God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign....

One must say Yes to life,

and embrace it wherever it is found -

and it is found in terrible places....

- James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time

 

I've lost my James Baldwin (collection of books) - or, at least, cannot locate him/them at the moment and feel that periodic intense need to do so - and I find myself in one of those 'terrible places' as the author and artist suggested.  Being without Baldwin for those of us who've discovered him is very much like the delirium tremens experience of an addict.  It seems that every year or two I feel an intense need to rediscover his brilliance and salve the wounds inflicted on my soul by this weary and wearisome world.  And now I cannot find him....

 

The antecedent cause of this latest Baldwin jones is the excellent American Masters documentary on his life.  Two truths be told, I've read a fair amount of Baldwin and not while I was in school and had both the time and the environment to do so deeply, and yet much of what was shared during this moving biograhical documentary was new to me.  It seems that I've only known the man through his writings and have now been exposed more fully to his life (and the particular contexts from which his writings spring), so I am greatly enriched for the experience ... which is the same sensation I experience when reading his (mainly non-fiction/essay) work.  And to think that he's been gone more than a quarter-century and my admiration for him continues to grow.

 

In part this is because so much of what he wrote about has yet to become timebound.  James Baldwin was described not as bitter but as angry by no less than the late great Maya Angelou ... and the causes of his anger - injustice, racism, heterosexism, classism, etc. - continue to this day only slightly abated.  Yes, there has been progress, but not as much as one would think in the half-century since the publication of his seminal work The Fire Next Time.  We are still talking about the institutional racism in our society, still decrying the oppression and exploitation of the poor by the rich and still amazed and dismayed by the strikingly inhumane practice of religion - especially the Christian religion - by many of its supposed adherents, among the many causes of our dis-ease and distress.

 

Oh how I wish his writings would fade from timely to dated, from open, raw and painful to uncomfortable and embarrassing reminders of days gone by.  Oh how I wish that James Baldwin weren't just as relevant today as during his lifetime ... and perhaps even more so now.

 

Where are our modern Jimmy Baldwins?  The eloquent, articulate and elevating capturers and communicators of our hurt, our pain, our weariness ... as well as our desire for love and life?  Who speaks as movingly as he did to the mass of Americans - mostly white then as now - to help them understand what it feels like to be labeled and limited against one's will?  Or to be transported by those you love, whomever they turn out to be?

 

[This being said, one has to wonder if they would listen.  The ferment of the '60s seemed to compel their attention ... but does the modern age call forth such a response, such openness and willingness to listen (even if, then as now, for a very brief time)?  Some, it seems, revel in the reality of their refusal to listen....]

 

And yet Baldwin isn't just great to help frame and address society (and its inevitable and durable ills).  He's also a profound and generous guide to life.  His meditations on love, spirituality and other aspects of the human experience touch and inspire as well.  For example, I continue to be transported by his observation that

 

Love takes off the masks that we fear

we cannot live without

and know we cannot live within.

 

I'm still staggered and guided by his piercing perspective on the Divine, that

 

If the concept of God has any validity or use,

it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving.

If God cannot do this,

then it is time we got rid of Him.

 

And I finally have matured enough to understand how profound an observation it is that

 

To be sensual, I think,

is to respect and rejoice in the force of life,

of life itself,

and to be present in all one does,

from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

 

So much of what I value in my life now revolves around the gift of loving and being loved and around the breaking of bread with those with whom I share this gift....

 

And maybe as I sit here writing - his cardinal gift - and appreciating his influence - even if felt initially in absence, in temporarily lost access - I am more aware of him deep within my soul than I realize.  James Baldwin still haunts me, and I hunger for his wisdom, so that I can live life more fully, more perceptively and more lovingly as well as be prepared for the inevitable, for the fire next time....

 

There is never time in the future

in which we will work out our salvation.

The challenge is in the moment;

the time is always now.

 



Listening To That Inner Voice....

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky.

I believe that what people call God is something in all of us.

I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha

and all the rest said was right.

It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

- John Lennon

It's been a week since Easter and I've been in a reflective mood: the days that have followed the holiest one of the Christian year have been challenging for me, to put it mildly.  So I've been trying to get in a more spiritual frame of mind and to regain my equilibrium by accessing and drawing on the depth of my faith.  I sit quietly and wait for that inner voice, the one that is my own and seems to stream from my very depths, the one in which I feel the touch of God and am moved to ponder His Infinite Mystery.  And merely in this reflection and contemplation I begin to heal and steel myself for what is to come (while, hopefully, leaving the past behind except for the wisdom with which it's gifted me).

