I.Q.

Sometimes I think that we get dumber as our numbers grow -  that collective I.Q. is inversely proportional to the number of people in the group.  It has been said that we behave more intelligently, and morally, as individuals.  Congress springs to mind as an example of an ethically challenged, ignorant group.  

But I shouldn’t be so offhand in the matter.  Who elects members of Congress?  Whose values do these members of Congress reflect? I’ll repeat the remark made by Winston Churchill that people get the government they deserve.  

Isn’t government whatever structure that people tolerate, or are forced to tolerate, to order their communities?  Democracy is, in theory, a form of collective government and it isn’t working anymore in America, partly, I believe, because we’re ignorant, we’re deceived, and we’re unmotivated.  When voters send the message that they don’t care enough to be rational and informed in their actions, this is what we get.  Nobody is minding the store. 

Helpless?  Perhaps.  Hopeless?  Never, for spiritual people (on a good day!)  

I think that the solution is basics, that is, a focus on our own spiritual growth.  What intelligence anyone has, what money, whatever influence we can exert is really just control.  Instead, we must hear the common thread of Jesus’ message.  It’s a challenge to our worldly, controlling thinking and an invitation to enter into God’s World in a radical way that opposes “conventional wisdom.”  

Love Works

A bad start for Christmas - what’s the world coming to anyway?  

We were sitting in a sacred space for a concert.  Directly in front of us were pre-teen girls - two of them - with Tablets.  The bright screens shone in our eyes – thumbs flicking around, moving game characters.  God.  

I know.  I’m an old man.  These kids live in a different world.  Actually so does their mother.  This looked to be a long concert and both girls were going to be majorly bored.  I resigned myself to an evening of distracted misery.  Perhaps a move across the aisle…  

But the orchestra was done with tuning up.  The choir was marching up the risers.  Now the mom reached along the back of the pew and gave the daughter on her left a gentle pat on the shoulder.  The Tablets flashed off and disappeared and the evening’s surprises began.  

Sharp and bright brasses, booming percussion, fifty perfect human voices took us through two and a half hours of classic, Broadway, traditional Christmas, jazz and locally arranged numbers.  They had us itching to be on our feet at times: singing, applauding.  But time went more slowly for the girls.  Rapt attention alternated with restlessness, squirming, fussing.  

Their mom never lost her cool.  It’s like there was a feeling of mutual trust between that mother and her daughters.  A very quiet whisper in the ear, a little rub.  She’d brush their hair back.  Both of them would lean against her for a while and she’d put her arms around them. Her directives were never hostile or anxious, and their responses were always matter-of-fact and compliant on their own terms.  I couldn’t believe it.  

Not knowing what people’s whole lives are like, it’s still a blessing to see a small picture of love working.  This was Christmas more than anything else.  God is with us, offering to make bearable the boredom-to-brokenness in our lives and the horrors we see in the media every day.  It’s this good stuff that repeatedly wins over my heart, and my hope. 

We've Got It All Backwards

We’ve got it all backwards. 

I thought that one role of religion was to provide a moral compass.  Now I think I was wrong.  It’s probably more accurate to say that culture is less informed by religion than religion is informed by the culture.  

After all, providing a moral compass, as Jesus did, just got him killed.  

John Shelby Spong has stated that “theistic” religion is on the way out.  The facts of science, and increasing knowledge of human makeup are driving the last nails into the coffin of second-century religious thinking.  But my fears linger on for reasons Bishop Spong doesn’t seem to consider.  Science and love are both under attack.  We’re going through a rough spell.  

I now believe that monied interests work against science, and religion follows suit for its own reasons.  Big tobacco is against the medical community.  Big petroleum is against environmentalists.  The arms industry is against human behavorial science.  Billions are being spent on bribery, pseudo-science and misinformation and distributive justice is instantly attacked.  Religion has an interest in keeping things as they are, so the two walk a common path.  We shouldn’t be having to debate evolution or global warming.    

My only hope for myself is to persist in my journey and not let my faith become the servant of the culture.  After all these years I’m finally accepting the idea that religion has become the often-violent defender of the status-quo, and not a moral challenge to evil.  Our culture, our thinking, needs to change, and religion will follow, not the other way around.  I believe that the spirit of Christ lives free of both religion and culture, and lives powerfully in loving hearts.  It moves us onto a journey that’s both fearsome and full of joy.  

