Seditious Faith

The Things We Teach Our Children

"Some people never grow up." As often as we hear that repeated, I doubt that most people give it any real thought. When we watch TV shows like "Bert the Conqueror" we are amused—to some degree or other—at the ways in which people don't grow up, but again, we merely assume that it's just for our amusement. After all, a little fun is good for us, isn't it?

Yes, fun is a part of having complex human feelings in a scary world. Without the "escape" of humor, for example, we'd all probably go nuts. But there's a sinister side to this, as well. It has less to do with the fact that we try to relive parts of our lives that were pleasant than it does with how we spent those times in the first place. Childhood is probably the most important part of that. In a very real sense, our world today is—and always has been—driven by our childhoods. Look around you. Especially, look around you at work. Our families, workplaces, and governments (not to mention religions) are run by adults who are really still acting as children, because they are still using the lessons learned as children by other: peers, elders, role models, hero figures, you name it. When you begin to study it, this aspect is actually pretty frightening. As children, we learn about honor and shame, about winning and losing, about good and bad, about "us and them", and a host of other things. We learn our prejudices there as well. We see movies with violence (and especially with violence as the proper means to address injustice), play violent games: playing games that enforce gender roles and expectations, and such as that. In Sunday School (or other such religious education settings) we also learn the stories that later make no sense, that are truly black-and-white, devoid of human nuance, that reinforce the belief in miracle over mystery (I've written about that earlier). We teach our children patriotism and that war can be "good," and that we (that is, those on "Our Side") have many enemies that are "bad."

There are, often, positive things that we teach our children, but it's vital to pay attention to the negative, divisive, judgmentalizing lessons as well. Patriotism and war are a good example. If you ask foot soldiers of WWII about their experiences, sometimes you find that the hopeful youth went off to wage war against a bunch of evil foreigners, only to find that childhood fantasies lasted minutes at most when fear and death became all too real. Some actually say that they aged many years in many minutes in the heat of battle. And yet we still speak of valor, honor, duty, and patriotism as though they mean the same things to us as adults as they do to little children. If we do actually grow up, we find our black and white world full of gray. If those in power want to influence us, they have to make things black-and-white again by supplying enemies and fostering distrust and hatred, just as we experienced as children. And, because we learned such things as children, we follow them. And, because they need to have power over us, the enemies are defined as the cause of many problems, and often to great effect. Our world sinks into the abyss just a little bit more… We are, it would seem, at the mercy of children wielding great power and influence. It is as though, now as adults, they are turning the world on its axis opposite to the direction it really must turn. What we learn as children helps it move backwards, toward the very things we know are wrong, counterproductive, and just plain evil.

But most of us know children, and we can teach them positive lessons that will, at the very least, I hope, confuse them, offering alternative views that might just take root over the years and begin to slow our backwards turning toward our own self-made doom. If we keep it up…and if we all try to take part in it, what we learn as children will not have to be what we escape "to" to avoid the problems of this world. We can live there all our lives just as happily…as children.

Miracle… or Mystery?

Easter has come and gone now…thankfully. It's a time of year when I get to spend a lot of time doing interesting—and sometimes wonderful—liturgical sorts of things. It always leaves all clergy exhausted. We're all glad it's over. But this year, I struggled a bit more than usual.

You see, I have begun to feel uneasy when someone tells me of a "miracle" that has happened to them or to someone they know. I mean, if miracles are real, then why are they so seemingly random? Why, in that case, is there so much suffering, punctuated randomly by "miracles?" Is it because God has a sense of humor that we don't understand, or if it's because of angels, then why are they so capricious? Why do people pray for a miracle to happen to one person, when so many others need them too?

Let me just say right here that, while I believe in our need to believe that our thoughts—and therefore our prayers—have some real meaning or power in this life, I do not actually believe in miracles.

