What Ever Happened to Civil Discussion?

I don't know about you, but I am getting weary of not only mean politics, but also mean theology.  But let's just look at theological discussion for now.  Jim Wallis and Brian McClaren have been called "Marxists" for being so bold as to say there is a "social gospel;" that Jesus came to right things like poverty, unjust social systems, and illness.  Did these guys ever go to Sunday school?

Today, Brian McClaren, who calls himself an "evangelical," was inerviewed on National Public Radio concerning some parts of today's on-going Christian arguments.  It is worth listening to or reading.  There is even a lengthy excerpt from his new book, A New Kind of Christianity, which has caused more rancor -- not from McClaren -- but from his opponents and detractors,  (See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125165061&ps=cprs.

One of the issues is the ancient (and somewhat tired, I must admit) discussion about who is going to hell and who isn't.  About 60 percent of Christian traditionalist (though fewer in number each year) today say that anyone who is not a Christian is going to suffer eternal damnation in hell.  Younger folks, under age 35, even young evangelicals in that age range) have a much different take on it.  They have grown up in a religously pluralist world.  They know of, or have friends who are, Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, or Muslim.  Nearly two-thirds of them believe that their non-Christian friends are going to be damned eternally to hell.

Of course, when you get right down to it, what kind of global community would this be if everyone thought this way?  The days of tribalism must pass and we all need to understand truly that not only are we all  genetically related, we are all "the neighbor" who is to be loved as strongly as one is to love God and the neighbor to whom we should practice the almost universal "Golden Rule."

David Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame and co-author of American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives found that "a young evangelical, Roman Catholic [or] mainline Protestant growing up in America today, if he goes to college, his roommate might be Hindu.  His roommate might be Muslim. His roommate might be Buddhist or atheist. So, suddenly the 'other' is sleeping across the room.  And, it's really hard to condemn someone to eternal damnation on the basis of their religion when you know them well and have come to love them."

I am being to understand why most young people tell me they are "spiritual" and not "religious."  Who would want to be called "religious" when that can mean eternally condeming your friends to hell?  And who would want to be "religious" when all you hear is acrimony and condemnation between Christians themselves?  After all, if Christians can't get along with each other how might we expect them to act in the world?

As for me, maybe I will start calling myself "spiritual" and not Anglican or Christian.  Better yet, maybe I should just call myself a struggling disciple of that Palestinian carpenter who tried show us how to live with one another!

Being Tested

At a recent men's group meeting we took one of those stress assessments: things that have gone on in your life; marriages, deaths, divorcces, changing jobs, and even the "good events" were ranked as stressful events -- things like retiring, a promotion, etc.

I was definitely in the top end -- the cancer, a son struggling with addictionl, a daughter off to Afghanistan, another retirement, etc.

I know that the Bible tells us that God does not put more things in our way than we can handle.  If that be the case, God has a lot of confidence in me.  God must know I can handle a lot of BIG STUFF. 

So God, I am calling on you to back up what you said by shoreing and toughening me up.  Come on, God, you can do it!  In the meantime, God, no more tests!  Please!

And then... my youngest daughter has just called me on the phone.  She is boarding an airplane with her Army unit.  They are headed for Afghanistan.  I begin to be choked up... I tell her I deeply love her and that she will be in the prayers of her mother and me.  Dread creeps up on me as we say "goodbye" -- which is, "God be with ye."

I write this poem:

her sweet voice
my youngest daughter
boarding a plane
to afghanistan
my daughter
part of
this empire’s
long
strong
and reaching arm
but something’s
wrong
daughters and
wives to war?
what have
we become?

Contemplating When Things Go Wrong

A popular television psychologist recently remarked, "You never get over being a parent!"  It is so true.  Our adult childhood may be out of sight, but never out of mind.  And when a bad thing happen to one of my children (by either accident or intention) it triggers a flood of emotions ranging from "if I had only been a better parent" to  "this is beyond my control and there is nothing I can do" to a more steadying --"I feel a great sadness; a sadness not easily avoided."

These feelings for me are best put into poetry as I emotionally recon the terrian and get my bearings as to when the "child" is, where I am, and, most importantly, where God is in this...

the sadness

a reluctant companion
a child’s
hopes and dreams
scattered again
waveringly i
reach for
God's hand
i sense his presence
yet also another sense
a coldness
not close
but
hovering nearby
waiting
it is
death
its challenge
conclusion and
ending
it floats like
an angry
mist
waiting
watching while
tears
inside of me
taste bitter
and
growl around
in my
nervous stomach
my voice
cracking
oh God
oh God.

Developing a Spiritual Plan

During Lent I have been serving Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Prairie du Chien which is just west of us on the Mississippi River.  The book we are reading during Lent is John Ortberg's, "The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People."  John does a great job in making spiritual exercises (training) simple and understandable.

He gives us some questions we should ask ourselves in developing our own spiritual plan:

1. How and when shall we pray?

2. How are we going to handle our money in a way that draws us closer to God.

3. How are we going to approach our work in a way that will help Christ to be formed in us?

4. How are we going to be involved in Christian community?

5. How are we going to fill our daily tasks with a sense of God's presence?

I think these are the basic questions we need to ask ourselves -- a good checklist through the year.  We all need a "rule of life;" a plan as to how we are going to live this precious life that God has given us.

As Paul wrote to the Galatians, "All that matters is that one is created anew" (6:15).  Spiritual development is all about being created anew!

Juking the Stats

I have never seen the HBO series, “The Wire,” but from what I heard in an interview I heard re-played this morning between the executive producer of the series, David Simon (a former big-city news reporter), and Bill Moyers, I put the five-season series in my Netflix queue as soon as I could.



During the interview, Moyers and Simon talk about the American city, politics, police, public education and, as they say, our propensity to ‘juke' [manipulate] urban statistics.  In it, Simon makes stunning and insightful commentary on our current economic system and the "war on drugs":


SIMON: The people most affected by [our current economic system] are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don't think-- since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.


MOYERS: Which says?


SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.


MOYERS: But here's the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound, but are numbing. I mean, here's an excerpt I read just this morning: "Over the past 20 years, the elite one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation's income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent. But their tax burden shrank by about one-third." Now those facts tell us something very important. That the rich got richer as their tax rates shrunk. But it doesn't seem to start people's blood rushing, you know? Another topic they take on during the interview is this matter of “juking” statistics whether they be crime data or public school test scores.


MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats."


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


[A dialogue from “The Wire:”]


PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.


"PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI (a former cop now working as a teacher): I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?


COLLEAGUE: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.


PREZ: Juking the stats.


COLLEAGUE: Excuse me?


PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.


COLLEAGUE: Wherever you go, there you are.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.


MOYERS: And you say that's driving the war on drugs, though, right? The stats, not the-


SIMON: Dope on the table. Stats, you know, "We've made so many arrests." I mean, they used to ride around Baltimore under one administration, and say, "If we can make 54 arrests a day, we'll break the-- we'll have an all-time record for drug arrests."


SIMON: Some of the arrests, well, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that. So, I would be-- I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was, you know, you would look outward. But if you looked inward you'd see that the same game is played everywhere. That nobody's actually in the business of doing what the institution's supposed to do.


Simon also has some harsh things to say about the “war” on drugs. When Moyers asked him what he would do about the drug problem Simon said:


SIMON: Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war's war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As I see it, the ramifications of not only the spiritual heart of our nation but our very survival is put into question. What is up for discussion her is efficacy of our system of government. This entire interview bears careful reading (the interview transcript between Moyers and Simon, dated April 17, 2009, can be read at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/transcript1.html

Beware, I am sure you will find it as provocative as I did.