If we accept this, we are set on a path to change our internal image of God and who, or what, is God.  For me, it’s a wonderful and adventurous journey to new life in spite of the struggles and the fear that the old ways will die hard and with terror.

I begin with knowing now who God is not:  a tyrant prone to anger and violence, jealous, vindictive, male, manipulative, controlling, hateful, inconsistent, one who plays favorites, limited to location, desirous of flattery, invasive of nature, unmoved by progress, unable to learn.  

Then what is God?  God is present, always present, and God is the embodiment of love, the antithesis of greed.  That’s where I begin. Maybe that is all anyone needs because the products of this kind of trust will make a world so much different from what we have now.  I believe that’s where Jesus is taking people in spite of all the inaccuracies of scripture and tradition.  

The television evangelist holding that floppy, gold-trimmed Bible, the oil billionaires, politicians, bankers, who may be doing things of which I deeply disapprove, are still my spiritual family.  I only hope that someone loves them away from greed and control and all of us into the world that Jesus preached and visioned. 

Alarming

I’m alarmed right now.  Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but a familiar pattern seems to be emerging.  Here in America, people whose religious views are being questioned, or rejected, by increasing numbers are rumored to be working on a “power play” in which these views can be forced on others.  It seems to me that their agenda is aimed at the worldwide destruction of any religious or political entities that stand in opposition to their Christian fundamentalist views.  Most disturbing, this movement has over a billion dollars to throw at congress and at the media, and money talks.  (The Supreme Court says so.)  This group targets children, and people who are ignorant, desperate or otherwise vulnerable.  (See Truth Wins Out – Center Against Religious Extremism.)

What to do?  I, for one, certainly don’t have the resources of fundamentalist businessmen, nor can I raise that kind of money.  All I have to offer is an alternative that I believe is living Christianity today:  

Many old beliefs about God come out of ancient cultures and were useful for those people because the terms were fully understood. Others come from church politics benign, which clarified issues of ancient times, and some come from church politics malignant, intended to control or even destroy people.  Intermingled with this is the witness of scripture, assembled by a “committee” over two hundred years after the time of Jesus.  

Fundamentalists wish to ice all this down – to preserve it as perfection, especially scripture, in spite of the fact that there is no support in scripture itself for absolute descriptive terms such as “inerrant,” and “infallible.”  

The God I seek does not take the form of a male, sitting on a throne, out there somewhere.  God does not intervene in human affairs, including my own, at my behest, in violation of God’s own natural order, and in disregard of the consequences to nature and others around me.  (Lord, let our football team win and those other guys lose!)  There’s something better.  

I see people tiring of the nonsense and lies and leaving the church, still longing for some kind of relationship with some kind of God.  I hope the world population is gaining the intelligence, and more important, the heart to see God in today’s living terms and not frozen and dead.  It’s more than possible.  

I believe that Jesus launched the world toward this process, not by the mechanical “died-for-our-sins” dogma (not even known for about forty years after his death), but by giving his followers a glimpse of the very Spirit of God, a spirit that stayed with them through the centuries in spite of church politics and gross errors in thinking.  

For me now, God is here.  The Spirit of God is within me, within nature, and within all people whether they live it or not.  God’s “desire” is that we seek to recognize and live this truth, and not see God as judge/executioner and living in guilt, or as rescuer-at-our-bidding, protecting us from the pain, tragedies, heartbreak and injustices that happen to everyone.  

There are many implications to seeing God in today’s world.  There is so much more to this God than we could have ever imagined by artificially living in the ancient world.  My prayer life is changing dramatically.  I am increasingly living for now and loving people by not directing my energies toward an afterlife that leaves them out in this present world.  Christian ethics have an entirely different basis, not on obedience and control, but on love and the desire that people be whole, honest, authentic persons.  

I don’t have all the answers.  I “wrestle with God” over my own unresolved issues.  But this Spirit is here and it’s all I really need, absolutely.  

Scared?  Excited?  Good.