But, then, having said that, let me point out that I am a big believer in mystery. You see, miracles are one-off events. They come from a source that can do these things and all we do is say thank you, accept the "miracle" and move on. If we want to, we can "celebrate" miracles, as do many religions. In order to do that we must relive the past, and retell the stories of the miracles. If the "miracles" were in the form of salvation—and they almost always are—then they saved our ancestors, and maybe they are the reason we are here to celebrate the miracles at all. But they are simply idols to our past. They teach us nothing, save the possible notion that a benevolent God smiled on our ancestors one day. And, it would seem, the really big miracles, the Charleton Heston sized miracles, are no longer on the menu for anyone. We are left with rituals that service the miracles of the past, as though they are idols to be worshiped. That is, of course, if we learn to accept them as merely…"miracles."

But let me offer things up differently. Because of the randomness of life, the almost infinite possibilities of nature, our limited acuity for perception, and the possibility that there actually are other potential sides or parts or facets to this universe that we can't (or won't admit to) seeing…because of things like that, the unexpected is always possible. Always. Even in the realm of what we consider—perhaps even scientifically—normal, there are always outliers, things that beat the odds but are still possible. People actually do recover from serious illness, even when the odds are stacked heavily against them. Once in a while, someone will survive a catastrophe that claims the life of many others. But for every one who survives a disaster or makes a completely unanticipated recovery from an illness death still waits. You see, these miracles may extend life, but they never cheat death. Death still wins…always. But what really is exciting about these occurrences is what we learn from them.

We never really get to "learn" anything from a miracle. Once it occurs we can be grateful and ritualize our celebration of it, but there's really nothing there to interact with, nothing to learn from. That's why it's so incredibly important to understand the importance of mystery. Once we treat an occurrence as a mystery we are allowed to ask questions about it, to interact with everything that surrounds it, to ponder all the hidden facts and meanings that are always part of it. Mysteries engage us—on personal and spiritual levels—in ways that mere miracles never can.

Easter is one of the very best examples. The "miracle" of Easter actually sets the whole story of Christianity up as a religious entity. But there is little of historical value to back it up, apart from what was written in scriptural texts (i.e., not historical) that themselves were written relying on a miracle to give them validity. People really "want to believe" in that miracle, perhaps because they were taught about it by people they look up to, perhaps because the Judeo-Christian ethic is such an important part of Western life. But let me give Easter a break for a moment. Just for a moment, let's say that "Nobody actually knows" what happened. What we do know is that whatever Jesus of Nazareth taught was somehow important enough that his followers overcame their abject fear of their own personal crucifixions to begin to pick up his work where he left off. Why? Well, it's been so long, and so much has happened in between, that we can never know. We are left with a mystery. And as a mystery, all of this is far more demanding, engaging, and compelling. Easter is a fantastic mystery…not a miracle. As such we get to allow it to "get under our skin," to teach us things about ourselves and whatever spiritual world we believe in. As a mystery, it demands that we study it—and ourselves—to look for clues, to try to figure it out, so to speak, even if that takes a lifetime. Easter is one of those incredibly BIG mysteries that actually will demand a lifetime's work.

History…?

A lot has happened since my last posting, but there's one thing I want to talk about. It is "history." I have a good friend who is actually quite an historian, and his insights are often useful. But there's another aspect about "history"—as a tool—that has begun to bother me deeply. Putting it simply, knowing about history—specific history—is, admittedly ,important. It helps us form a clearer picture of who we are, right now. But using history is dangerous, and it always has been. You see, whether we're talking about the US Constitution, the Magna Carta, or Das Kapital there is always an interpretive history that gets involved. The US Constitution is a good example. It is, whether we like it or not—and whether we agree about it or not—a snapshot of the intentions and desires of a fairly small but powerful group of people (landowners with the means and ambition to allow them the time to attend to matters of state) taken at a single, fairly narrow, point in time. Frankly, it might not have looked the same a year earlier or later, or if a larger "voting" group had been allowed to take part. Small changes in the "history" leading up to its writing would probably have introduced significant changes in the document itself. What kind? That's probably impossible to say. But some changes would be inevitable. If we had to rewrite our Constitution—or its Amendments—every ten years or so—life itself in this country would probably be radically different. Now there's a thought! But there are people who try to do just that, using "history" as their editorial tool (or weapon).

It is virtually impossible to see—from today's perspective—that moment in history (when the Constitution was written) with anything approaching clarity. But some folks like to pretend that they know enough—thanks to their views on history—to "know" what was in the hearts and minds of the Founding Fathers, and that this sacred knowledge gives them license to impose their views and wishes on our present world. There are two big problems with this: first, the writers of the Constitution would be unable to cope with trying to write such a supposedly "liberal" document today. The world has just changed too much. Those eighteenth-century people were credits to their age, but they also belonged within their own time. Second, history never works well going backwards, so to speak. As you move from "right now" to "ten minutes ago," to "yesterday," to "last year," and so on, the inaccuracies pile up, and we fill in the gaps with intuition and guesswork. That's all well and good; we need some amount of history, both culturally and psychologically. But it is entirely unreliable as a basis for more important concepts that underpin our world right now, like morality or ethics. History can help us see—a bit more clearly—who and where we are at this moment, but it cannot predict the future. We never—by the way—repeat history. We are, however, prone to repeat the mistakes others have made before us, and that's usually what is talked about when we warn others about "repeating history." But everything actually depends on us, right now, from this moment on. You see, WE influence the future as we make choices from one moment to the next. Dragging all that history along is only useful in hindsight, and as I've implied, that's certainly not 20/20…not even 20/1000.

We humans are actually a pretty strange lot; unlike other species, we cling to our history as though having that to cling to will make great differences in how we expand into our futures. And the "future," as we call it, will always be made by people who have little or no understanding of the past. It has always been that way. Relying on the past as a "standard" against which to measure either the present or the future is only useful to those who can manipulate what society calls "history" for their own ends.

Nobody

Every once in a while, I find myself deeply appreciating certain aspects of my place in life. In short, I am pretty much a…"nobody". I am often in the company of those who hold small or great sway over the lives and fortunes of others, and I have even known those whom others quote or turn to for important advice. I also have, a few times, sought higher status or fortune or title. All the titles I have are okay, but they really do little to afford me great status or respect. Whatever status or respect I have I have received for other reasons, I guess. And even when respect, trust, or "status" are something others might think about, there is never enough to change my place in life. When I was younger, I have to admit that this did bother me.

One thing that this has shown over the years that there really is kindness in the world. Some do what they do in order to ingratiate themselves to others of importance. The rare times when I have been, temporarily, "important" (part of that "few minutes of fame" thing, I guess) I've recognized that the more important one is the less sincerity they can usually expect from others. That's too bad. If those who hold positions of importance were made—on the whole—to act with their hearts and heads instead of their egos…well, this world would be far different. The problem with "position" in life is that it often winds up feeling to be "deserved" by those who have it. Perspective is lost all too easily, I've observed. I guess that it's been that sense of "entitlement" that I have seen in others that has saddened me the most. It builds fortress walls around the egos of those who have it.

Here's a problem to ponder for anyone who might read this. I can't really think of one "great" deed that has benefited this world—and I mean BENEFITTED this world—that was done by a person of great stature. The powerful have only "done" useful things by stepping aside and allowing others to accomplish what must be done. When power takes the reins of action, ego does the driving. When power shares the control—and the greater the sharing the better, sometimes—actions and outcomes are enabled that can bring change without oppression or suffering. The problem here is to think through history to agree or not.

The one real corollary has to do with "group dynamics" or "group think." I have a poster on my wall at work with hands collected in the center—like a team preparing for a game—and the title: "None of us is as stupid as all of us". Another fascinating observation. There seems to be a human tendency to hold the goals and ethics of any cohesive group to such a low level that they suit the least goal-oriented and ethical in the group. It's as if the group operates a notch below the least individual in order that all feel superior and that all can act—as a group—together. In cases when the group is more important than the ethics and goals they stand for (e.g., a political party) the group acts with the same disdain and entitlement as any powerful and ego-driven individual. Another thing to think about.

I could not, probably, write this now without a sense of free-agency that I get from having essentially no real "stature". That's good. You can forget me and remember my words.

November 11, 2010

War is always about loss. The only thing assured by it is its own continuation into the future.

Over the centuries, perhaps the greatest loss due to war is the future. War is built upon the dreams of the "older" people who feel unfinished business from the last war. Most often they also feel the need to regain the feelings of "glory and honor" they can only experience in oppressive and crushing conflict. But it is always the youth of the cultures that wages the wars and dies on the fields of glory, honor, and valor. Those youth who survive themselves grow old to hunger for the summing-up of their "unfinished business" and their need for continued glory and honor. Thus wars always—always—destroy the future. They eliminate the lives on which the future might be built, and they instill into those remaining the need to use war again.

Freedom and peace, it has been said—over and over—are never free. But I strongly disagree. They are, after all, the only things that truly can ever be free. They are never built out of the remains or aftermath of conflict: war and conflict only assure more war and conflict, and with them the oppression that fills the spaces in between. But freedom and peace can only be built out of freedom and peace and the desires for freedom and peace without the violence and oppression that is foolishly thought to produce them.

Fear is not respect. Violence, oppression, and such are used to "vanquish" one's enemies, and in so doing to instill fear and shame. Those, it is assumed, will prevent enemies from rising again to challenge the vanquishers. That is never true. If it were, wars would have ceased thousands of years ago because of "good judgment." Cultures must learn to respect one another to a degree heretofore unseen. Soldiers and terrorists—call them all what you will—take up their weapons to demonstrate their lack of respect for one another. Religion, unhappily, has been used for all of our history to draw the boundaries of "respect" around one group or another and to exclude those for whom little or no understanding or respect need be shown.

The actions of those who participate in the world's wars are often acknowledged as sacrifice, and indeed they are. I feel a great deal of emotion about what they have done, and what they have lost. But, because of the points I have made here, their numbers may never end until there are no more wars or veterans…or people. We have grown into a culture and world that can destroy countless others by remote control. But even distance does not eliminate the madness of what is done. All that has changed over time is our ability to not only change the future, but to eliminate it once and for all.

Halloween’s secrets

I'm not really a fan of Halloween. I guess I never really have been, either. But this is an excellent opportunity to say some things that need to be said.

Let me start by reviewing some things most of you sense might be true, in one form or another:

• There is more to our experiences than meets the eye.
• There is a "component" of each one of us that transcends our physical deaths.
• Alive or dead, we seem to be spiritually connected to one another.

"Life after death" is a misunderstanding. Our experience of "life" is a physical one. What transcends death is something quite different. We also need to get that out on the table, too. For now, I'll use the term "soul" to refer to that part of each one of us that is eternal.

What follows next is a condensed version of what I have learned over many years. I'm offering this as something of an anti-ghost story for you to take away and ponder.

• Our living consciousness is an amalgam of our physical reality and the experiences our souls bring to bear.
  • You see, souls are not typically ever destroyed. They come back in other lives. Some—most—are very young, perhaps with the experiences of one or only a few lives. Others can be older, some very old.
  • When we physically "die" our experiences and learning "survive" in our souls.
• While we are alive, we experience communication physically person-to-person, and "otherwise", as soul-to-soul.
  • The degree to which physical and soul communication interacts varies greatly in each of us.
  • Younger souls have great need for communication with one another; as souls age they tend to act more autonomously.
  • By the way, souls aren't perfect. In fact, they are with us to learn and grow, oddly enough.
  • And yes, some, it seems, never learn.
  • And for those of you with a scientific bent: I like to talk about that "alternative" part of our reality as the one for which the speed of light is not a constant in vacuum. Think about that for a moment. The laws of probability and interaction are fluid.
  • Although not a universal constant, psychic ability tends to belong to younger souls that are still more "communicative" with other souls.
  • Prayer, as a consequence, is primarily a soul-to-soul activity. That may come as a surprise to many, but the efficacy of prayer and intentions that are passed from soul to soul and can affect us physically bears this out.
• Believe it or not, organized religion has a valuable role to play in all of this.
  • Religion, when it is not abusive or fundamentalist, offers a sense of perspective to each of our lives.
  • That perspective helps us to realize that there are greater gifts than what we offer, that each of us has responsibility to all creation, and that harmony must be the goal of all we do.
  • Religion has consistently abused these points, but not always and everywhere unrecoverably. Religion is shaped and governed by humans, after all.
  • There is a creator force in the world, but it creates the souls that are part of us. Our physical world is just that—shaped by physics.
• There are many ways that we can try to understand our interactions with our souls. Some work better than others, of course, and there's no "one-size-fits-all".
  • One of the most surprising things we can notice about ourselves as humans is that we have developed a great sense of learning things. We aren't so much "tool makers" as we are "learners and adapters." Most species can "use" a tool; we learn what can be done with it, and that's the developmental, the learning side of who we are.
  • A consequence of this is that we spend most of our lives working out the "how?" of things. Daily life is managed by knowing the answers—or figuring them out—to all the "how?" situations that are presented.
  • We then must also figure out the "what?" part of these "how?" situations. We usually know—or again, figure out—"what" to use and "how" to use it.
  • Religion and spirituality are primarily concerned with the "what" and "how" situations. Scripture and ritual are essential to navigating the "what" and "how" kinds of questions.
  • What's usually missing is the "why?" Salvation, damnation, and things like that aren't real motivators, though we still act as though they are. They usually lead to things like "righteousness", and that just leads to self-righteousness, and that can (and usually does) lead to bad things.
  • So here's the trick: Our "Why?" is really wrapped up in our cumulative ability to maintain harmony. By that I don't mean the foolishly simplistic ideas of the 1960s. I'd never want to relive that! And harmony is never—repeat NEVER—approached by checking out from reality. Real harmony is much more pervasive and wrapped up in different attitudes towards power. I'll leave that for another entry…but I do have to say that our attitudes toward power are key to all we are and do, and all our souls experience and learn. Simple, eh?
  • Harmony is purpose, achievement, and mastery. It is our only real calling. It is our souls' only calling.

There are "ghosts," if you will. They are young souls that can't find their way home. Some of them go very, very seriously wrong, desiring eternal power on an earth where it isn't easily defended against. To that end, they find and attach other young souls who can be forced to share their quest for power. We call them demons. Yes, stay away from them.

Enough for now. Happy Halloween.

Shame on Nobody

The impetus for this entry is hard to pin down, so I won't try to. But what I can say, based on that, is that the reasons for this entry can be gathered from many corners of my experiences.

There are many instances in our lives—and in human history—that offer choices and outcomes based on honor. In fact, either directly or indirectly, most of the oppression that we face in our lives comes from actions based on the goal of honor.

That is said, knowing that honor is never possible without its constant companion: shame. Shame is that which is without honor, and a person is shamed when their sense of honor and self-worth are removed. Entire societies have come and gone, basing their social order and their politics on the honor/shame model. Many of these social constructs exist today, as it turns out, and their patterns seep out into the rest of the world, providing a well-understood basis for doing whatever feels "right." More's the pity.

One good example is the typical honor/shame society as it existed in the Mediterranean world a few centuries ago. Simply put, men held the honor of the family, while women guarded against the shame of the family. Men we "born with honor" based on their family's status. Women were "born into shame" based on that same reasoning. It was difficult for a woman to attain honor. However, she could either guard against shame or allow herself—and by extension the family—to receive shame. Protection against shame required certain ways of dressing (e.g., the birka) and acting (e.g., not being alone with a non-family male). The examples, by the way, also belong to that region's dress and deportment centuries before our current scriptures were written. But merely doing something that might make shaming possible is shame itself in one way or another.

Honor, on the other hand, is something that the males were born with, to greater or lesser degrees, according to their family. Some family occupations (shepherd, for example) did little to offer honor to the males of the family. But honor was also something one could gain through one's actions. And gaining it mean that someone else—another male, in the case—must lose some honor and feel some shame. That old tale about how David was plucked out of a shepherd's family and achieves greatness actually attests to that. He came, not from a merely lowly upbringing, but from a relatively honor-less one. How he later became great is an object lesson that has never been lost, so it seems: kill and oppress. First, there's Goliath. Battles have always been "field of honor" encounters, but here the outcome was to be decided in a one-on-one duel between the champions sent by each side. The Philistines sent their "most honored in battle" (i.e., most victorious) Goliath. The Israelites had nothing to match him. So the "least honorable" warrior—not a warrior, but a shepherd, seizes the moment and kills Goliath, thereby gaining the honor that the entire Philistine nation lost that day. That's how things worked back then. As a warrior in King Saul's army, David continued to gain honor after honor—that is, he killed a lot of enemy soldiers in battle. Even how King Saul died was ultimately portrayed as "less honorable than David." Saul died on the field of battle—the so-called field of honor—but not at the hands of the enemy, but at the sword of his servants. You see, the story is ultimately about establishing the great honor of King David. A less "honorable" King could never bring home the Ark of the Covenant. David's actual history remains shrouded in mystery. The need to explain his stature—that is, his honor—was all-important.

