, textual criticism, etc.

In fairness, it might be good if there was a space for students to learn, without recruitment, about the great texts of world religions.

My life has been enriched not just by the Bible, but by other traditions as well.

I’ve learned much about tradition, education and social order from the Analects of Confucius; about following nature from the Tao Te Ching; about compassion and mindfulness from Buddhist sutras; about the vast nature of divinity from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita; about mercy and justice from the extra-biblical teachings of rabbinical Judaism and the Islamic tradition; etc.

Learning about other faiths takes nothing away from one’s own.

Alas, that was the road not taken.

If I may echo ideas often expressed by my conservative friends (I actually have some), some things should be left to the private sector. This includes religious instruction.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that religions of all kinds flourish without state support in the U.S., while they have declined in industrially advanced nations with established churches.

While it’s good when we bring the values of our beliefs to the public sphere, the marriage of religion and government doesn’t usually result in better government. It results in bad religion.

All of which is to suggest that, if we’re not going to expose students to the varieties of religious experiences, we should leave religious instruction to families and communities.

Or just let ’em get it the old-fashioned way, by being dragged against their will to religious services by their elders.

It worked for me.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Here we go again

(The "war on Christmas" hissy fit raised its head in Charleston recently. This prompted me to dust off an op-ed that I wrote on this way back in 2005 and bring it up...or down...to date. This one ran in the Gazette-Mail this week.)

I usually enjoy holiday customs and rituals, especially those sanctioned by age and tradition.

Some of the newer ones, however, get on my last nerve. One such is the recent annual ritual of “war on Christmas” outrage, a feeding frenzy of pretended persecution and pseudo-martyrdom heralded not by the singing of angels but by ... some other kind of sound.

The goal is apparently to summon the faithful to a hissy fit over things like saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” This apparently is seen to be the latter-day equivalent of being fed to the lions in the Roman coliseum.

As a practicing, although not entirely successful, Christian who celebrates Christmas, this seems bizarre to me. I don’t care how I’m greeted at that season, having learned as a child that it’s rude to get angry when someone wishes you well, however they express it.

But there is more to this than bad manners.

At a moral level, it’s pretty perverse when a person claiming to be a follower of Jesus walks into a big-box store containing products made by women and children in miserable sweatshops, is waited on by a person who doesn’t earn a living wage or have health insurance or vacation or paid sick days, and manages to get mad only if the worker says something other than “Merry Christmas.”

This is the kind of thing the real Jesus (remember him?) called “straining at gnats and swallowing camels.” In fact, I don’t think any of the Gospels quote Jesus as saying “Thou shalt get royally ticked off if the occasion of my birth is not marked by everyone exactly according to your liking.”

Maybe I missed that part.

At a religious level, there is something pretty blasphemous about thinking that the current annual orgy of materialism, greed, commercialism and over-consumption in a world where billions of people are desperately poor has a whole lot to do with the actual person or birth of Jesus.

As I recall, when Jesus himself was exposed to the commercialization of sacred things in the temple, he started overturning tables and raising a ruckus.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was probably onto something when he said that true impiety consisted of “attributing to the gods the ideas of the crowd.”

At a semantic level, there also seems to be some confusion about the definition of persecution. Jesus was literally persecuted to death. When he warned his followers to expect the same and told them to bless and pray for their persecutors, he probably didn’t have the greeting “happy holidays” or the name of a parade in mind.

Maybe a real example would help clear things up. In 1980, three American nuns and a church worker went to El Salvador to stand with oppressed people. They did this because they took Jesus’ teachings about justice for the poor seriously.

They were kidnapped by the Salvadoran National Guard and were raped, tortured, shot and buried in an unmarked grave precisely for being faithful to the Gospel.

That was persecution.

Equating generic holiday expressions with persecution is an insult to thousands of authentic Christian martyrs, from the stoning of Stephen in the Book of Acts to the present day.

At the historical level, no one knows when Jesus was born, although most scholars would put their money on any date but Dec. 25.