 

Yet as I listen to my inner voice, I come to know two things clearly:  First, too often of late, in it I hear anguish, a hurting more for the world than for myself, but a hurting nonetheless.  And, second, I know that it is my voice, not God's, and this helps me: while I feel His Grace and Touch as I heal, I realize the thoughts are my own, my truth, not His Truth, limited as they are by my human perspective.

 

God doesn't talk to me directly, and that's good: I had too much religious schooling when I was young, so the prospect of speaking directly to God is still a frightening one ... and, in my adulthood, I've come to be wary of those who claim to be a human - meaning finite and flawed - vessel for the Infinite.  And yet I feel His/Her/Its Presence regularly.  Not that He/She/It isn't always there, but just that I'm more aware at some times more than others.

 

And that's the point: God is, however we limited, flawed and finite humans perceive this in any given moment and choose to describe this Ultimate Reality.  To me, among other things, this means that all human conceptions of God are as limited, flawed and finite as we are.  We can't know God as He/She/It is, we can only sense the Divine and try to craft a description in limited, human terms.

 

For example, though I started this piece using the traditional male pronoun to refer to God - capitalized, as I was taught, of course - He is not a male ... and we only describe God this way because men have been the most dominant gender of our species for millennia and thus have decided to refer to and conceptualize God in this (limited) image and language.  He is not human, so He has no gender.  As much as it's more familiar to refer to God as Father, He isn't: God is the Source of our (human) life, to be sure, but He isn't a he, and our Father image is a reflection of our projection of something familiar onto God rather than His/Her/Its revelation of a particular gender.  It seems to me that choosing to see God in such limiting terms creates all sorts of problems, including the tendency to project and fetishize.

 

If you disagree with this last hypothesis, ask yourself the following question:  Why is it that the most popular and ubiquitous picture of Jesus portrays Him as a straight-dirty-blond-haired Caucasian (in Warner Sallman's classic 1940 painting)?  Would all of us - especially (American) Caucasians (particularly of the fundamentalist/conservative stripe) - continue to pray to Him if He were portrayed more realistically, as the swarthy, light brown-skinned Palestinian Jew with curly dark hair that He likely was?  I seriously doubt this.  It seems likely to me that the key to the popularity of the picture in the last 85 years is that it reflects an American ideal more than a 2000-year old historical reality.  And if you don't believe me, just ask Megyn Kelly of Fox News....

 

So, if God's not a he, what is He/She/It?

 

Great question!  And here's where modern theology comes in and, for many, doesn't help that much.  Many question the viability of Theism, the concept of the personal (and most often anthropomorphic) God who acts in human history.  There are many suggestions as to more accurate depictions.

 

For example, one of the many such 'new' conceptions was offered in the late 1940s and early 1950s by theologian Paul Tillich (in his classic compendium of sermons The Shaking of the Foundations, among others), when he suggested that God be thought of as the Ground of Being, or even as Being itself.  For many  this doesn't work as a meaningful God conception because, among other reasons, it seems impersonal and distant.  Well, of course it does: it's a complete contrast to the external, theistic God that we've all been taught for most (if not all) of our lives.  It's intangible and intellectual, not emotional and tangible like we project the theistic God to be.  And yet just because we may believe the latter/what we've been taught doesn't make it true.

 

And that's another point on which I'm becoming clearer: just because we as fellow believers or citizens or whatever classifications believe something doesn't make it true.  We want it to be true, and many may feel that they need it to be true (especially for control and/or security reasons), but, again, this doesn't make it true.

 

Just like 'believing' (or, in reality, claiming) that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It isn't.  That's not my opinion, that's fact, verified by a legion of biblical scholars (who, conceptually, are God's children).  For starters, on its face we know that it's not inerrant: there are hundreds of internal disagreements and/or contradictions, including the two different birth stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke or even the two different creation stories in the first two chapters of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, to name a few.  And the lack of thematic continuity in literally hundreds of places throughout the Good Book attests to its having been edited and enhanced many, many times in antiquity by all too human hands.  So the fact that many who choose to describe themselves as Christians claim that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God doesn't make it so.  And the fact that this can be disproven but is believed anyway is one of the reasons that blind faith is questioned so vehemently (and appropriately) today.