The point here is not about uncovering King David's past, but the need by cultures to define and use both honor and shame. The story about David is merely interesting because someone had to show how one growing up in an honor-less family (i.e., shepherds, who were deemed also unclean due to their, shall we say, closeness to their flocks) could become King of an honorable nation. You see, this has never gone away. Honor and shame are the forms of currency in an economy that rules most of the world as we know it. And as a ruling entity, it has done more to oppress and subjugate its inhabitants than even the most vile dictators the world has known. Honor versus shame has been the starter of wars, the ethnic cleanser, the caller of armies, the armorer of the hordes and the warriors. It has infiltrated our cultures to make gangs useful "alternatives" and to focus their violence and hatreds. In all armed conflicts, both sides ante-up the currency of so-called "honor" in order to bring shame upon their enemies. In business or politics, the stakes might not be as deadly, but the currency is all too often the same. Honor to the winners. Shame to the vanquished.

So let me offer one thought: Shame on nobody. Honor is meaningless, as is valor or glory. These will never end suffering or bring harmony to any situation. They can only add oppression, destruction, hatred, and despair. Enough for now. Alternatives are for another entry.

Connectivity

Last Sunday I was asked to present a small, portable Bible to a young parishioner about to leave for boot camp. That seems a simple enough task, and as part of that we prayed in front of the congregation for him to return safely. It is difficult to "bless" warriors of any kind. But it is necessary to hope that their "gifts" may be offered but never used or needed. We know that prayer—of some kind—is necessary at such moments. But this matter is part of something much larger. It has to do with what we might call nowadays "connectivity."

We do some things without understanding…or even seeming to need understanding. We pray for one another on a multitude of levels, for a multitude of things. We assume that somehow these messages get uploaded to God—or some angels—for processing. We assume that these heavenly recipients are reading their mail, but it's always been a puzzle as to why the answers are so inconsistent. The real core of this is, as it turns out, too obvious for us to recognize. It has to do with the real nature of our spiritual "connectivity"—the connections within us as individuals.

You see, there's a tendency to see ourselves as "complete" entities. The attitude is that it is me, this person, this fleshly being, that is all that there is, all there is to pray for, all that will survive—somehow. But we know better than that. Death—as we experience the death of another—is the event that emphasizes the fact that the body is merely one part of us, and the soul the other. We just don't think about this on a daily basis, perhaps because it reminds us of our own fear and mortality and that our great achievements are sometimes worth very little in the long run. But it's true. I co-exist with my soul. My soul can be young, or it can be very old. It might be trying to learn lessons through my life experiences, or it might be trying to reach me to guide my life experiences, perhaps even to provide something of value for others or to teach others something valuable. In other words, my prime connection is internal: it is between my life and my soul, between my temporary life and my eternal life, between that produced by human means and that produced by a true Creator.

So this brings me back to the "Prayers of the People" that started this entry. We pray not person-to God-to person (or something like that), we pray on a soul-to-soul basis, at the mercy of—or relying on the receptiveness of—the souls at both ends of this process. And assuming that this process does take place, it becomes vitally obvious how much worth our internal person-to-soul connections have.

But there's another issue, a semantic one. It gets thrown around so much that it's important to clear this up here. We talk about "Faith" in so many confused ways that the word has little meaning. It seems to mostly mean a kind of blind trust in forces greater than ourselves…or it can allude to one's "Faith" in an us-versus-them set of value judgments. From all I have said above, Faith is none of that. It is the connection—the kind of connection and the closeness of connection—that our lives have with our own souls, and how this gets expressed in all else we do. Anything else of a spiritual nature is frankly lame without that. Magic is often what try to invoke, the thing we are praying for, the sort of thing that we expect our "Faith" to influence. But NO, it is never about magic, but about what takes place between us as living beings in a world teeming with life, and between us as souls imbedded in a world that desperately hungers for that connection.

Black, white, or gray?

The ideas around the role of fear--or fascism--can stretch far and wide. Last Sunday, our rector gave a sermon on the passage from Luke's gospel (Luke 16:1-13) about the "dishonest manager." In that passage, a thoroughly despicable manager or overseer is going to be dismissed, and decides to reduce his master's profit on what he's owed and thus gain favor with the "little people" from whom he may need favors in the future. Frankly, no preacher really "likes" to handle that passage; it just seems out of character. But...it fits perfectly, I think, in a notion of social morals.

You see, the tale (we usually call them parables, but there weren't really "parables" then) actually takes up the problem of the differences between those who must negotiate this world on its own terms and those who assume that they've already got it all figured out. For the latter group, everything is neatly black and white. If you don't see things their way you are. conveniently, a) an outcast, and b) condemned to hell's damnation. In those days the "everything's black or white" group was represented by several sects, notable among them the "Children of Light," the Essenes. In his explanation of the story, Jesus remarks that even run-of-the-mill folks like that unscrupulous manager know more about how to ultimately treat one another than do the Children of Light. Life does not offer things that are black and white, good or bad, perfect or perfectly evil. Life comes in shades of gray, and it is OUR duty to understand that and to apply it in our lives.

The kind of fear that the manager felt--and exhibited--is the kind we share when we face calamity. Among the Essenes or any other fundamentalist group that bases its motives on a conservative approach that excludes outsiders, fear belongs not merely to calamity but to everlasting damnation, and they're going to tell you exactly what that means and what the (i.e., their) rules are. Seventy five years ago new rules were being written by the new conservative movements that sought to seize power and create friends and outcasts, painting everything in terms of black and white, so to speak. The threats that engendered fear were "ultimate" then: not merely fines or imprisonment (though they used that, too) but loss of all freedoms (the camps built to house the outcasts) and ultimately life. Totalitarian power does not tolerate shades of gray. It has no use for people who might agree with them one day then, having pondered how things developed, decide to disagree. Whatever kind of mechanisms are used to instill the necessary fear, it must produce a kind of dear that blinds people to the truth around them--the "gray" areas of life.

A new start

20 September 2010. I think I'll start again.

There's something currently in the political breezes that is far more than troubling. The Tea Party movement--as it calls itself--is showing some signs that mirror other trends in human history. This may seem a strange place to start this blog, but it's on my mind.

As Sinclair Lewis noted, fascism will enter our consciousness "wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross." (1935, "It Can't Happen Here") The only way that can actually happen is when critical thinking goes out the window, when scapegoats are chosen that don't fight back (or vote regularly), and the past is to blam for everythng in general. Sinclair Lewis might have been thinking about the rise of fascism in Europe, but there the anit-establishment movement was spurred on by economic history. Today, we stand at a crossroads between fear and hope. The ultra-right wing of the Tea Party relies on personalities rather than substance to control and create the fear that is stirs up a truly religious zeal to knock down all that enables hope. Even broken, the framework of our heritage is based more on hope than it is on fear. Yet, in spite of that, the fear brokers of the ultra-right are decrying all that does not conform to their ideas (would that they had ideals) as anti-American and anti-Founding Father...whatever that means, as though overtwo hundred years of cultural evolution and history should be completely predicated on ideas that are no longer understood.

Fear is the common currency of this movement, and with it people can--and will--be pushed and prodded to "conform," to trade hope in for a blindness that allows others to keep them "safe:" safe from the fears that are generated by those whose only motivations are those of extreme self-interest and greed. And if fear is the common currency, then greed is the motivation, a warped sense of Christianity the framewok, patriotism the means to condemn non-conformists, and love and hope the casualties that will ultimately bring about the death of our cultural organism.

So...what'll it be, do you think? Fear...or hope?