The earliest church didn’t mark Christmas. In fact, in the New Testament epistle to the Galatians, Paul criticizes that congregation for observing “days, months, seasons, and years.”

By the year 200, the church father Clement of Alexandria found that the people who tried to mark the exact day were “overly curious.” Early dates from around that period set the birth in the spring or early summer.

The Dec. 25 date didn’t catch on in the Western church until the 4th century of the Christian era. This time of year was already celebrated in pagan customs honoring Saturn, Mithras, and the return of the sun after the winter solstice.

A lot of other Christmas customs, including trees, Yule logs, mistletoe and the exchange of gifts were adapted from Mediterranean, Germanic or Celtic paganism. In other words, there are a lot of reasons for the things people do that season.

Still, I think the eventual decision of the ancient church to fill the calendar with sacred days and seasons marking key events in the life of Jesus, the apostles and the saints was a wise one, even if the days don’t match up exactly or literally.

Maybe one reason some people unfamiliar with that tradition get so wired about Christmas is that they have an impoverished sense of the sacred year. Making do just on Christmas and Easter from this perspective is kind of like trying to play cards with just two in the deck.

When I buy gas on Jan. 1, for example, I don’t get worked up if the person says “Happy New Year” instead of “Happy Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord.” I don’t tell the people I’m taking my business elsewhere if they don’t say “Happy Epiphany” on Jan. 6.

It’s even OK if folks don’t wish me a happy Nativity of John the Baptist on June 24 or a pleasant Feast of St. James the Greater on July 25.

Meanwhile, I’m already starting my wish list for next Christmas. I’m asking St. Nicholas, the 4th century bishop of Myra who somehow got morphed into Santa Claus, to help the war-on-Christmas crew find something better to do next holiday season.

Maybe something Jesusy for a change.

Revisiting Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign 50 years later

Fifty years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies made some ambitious plans. They hoped to bring poor people together across racial and other social divides to call for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

They hoped that a multi-racial Poor People’s Campaign would awaken the conscience of the nation and spark a mass movement to end poverty, systemic racism and the war economy.

The campaign came to pass but the desired results obviously did not. I can’t help but wonder what might have been different had Dr. King not been assassinated on April 4, 1968. I don’t believe that history is made by a few heroic figures, but it seems clear that individuals can make a huge difference.

In any case, half a century later we have unprecedented levels of economic inequality and a political system dominated by the very wealthy who seem intent on widening the gap. More people in America live in or near poverty now than in 1968.

Today, in the wake of passing gigantic $1.9 trillion in tax cuts that benefit primarily wealthy people and corporations, Congress is contemplating drastic cuts and restrictions in food assistance to vulnerable Americans as the mammoth Farm Bill comes up for reconsideration.

Slashing spending on food assistance by billions and cutting off basic help to millions won’t promote work, although it is likely to exert a downward pressure on wages for working Americans.

Other programs — like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, student aid — that help millions of Americans and tens of thousands of West Virginians are also being targeted at a time when the wealthiest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 99.

This is clearly a moral issue, one that is all too often ignored by those preaching restrictive versions of religion and myopic views of morality.

Ignoring issues of social justice goes against the grain of the biblical religion so many profess. The prophet Isaiah, honored alike by Jews, Christians and Muslims, couldn’t be any clearer:

“Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
and robbing the fatherless.
What will you do on the day of reckoning,
when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your riches?” (Isaiah 10:1-3)

Around the country, there is a growing awareness of the need to revisit the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign in our new context and to issue a national call to moral revival.

In the words of the Rev. William Barber and the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the new campaign, “There needs to be a new moral discourse in this nation — one that says being poor is not a sin but systemic poverty is.”

(This ran as an op-ed in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

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.

How I survived year one of the Cheeto Apocalypse (although there are a few days left)

(2017 would have gone much better if Arpad the Magnificent, pictured above, was still around)

Well, year one of America's latest dark journey is about to end. I can't say I'll miss it much.

Greed and hatred triumphant. Fascism and white supremacy's moment in the sun. Sealing the deal on oligarchy. Still there were moments.

In this post, I want to write a bit about how I got through it. I'm interested in your ideas as well. After all, the dark journey isn't anywhere near over yet. So, in no particular order, here goes:

1. Obviously, certain people and animals helped, starting with La Cabrera my partner.
Without her there wouldn't even be goats to name and exploit in this blog. Then there are friends, family (literal and metaphorical) and comrades, with some overlap there. I've been blessed to have a great group of people to work and talk **** with. It's also been a pretty good year for gallows humor.

2. Spy novels. A while back I listened to a lecture series on the history of espionage. The lecturer mentioned some notable fiction on this subject, including the novels of Alan Furst, which are all set in the 1930s and 40s and deal with resistance to the Nazis, which for some unknown reason seemed to fit my mood. I devoured all 14 one after another. He needs to get busy again. (Now I'm on John LeCarre, although I read him more for nostalgia about the good old days of the Cold War, which may not have been what the author was going for.)

3. Hoopla. My local public library, which hasn't been privatized and auctioned off just yet, has this feature by which you can download books (audio and electronic), music, and videos to smartphones and other devices. I go through tons of audiobooks while driving, running and doing tasks that don't take a lot of thought (my favorite kind). With CD books, I was always at risk of misplacing and losing discs, which was a pain. Hoopla changed all that. Hoopla also helped me take a...

4. Wisdom bath. With Hoopla's help I was able to listen to unabridged recordings of Herodotus' The Histories, Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, and Plutarch's Lives. I'd read them all before at least once, but it was nice to pound them down in order. Herodotus's story of the Greco-Persian War, heavy on wonders and tall tales, is a moral study of the dangers of hubris. Plutarch has been mined for 2000 years for lessons and inspiration. His Lives were also the source of several of Shakespeare's plays. Thucydides' no-nonsense account of how a great democracy went off the rails was like a warning.

5. The Resistance. I couldn't believe the size of the Women's March in Washington, in Charleston and around the country--or the many groups springing up around WV and elsewhere which are determined to fight back.

I had the privilege to travel around the state to meet and work with "new" and "old" groups of people committed to social justice from Huntington to Concord to Lewisburg to Parkersburg to Wheeling to Buckhannon to Morgantown to  Berkeley Springs to Charles Town, with plenty of stops in between. To use the language of spy novels (see #1) this meant many more assets to work with.

7. The fights. There were several in the legislature, a few of which were successful. Much of the year was devoted to trying to preserve recent gains in health coverage, particularly Medicaid expansion, which brought coverage to around 175,000 working West Virginians. At first it looked like flat-out ACA repeal was a slam dunk but that didn't happen, thanks to the hard work of people all over WV and the nation. Then there was the #taxscam tax reform fight, which didn't go as well. More fights, starting with CHIP reauthorization, are on their way. It may not have done any good, but I was also lucky enough to have some soapboxes to rant from in the form of newspapers, radio and such.

8. Physical activity. No marathon this year (but watch out, 2018!) but there were plenty of foot miles slogged, not to mention martial arts, yoga and such. I'm especially grateful to my Okinawan karate lineage, which includes legends like Funakoshi, Itosu, Kyan, Matsumura and Sakugawa.

9. Coffee and box wine, for obvious reasons and at different times of day. Oh yeah, and some attendance of Episcopal church services.

10. Myths, stories and ancient teachings. The Buddha on impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering. The Bhagavad Gita on following one's path or dharma: "It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's." The Norse idea of Ragnarok, a final battle doomed to fail but still worth fighting. Dante's allegory of the need for both human effort and divine grace.

Then there's Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe," an unexpected turn of events that brings good news when all seems hopeless. One of those would be nice right about now. Who knows--we might even get one in the new year.

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.

Do you feel lucky today?

I’ve been musing lately about the role of luck in human affairs. By luck, I mean things that affect us for good or ill that we can’t anticipate or control. We go through our lives bouncing between automatic pilot and conscious planning, but even when we try to leave nothing to chance, the universe gets a vote.

Even when things work according to plan, I’d say we were lucky. Think of all the things that could have gone wrong but didn’t.