 

I could list other 'new' conceptions of God like those of Bonhoeffer and Bultmann, et. al., but by now I think that I've established the point that there is no one true way to see - and/or experience - God.  The fact that there are literally hundreds of human religions proves this.  And lest some 'true believer' of whatever sect claim that his/hers is the only true religion, let's just ask for the proof.  There is none, beyond belief ... and, as we know, just because we believe something doesn't make it so.

 

And yet one of the most virulent expressions of human religion today is the deplorable and immoral level killing that is perpetrated in God's name.  Here's another thing on which I've become clear in recent years: if you kill, hurt or in any way diminish another's humanity in the name of God, you're doing God wrong.  God is not tribal, but universal ... meaning that God is not a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or an adherent of any of the other myriad belief systems and sects that we humans have created to express our awareness of the Ultimate Reality.  A popular FaceBook meme captures this nicely:





 

God was not a Buddhist.

Jesus was not a Christian.

Muhammed was not a Muslim.

 

They were teachers who taught Love.

 

Love was their Religion.

 

Now we can debate how much each of them taught and practiced Love, but, again, this is a human debate and has nothing to do with who or what God is even though each of them is considered to offer a pathway to Him/Her/It.  Slyly, the meme establishes a great point: each of these sages saw and/or described the Ultimate Reality differently and yet we acknowledge the depth and meaning of their insights into the Divine by choosing to use them as the portals to a more spiritual life ... even though they didn't and don't agree on the 'right' path thereto, unless you believe that they were aligned in that they each espoused Love.  But this digression is itself an artifice to reinforce the larger point that irrespective of what each of us chooses to believe - be that the tenets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Baha'i, etc. - God is ... and the choice of path is ours alone however we feel about another's path or others' paths.

 

In other words, just because we believe a certain way doesn't make it so and God is, whatever we believe.

 

Which brings me back to the anguish that I too often feel as I reflect on the abuse of religion in our world.  Simply put, we get God wrong way too much and to our collective detriment.  That we kill in the name of the Source of Life is proof both that we don't get God and that we are too flawed to comprehend fully the Infinite and Ultimate Reality.  That we are too often religiocentrists - believing that our view of God is the 'right,' true and the only one - just reinforces the point.  What kind of Divine would favor a few of His/Her/Its children over others?  Not one worthy of our devotion and belief, for sure....

 

And, in my humble view, only in the acknowledgment of the limitations of our humanity, especially our inability to know God fully, will we find our salvation.  Only when we accept that the one thing that we have in common is that we are indeed all Children of God - however we choose to see Him/Her/It - can we begin to honor God by emulating Him/Her/It.  As far as I can tell, this means that we treat each other in life-affirming ways, which, now that I think about it, means in a loving way.  Hey, maybe FaceBook is right: God is Love after all....

 

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple

of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence

before every human being and see God in him -

that moment I am free from bondage,

everything that binds vanishes,

and I am free.

- Swami Vivekananda



 

An Easter Reflection....

I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians.

Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

- Mahatma Gandhi

 

 

On the eve of the holiest day of the Christian year, I'm perplexed: as deeply spiritual and Episcopalian Christian as I am/as I've become, I'm ever more dismayed by what I perceive to be the routinely and so often almost completely unchristian behavior of others who claim to share my faith ... and I'm also dismayed by the relative silence of so many so-called Christian leaders in combatting this reality.  It doesn't make me any less a believer in Christianity; actually, it has the opposite effect: in response to the unchristianity that's so prevalent in our society (and world), I'm actually called to be more Christian ... or, actually, Christ-like.  And, in modern America, these are two very different things....

 

In my humble view, modern Christianity - at least as many of its professed adherents practice it - is in need of a major overhaul ... and, should it not choose to change dramatically, it will surely die eventually as Bishop John Shelby Spong has predicted.  The signs of this decline are legion and evident: from declining church attendance to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated and "unchurched" to the ever-distressing politicization of the faith coupled almost always with a distinctly unchristian and inhumane vehemence.  I seriously doubt that if Jesus were to return today that He would recognize (or accept) most of what's being done in His name.

 

An instructive case in point is the advent of so-called "religious freedom" laws in twenty of the fifty United States, with Indiana's and Arkansas' iterations serving as the current flashpoint.  As much as some defenders attempt to deny (while they dissemble), the practical effects and the sponsors of such legislation are instructive: in the case of Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, when it was signed in a private ceremony by Governor Mike Pence, several of those invited to stand by him as he did so were in fact among the most vociferous of opponents of gay marriage/rights/equality.  So, if we take the governor at his word that the law wasn't enacted to allow Indianans to discriminate against LGBT fellow citizens - although, in fact, this is just what it did allow - then what are we to make of the reality that a significant proportion of its most visible supporters and, ostensibly, catalysts and proponents want and expected it to allow just that?

 

And though there was popular outrage and an uprising of conscience in response to this travesty, it seems to me that the response from many high profile 'Christian' leaders was muted.  Some progressive Christian denominations were observed among the protestors, but many, many other so-called Christian leaders were not.  In fact, many in the more supposedly socially conservative and fundamentalist wing of the faith were the law's greatest champions and defenders.  They asserted, quite correctly, that the law would allow them to avoid serving those whom they believed their religion to condemn ... like, say, our gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender brothers and sisters.  They see it as a legitimate and welcome  (political) protection of their religious right to discriminate against those whose lives and lifestyles offend them.  Hmmm....

 

To me - and, again, in my humble opinion - this is so wrong on so many levels, but for the sake of brevity let me focus on just two:  First, how on earth can the American constitutional freedom to practice a religion be conflated with the right to discriminate in the public sphere (or, perhaps more accurately put, square) because of it?  If church and state are truly to be separated as the cherished American value alleges, then the State cannot abridge the public rights of one group to satisfy the desires of another one under the cloak of protecting the latter's religion/religious beliefs.

 

An extreme example to illustrate the point:  If I were a devout Muslim and decided (incorrectly) that my religion allowed me to discriminate against Christians, how would this be received in this still Christian-dominant country?  Can any of us seriously imagine even progressive Christians leaping to the defense of such 'religious beliefs'?  Of course not.  The idea only has currency because the dominant group - in present-day America meaning (so-called) Christians - wants to exercise its considerable institutional/political power to do so.  It only works because the in-group wants to discriminate against an out-group (or out-groups); no in-group would ever agree voluntarily to condone discrimination against itself.

 

Another reason that these laws are so repellent to me is that they completely contradict the example of Christianity's Patron.  Jesus was known for communing with the dispossessed and advocating for the powerless against the interests and system of the powerful.  In fact, this is why he was put to death, because he afflicted the powerful on behalf of the dispossessed.  Translated to our time, this suggests that Jesus would be communing with those often spurned by society, including, sadly and still, our LGBT brothers and sisters.  Can any one of us imagine Him demonizing the LGBT community as so many of today's 'Christian' leaders have?  Can any of us imagine Him condoning discrimination against them ... or Jews ... or African-Americans, etc.?  Of course not.  Which makes Gandhi's observation so prescient: too many of us modern 'Christians' are so unlike our Christ.

 

To put a finer point on it, for those who claim their objections are Scripturally-based, such freedom-to-discriminate-under-the-guise-of-religious-freedom runs counter the final charge that the Lord gave his disciples before he left the earth physically.  As captured in the Gospel of John (13:34, NRSV), He instructs them:

 

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.

 

Suffice it to say that there's no way to contort this commandment to suggest that discrimination in Jesus' name is in any way loving.   So, yet again, so many of His ostensible followers ignore, pervert or outright contradict His commandments, in this case under the guise of their belief in Him.  Can anything be more unchristian than this?

 

So, as we prepare to remember Christ's life and legacy in the celebration of Easter, I'm reminded of Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks' distinction - in his brilliant and classic book The Politics of Jesus - between so-called/self-professed Christians and Followers of Jesus: many if not most of the former support the modern status-quo-aligned institution of the Christian church - including its misguided and perverse efforts to promote so-called religious freedom - while the latter believe that emulating Christ's example is the true version/practice of the faith.  When I see Christians discriminating in Christ's name, I'm glad not to be one of them, but ever more thankful to be a Follower of Jesus and hope that you will be, too, whatever your religion may be....

 

In other words, Jesus' view is that laws are to serve us, not oppress us.  That is why in our practice we must always stress the foundational principles of Jesus' politics - justice, righteousness, and steadfast love.  Any laws that are not based on these principles are inconsistent with the politics of Jesus.

- the Rev. Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

The Politics of Jesus:

Rediscovering The True Revolutionary Nature of

Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted