Seditious Faith

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?