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes sums it up: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.”

Similarly, I found this quote by American philosopher John Dewey:

“No one knows what a year or even a day may bring forth, the healthy become ill; the rich poor; the mighty are cast down, fame changes to obloquy. Men live at the mercy of forces they cannot control. Belief in fortune and luck, good and evil, is one of the most widespread and persistent of human beliefs. Chance has been deified by many peoples. Fate has been set up as an overlord to whom even the Gods must bow. Belief in a Goddess of Luck is in ill repute among pious folk but their belief in providence is a tribute to the fact no individual controls his own destiny.”

A lot of our lives is conditioned by things we have no control over — the genetic dice our parents rolled when we were conceived, or their bank accounts and zip codes at the time.

I’ve also been struck by the idea of “moral luck” as developed by philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. It works something like this: We praise or blame people for actions, as if everything was up to the individual. But in real life, what people do or don’t is often as much a matter of time and chance as choice.

Consider a soldier who commits atrocities in a war. Would he or she have done the same without war? Or what if people who did evil in a dictatorship were born in a different country and/or under a different system?

Consider a car accident. Most of us have zoned out at a stop sign or neglected to obey a speed limit. Driver X runs a light and nothing happens, but with Driver Y innocent people are killed. Both are blameworthy for not paying attention, but the results are vastly different. We tend to blame one more, but the actions were the same. The main difference is luck.

Looking back at my life, the fact that I didn’t get into more serious trouble had more to do with luck than anything. Virtue is often a matter of chance and opportunity.

It’s also fascinating how different religions have incorporated luck and apparent randomness into their beliefs and practices.

In the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament, divination was performed with dice- or coin-like urim and thummin to determine the will of God. These were objects connected with the breastplate of the high priest. In the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, the 11 remaining disciples cast lots to see who would be selected to fill the void left by Judas.

In Chinese tradition, people threw yarrow stalks (or nowadays, flip coins) to consult the I Ching, an ancient book of oracles. Many peoples have attempted to read signs from things like the flight of birds or the entrails of sacrificial animals. Cards have been used for similar purposes. Even people who make fun of superstition sometimes flip a coin to make a decision.

Some traditions even make chance or luck divine, as in the Greek goddess Tyche, who morphed into the longer-lived Roman goddess Fortuna. Fortuna has been described as the one pagan goddess to survive into the Christian era.

Her main symbol is the famous wheel, which gave us the TV game show of the same name. The fact that this image has lasted so long in popular culture speaks of its power. As you know if you’ve ridden a Ferris wheel, sometimes you’re up and sometimes down. As the ancient Roman writer Seneca said, “Whatever Fortune has raised on high, she lifts but to bring low.”

Fortuna’s wheel is a good image to recall as we navigate life’s changes. If things are going good, don’t assume they always will be. If things are bad, this too can change. Nobody owns Fortuna.

One interesting effort to grapple with this is the situation of the Roman patrician Boethius (circa 480-525), who held high office between the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages. Rome was under the power of the Ostrogoth. Boethius fell afoul of King Theodoric, was stripped of wealth and position, imprisoned and sentenced to be executed in a pretty nasty way.

There he composed a classic work, “The Consolation of Philosophy,” in which Lady Philosophy visits and instructs him so he can face death with composure. While that might sound contrived, his situation was all too real.

His basic point is that it’s the nature of Fortune to change. Those who put themselves in her power by basing happiness on things they can’t control are helpless when things change — as they will.

Fortuna says: “Here is the source of my power, the game I always play: I spin my wheel and find pleasure in raising the low to a high place and lowering those who were on top. Go up, if you like, but only on condition that you will not feel abused when my sport requires your fall.”

As powerful as she is, however, she can’t dictate how we respond to her. There’s an old-wisdom tradition that says while we can’t control events, we can control our responses to them and thus acquire a degree of independence from fortune. Alas, that’s easier said than done.


“Dante’s Inferno” portrays Fortuna as God’s agent in bringing change to the world: “… he ordained a general minister and leader/who would transfer from time to time the empty goods from one people to another, from one family to another, beyond any human wisdom’s power to prevent.”

Though we may curse her, “she is blessed in herself and does not listen … she gladly turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness.”

Love Fortuna or hate her, the bottom line is we’re all subject — to some degree — to forces beyond our control, whether we see these as inscrutable providence or random chance. In that case, maybe we should be a little easier on each other.

In any case, good luck! We’ll need it.

(This op-ed of mine ran in Sunday's Gazette-Mail)

More Orwellian language

The latest Front Porch podcast is about the misnamed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, now under consideration in the WV legislature. I thought this was going to be a good one, but it has been severely cut, with some of the best parts taken out. Editors...

In lieu of a post

The WV legislature ended (thank God) Saturday at midnight. I've been thinking about all that for the last 60 days and could use a break. In lieu of a real blog post, here's an interesting take at the role of religion in American life and how it's been manipulated.

Sorry for slow posting lately. Between internet troubles, travels and work, it was hard to do.

Apropos of nothing...

...the following quote from G.K. Chesterton came to mind today:

 “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

SPEAKING OF JOKES, it looks like the WV Board of Education is going to dig itself in deeper after its rather embarrassing antics on climate change. Of course, you actually gain points for digging yourself in deeper on this issue here. It proves your loyalty to the ruling class and the great god coal, which is way more important than anything else.

OH GOOD.  On day one, congressional Republicans starting going after Social Security.

Charts and maps

Here's an interesting link from the Economic Policy Institute about the 13 most important charts of 2013. And here's a look at religion in the US through several maps. Enjoy!

The glorious imaginary library of *******

One of the weirdest writers I've ever read is the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. His work is very surrealistic. One frequent quote about it is that it embraces "the character of unreality in all literature." The words supernatural realism come to mind, minus the realism.

For example, in a one-paragraph short story, he tells of an empire where the art of map-making was so precise that one map of the empire was the exact same size as the empire itself and "coincided point for point with it."

Anyway, out of the blue I was struck by a story idea right up his alley, one that wouldn't be much longer than a paragraph itself. It would be about an imaginary library so fantastic that people come from all over the world to admire it. I must have been channeling Borges' ghost. Alas, I don't think I have what it takes to write it.

Maybe I'll read it someday. In that imaginary library.

THE POLITICS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM. This could be interesting to watch.

OF APES AND ANGELS. Here's the latest from primatologist Frans De Waal about evolution, apes, ethics and religion.

ANIMALS THAT OUGHT TO BE. Here's a whimsical look at composite critters we wish really existed. There are probably books about all of them in that glorious imaginary library.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

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.

A newborn bard of the Holy Ghost

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose impact on 19th century American culture was pretty huge. I have a love/hate relationship with old Ralph. Some of his writings are really inspiring, others are totally unintelligible to me, while still others seem kind of idiotic.

At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was pretty controversial in its time (and much of which seems to lean to the loopy side to me).

One reason for this was his advice to would-be clergy to disregard the dogmas and rituals of the past and trust only in their own direct experience.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
 

 I suppose prattle like this sounds inspiring to people with an overly exalted conception of their own internal hiccups, but the asylums and alleys of the world are full of sad and misguided souls who consider themselves to be the newborn bards of the Holy Ghost. It's one thing to oppose unthinking dogmatism but it's another to disregard tradition altogether and to mistake our internal chatter as the voice of God. The capacity for self doubt is a virtue, but the tendency to self-deification is a delusion.

WRONG TURN. Here's a good Gazette editorial on the tragic waste of the Iraq war.

MORAL ANIMALS? Maybe.

TALE OF THE WHALE. Here's a great feature on Melville's Leviathan and its evolution.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A wart and a wen

This time of year is the political equivalent of deer season in West Virginia. During this busy time, this blog has been focusing on the life and work of 19th century American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was a bit over the top for his initial audience.

To tell the truth, parts of it are over the top for me. Although I am no pillar of ecclesiastical conformity, I do have a moments of orthodoxy and some of Emerson's glib delusions of spiritual grandeur seem pretty loopy to me.

One such idea that I have always had trouble with is the idea that God dwells within us. Emerson loved that kind of thing, as expressed in statements like this one:

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

 To which I am tempted to reply, we are warts and wens, Ralph. Suck it up.

UNIONS FOR THE ARTSY? Why not?

NEANDERTHALS AND US. Apparently Neanderthal brains were more about things like vision than social networking. I guess this means they weren't big Facebook users.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This high chant from the poet's lips

This is a busy season for yours truly, so rather than scrounge daily for random topics I've been pondering the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Right now, the focus is on his controversial 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which so antagonized his pious Unitarian listeners (strange as it may seem, there were pious Unitarians in those days) that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

What got him into hot water were comments like these:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

(Actually, I think he was about as far from what the historical Jesus actually thought or said as his orthodox opponents. Jesus was no doubt many things in his earthy life, but poetic dreamyTranscendentalist probably wasn't one of them.)

Emerson then went on to argue that historical Christianity was based on a huge distortion:

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
 

That pretty much did it, even for Unitarians.

LOOKING BACK. Here's another take on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war.

COOL NEWLY DISCOVERED LIZARDS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

 

The doors of the temple stand open

The theme here these day is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the focus at the moment is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which stirred up so much controversy that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

It would be one thing to tick off a bunch of foaming fundamentalists with a little free ranging thought, but Ralph even managed to alienate relatively laid back Unitarians, who were more closely aligned with traditional Christianity then than now.

One thing that got him in trouble was his characteristic assertion that truth is not something once received and thereafter believed but rather something each soul must directly intuit. He believed that the same sources that inspired Jesus and other prophets and seers can inspire us today if we only let it.

If it sounds like he'd been hanging around with and reading about Quakers, he was. He was also learning or intuiting as much as he could about the religious traditions of Asia--so much so that the sounds Buddhist and even Zenlike in his insistence that every person must directly experience insight rather than merely accept some religious tradition:

...the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

That's kind of how a 19th century American might express the Buddha's advice to "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." It also is reminiscent of the teachings often attributed to the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, who was believed to have spoken of

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Such ideas are pretty commonplace now. You can find some reference to them in almost any bookstore and in popular culture. But they were a bit over the top back then. They'd still upset quite a few people today.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO WOULDN'T LIKE EMERSON, here's an article about the fortunes of fundamentalism in the US and around the world.

WHAT WOULD FREUD SAY? WV legislators have gone gun crazy lately. Would Sigmund say it was castration anxiety or are they just trying to compensate for something?

CAN I HAVE ONE? This NRP story about an Indonesian zoo breeding Komodo dragons has me all excited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The big flip flop

This blog is gearing up for a major series looking at the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (along with the usual links and comments about current events). But to understand Emerson's world it is probably important to understand a huge flip-flop that happened in this country's religious history between the 1600s and the 1800s, the effects of which are still with us today.

Here's what I mean. If one had to generalize today about which parts of the good old USA are most prone to theological rabies, the South would win hands down.

It didn't used to be that way. I refer the interested reader to the 1997 book Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt by Christine Leigh Heyrman.

Short version: in the late 1600s and for much of the 1700s, New England rather than the South was the region of religious conservatism and theocracy. Think Salem witch trials and guilt ridden Puritans. In much of the South, the dominant religious was a kind of lax Anglicanism (to which this author subscribes). Alas, the Anglican church in American suffered much during the Revolution, since clergy were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the British monarch. The loss of Anglican clergy left the field open to traveling Baptist and Methodist revivalists.

Too bad, I say, but that's just me.

The weird thing is that by the 1830s or so, much of New England Puritanism had morphed into a fairly laid back Unitarianism, while the South became a bastion of not only political and racial but also religious conservatism and dogmatism.

It was in that Unitarian milieu in New England that blossomed from the embers of Calvinism that Emerson first began his career. Ironically, he was too radical in his vision even for the Unitarians, a feat which would be hard to replicate today.

THE RESOURCE CURSE is discussed here.

STATE OF DENIAL: right here in WV.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED