The Indescribable Collision

Can't go forward; can't go backward; can't stand still; can't sit in the corner when you're in a round room. Now what?

"The brutally frank answer is that we're stuck, and we're stuck in several ways," Gates told the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

....

Gates said that he favors closing the detention center [at Guantanamo Bay], which currently holds about 270 detainees, but that a number of problems stand in the way.

For one, Gates said, there are about 70 detainees ready for release whose home governments either will not accept them or may free them after they return.

....

Gates said there were also several detainees who cannot be freed but who are also ineligible for prosecution under the military courts set up by the Bush administration. Gates did not elaborate on why those detainees would not be charged.

"What do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80, or whatever the number is, who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home?" Gates asked.

Furthermore, he said, there are lots of obstacles to overcome in order to send the detainees to U.S. prisons.

"We have a serious 'not in my backyard' problem. I haven't found anybody who wants these terrorists to be placed in a prison in their home state," he said.

One of the favorite paradoxes is the paradox of an omnipotent god, i.e.: could such a god create a boulder too heavy for the god to lift? Can there be, in other words, an unstoppable force and an immovable object, and what happens if they meet?

So what if we built a prison nobody wants, housed in it prisoners nobody wants back, and yet they are prisoners we cannot keep and perhaps should never have detained? What then? The most interesting problem here is that the people who created this problem, bear no responsibility for solving it. Congress must fund the Gitmo prison, or close it; the Defense Department must administer it and staff the guards there, or abandon it. There is no question some of the prisoners should not be there, and none of them were taken captive according to national or international laws. This was completely the action of a rogue state. But people don't stop being people simply because you lose interest in the symbols you once tried to make of them. They don't go conveniently away when the morning headlines shift from them. And what of those responsible for this disaster?

All moved on, muttering excuses or offering no apologies at all. What accountability will they face? What will a President Obama do about them (the answer if the question is President McCain is obvious on its face)? Nothing. He will do nothing. The great genius of the American system is its ahistoricity, we have been told for generations. We don't punish the past, we don't hold the historic grudges we claim to see in European, and now Middle Eastern, history. It has been the great genius of our system, we were told. It is now the reason the worst criminals will walk free.

What good, then, is a criminal justice system? I ask the question quite seriously: what good is it at all? It imprisons the poor, the powerless, the weak, the undefended. And it excuses the powerful, the wealthy, the self-important, the true monsters of our age, of every age; of any age.

When Jesus told his disciples to visit the prisoner, we comfort ourselves with thinking they were illegally and improperly imprisoned, because the Roman empire was an illegal and improper imposition of political will over a subjugated people; it held its power and control by force of arms, not as an expression of popular will. When Jesus says he has come to set the prisoner free, we comfort ourselves with thinking he meant spiritual imprisonment, and since we will never see the inside of a prison, we are quite sure he means us, and the cage of our complacencies and cares. But what if the fundamentalists are right about this much, and he meant what he said literally?

Even the fundamentalists don't take those words that seriously. What if they did, though? And why do we continue to trust our government to provide for our security, when they are so clearly incapable and uninterested in doing so? The alternative is not isolation and ammunition hoarding and mad defiance of the social order fed by paranoid schemes involving black helicopters and world governments. The alternative is to reconsider what government really means, and what is really supplies, and how much we can really expect it to do.

We never expected it to do this; but now it has. We never expected to face this dilemma; but now we do. We may even expect our new political leaders to find wisdom and solve these horrendous problems, to fix these nightmarish horrors. But if they do, how will they do it? We seem to be stuck going backward. What power, what rationale, what political position, what ideology or idea or hope, will make us move forward?

Is there an unstoppable force that can be brought to bear on this immovable object? If so, what will it be? What is the way forward? And who offers it?

Crimes of History

The Texas Observer does very good work, and this is a very good article on a very overlooked and underappreciated topic. Because one thing we have learned from the past 7 years of Republican control, both in Texas and in the nation, is that crime is what we say it is. As Lisa Turner says in the article:

“You have agents of the attorney general walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It’s about holding on to the levers of power.”

The basis of prosecutorial discretion is that the prosecutor will decided to use the power of the government against those who threaten the peace and security of the community. When that discretion is abused, the legitimacy of the system is called into question. Of course, that system has always been abused; just ask Dr. Martin Luther King. And it has always been used to maintain the status quo of those in power.

That doesn't, however, mean it isn't abuse to use it that way. Texas, like Indiana, had a record turnout for the state's Democratic primary. Shaving a few percentage points may yet make a difference to who remains in power in Texas.

But it's still illegal. And keep reminding yourself this is 2008, not 1964, and remember Tim Russert sought assurances from Barack Obama that, in America, we no longer believe in white superiority and black inferiority. Yeah, right:

According to the Campaign Legal Center’s lawsuit, in which Ray, Johnson, Meeks, McDonald, Hinojosa, and the Texas Democratic Party are plaintiffs, a PowerPoint presentation used by Abbott’s office to train Texas officials was rife with racial stereotypes associating voter fraud with people of color—communities that in recent history have supported Democrats.

“As an introduction to a section of the PowerPoint involving ‘Poll Place Violations,’ a slide depicts a photograph of African-American voters apparently standing in line to vote,” the lawsuit’s complaint said. “Notably, the 71-slide presentation contains no similar photographs of white or Anglo voters casting ballots.

“Another slide in the same PowerPoint presentation, in a section involving tactics for investigating purported voter fraud, is entitled ‘Examine Documents for Fraud.’ That slide states that investigators should look for ‘Unique Stamps’ and shows a prominent picture of a postage stamp known as the ‘sickle cell stamp,’ which depicts an African-American woman and infant,” the complaint said. “The PowerPoint presentation thus communicates the message that minority voters should be the focus of election fraud investigations and prosecutions, particularly under the new 2003 criminal prohibitions.”

And the irony is: the Voting Rights Act was supposed to take care of this kind of thing:

“You have to understand that this would be 20 to 30 percent of the voting ballots from the Democratic Party, because senior citizens cherish the right to vote,” she said. “They remember the poll tax, having to pay it. And they want to vote.”

Maybe we should let Dr. King put this in perspective:

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike (Uh huh) resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; (Yes, sir) they segregated southern churches from Christianity (Yes, sir); they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; (Yes, sir) and they segregated the Negro from everything. (Yes, sir) That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality. (Yes, sir)

The more things change....


...which is not to say we are about to let them change back! But nothing ended in 1964, or in 1965, or in 1968, or in 2008 when 75,000 people turned out to rally for Barack Obama. We have to threaten to unite, again. We have to stay united, and we have to recognize that union will always be threatening. But, as Dr. King said in that speech, God's truth is marching on.

ADDENDUM: I should add that it is common knowledge in Texas that we are only a few years away from becoming a "minority majority" state, so these efforts at voter suppression are more than a little desperate, and ultimately doomed to failure based on sheer demographics alone. Indeed, that is much of the reason for the anti-immigrant hysteria, such as it is, and these problems are perfectly predictable, from a sociological point of view.

That doesn't make them any more palatable, of course, nor any less destructive. The interesting thing here is Texas politics. Texas became a Republican dominated state almost 30 years ago, and yet even the Republican legislature recognized what was coming, and passed a good law requiring the two major state universities (UT-Austin and Texas A&M) to admit the top 10% of all Texas high school graduates, if only to give poor students from poor school districts a chance. Efforts at roll back of that law are underway, and it's a less than perfect law (some of those 10% are truly not prepared for college, but is that their fault, or the fault of the state school system?); but rather than continue on that line, the state GOP has apparently chosen to fight a rearguard action.

Meanwhile, God's truth is marching on.

Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2008

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,

1:2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

1:3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

1:4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

1:6 And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."

1:7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.

1:8 God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

1:9 And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.

1:10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

1:11 Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so.

1:12 The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.

1:13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

1:14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years,

1:15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so.

1:16 God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars.

1:17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth,

1:18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

1:19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

1:20 And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky."

1:21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

1:22 God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."

1:23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

1:24 And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so.

1:25 God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

1:26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."

1:27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

1:28 God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

1:29 God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.

1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.

1:31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.

2:2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.

2:3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

2:4a These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Psalm 8
8:1 O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

8:2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.

8:3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;

8:4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

8:5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

8:6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet,

8:7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

8:8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

8:9 O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

2 Corinthians 13:11-13
13:11 Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

13:12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.

13:13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Matthew 28:16-20
28:16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

28:17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.

28:18 And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

28:20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

And we have forgotten it; DAS is right: we Christians have forgotten that. Or we think Christ is with us, and us alone, and not with those people who don't look like us or don't live like us or don't think like us or don't worship like us, and I mean that person two pews over who you just know is wrong! And you can be sure Christ is not with them! And Christ is not with crazy people like Jeremiah Wright, and Christ is not with anybody who agrees with him, and Christ is not with the pastor when he doesn't say what I want him to say, and when he doesn't make me feel the way I want to feel, and when he doesn't do what I think he should do! Christ is with us, but "us" only means the people who think and act and feel and talk and live and look just like I do!

That's who Christ is with! That's "us"! And Christ is certainly not with our enemies, because then there would be no "us" at all, but only me! and I'd be all alone, and what good would that be? So Christ must be with us, when us is just what I want; and no more. Because life is hard enough as it is; life is tough enough; and I don't need God in my life just making it tougher. No...I don't need that at all.

DAS is right

A faith which just says "love your neighbor" and doesn't guide you toward that goal sets in front of you, it may be argued, a stumbling block before the blind (**) -- also from this last week's parsha. And to say "well you just have failed the impossible test, so you can't achieve salvation (of your own accord)" seems austere to the point of nihilism (c.f. Nietzsche). A pragmatic and graceful God would make it easy on us, not by exempting us from the Law as if we were mere young children, but by being a loving parent and instilling discipline in us as we grow, and to help us grow, spiritually.

We've made ourselves pragmatic, and made a loving God impractical. We've wrung all the good and all the support and all the community out of the gospel message, and we've made it exclusive to people just like us, gathered in a church just like we like, gathered around a pastor just like we wanted, gathered at a time convenient to us, and comfortable to us, and reserved for us. Our little slice of heaven, made just for us. This God's for you!, and if you don't like it, well, send it back, and get another. Every version is freshness dated, so you can be sure it's as fresh a god as you could ever want, and if it gets old and stale, just throw it out, and get another one. Yes, I'm afraid DAS is right.

Not that he meant to be; not that he meant to be harsh or cruel or even critical. But the truth is just like that sometimes; the truth hurts. That's why we don't like the truth. That's why we don't like to listen to anything that sounds like it's aimed at us. That's why we like to be comfortable; but too often, anymore, being comfortable means being alone, means having just what I want, and no one to bother me: it means roads without traffic, which would mean without people; it means stores without crowds; which would mean without people; it means quite neighborhoods where no one drives through, and no strangers ever walk: which means without people. It means a world suited to our comfort, to your comfort, to my comfort: which means a world without people. It means a world like we imagine we used to have, when everyone thought like us and did like us and believed like us and acted like us: which, today, would mean a world without people.

But that's a terrible thing to wish for! Why would someone say those awful things? Why would someone make such awful statements! Why do you say that, pastor? Why do I say that, I ask myself!? What's going on here? What's wrong? What's happened?

What's happened is, we've made the world: we've made it comfortable and convenient and cooperative and complete: and now we have to lie down in it. And it turns out, it ain't no bed of roses. Because Jesus tells us: "Love your enemy." But if we do that, we'll be left all alone. Because everyone who disturbs our comfort; everyone who challenges our beliefs; everyone who doesn't let us think we, and the few people left like us, are the only people in the world, is our enemy. And if we love them, then we'd have to love everybody! And we can't do that! Only God can do that! And besides, we don't know anybody who even tries to do that! So how can we do that!? How can we even think to do that!?

Precisely. No one tries to do that. Only God tries to do that. God who is the Creator, who made everything, and saw that it was good. God who loved Creation into being with just a word, and blessed it, and saw it was good. God who made day and night; and it was good; and plants and trees, and saw it was good; God who made fish and birds, and animals and creeping things, and finally human beings, and each time saw: it was good. Which is why God loves God's enemies: because in Creation, everything is good; even enemies of God. God doesn't need us to love; but we need God. And that is good.

But we don't turn to God: we turn to our power over plants and trees and fish and birds and animals and every creeping thing, even over day and night: and we look at our creation, and we say that it is good. And then we never rest. We go inside our houses, and our cars, and the other products of our creation, and we ignore God's creation, or mine it, and strip it, and abuse it, and burn it, and destroy it, and tear at it, and we declare only our work good, and on the work of others like us good, and the work we don't like is not good, and the people we don't like are not good, and those people are not across the world or across the continent or in other countries they are...right next to us. In the pews, in our streets, in the stores, in the city: the city we have made this way. And we say that our city is good, and our life is good, and we ourselves are good: but we are only good by declaring other cities and other places and other people, even on our streets, even in our stores, even in our churches, not good. And there we are. We cannot turn to God, because we don’t know how: because all we expect from God is that God tell us we are good, and everything we do is good, and that can only mean everyone not like us is not good, because that proves we are good, that makes us better! Miserable creatures that we are, who is there to free us from this imprisonment? How are we to free ourselves?

We can’t do it alone; but we insist on living alone. We can’t do it by ourselves, but we insist on doing everything by ourselves. The neighbor with the overgrown lawn is a lazy neighbor; the neighbor who stays up all night working on car in the garage is an obnoxious neighbor; the neighbor whose teenage daughter is pregnant again is an immoral neighbor. The neighbor whose skin color is not like mine, whose language is not like mine, who doesn’t live like I do, is not my neighbor. My neighbors are the people who make me comfortable; and if I only find them in church, then those people are “neighbor” to me. But more and more, even those people don’t think like I do, don’t believe like I do, don’t live like I do. How am I to love my neighbor, much less my enemy, when they refuse to be like me?

13:11 Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.
13:12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
13:13 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Yes, that must be nice; but Paul must have been talking to special people, to people who all agreed and all thought like he did and were already living in peace; who didn’t have to contend with different languages and customs and rules, who knew what was right and just did it! Surely the people who live right finally receive the peace of God as their blessing. Surely; except we know it wasn’t that way. Paul taught that everyone was equal, in a day when children never ate with their parents, and women were never in the same room as men, not even a wife when her husband had friends over; and slaves ate in their quarters, and never with the family. Paul taught that everyone was equal in Christ, and that meant Mom and Dad and the children and the slaves and the grandparents and…well, everybody! And they accepted that, when no one else in town did. And they lived in peace, and the God of love and peace was with them. But the neighbors thought they were crazy.

Greet one another with a holy kiss. What would it be like to do that today? Greet everyone here in church that way? Or on the street? In the store? Over coffee? All the saints would greet you, but what would everyone else say? Would the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you, even as your friends decided you must be crazy? Even as your enemies in church, in life, decided you had gone insane? I mean, if everybody did that, if just every Christian did that, what kind of world would this be?

Yes. Precisely. What kind of world would this be? We were told to go and make a community, disciples of all nations, meaning followers no matter who they were: no matter race or national origin or place or language. We were told to find and build a community, and promised that Jesus would be with us always, to the end of the age. And what community have we built? What support have we given each other for the hard work of faith, of believing, of loving our enemy and seeing that Creation is indeed good? If Christ came in the doors today to ask us, what would we say?

Maybe we could say we were about to get to it; that we’ll get to it right away. That this Trinity Sunday, the day we honor Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, we set aside as the day of remembrance that we are together in Christ, and that the work to be done we can do together: that all the saints greet us, and guide us on our way. If we would just greet each other in peace, and accept their teaching, and accept their community, and God’s grace.

Much to be done; and we can begin today. We can begin with prayer, and study. There is a cloud of witness around us, ready to be our guide. Nothing is left to us alone. They are here; we can ask them. God is with us. It is good.

Amen.

Trinity Sunday 2008

I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation.

I arise today through the strength of Christ with his Baptism, through the strength of His Crucifixion with His Burial through the strength of His Resurrection with His Ascension, through the strength of His descent for the Judgement of Doom.

I arise today through the strength of the love of Cherubim in obedience of Angels, in the service of the Archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet with reward, in prayers of Patriarchs, in predictions of Prophets, in preachings of Apostles, in faiths of Confessors, in innocence of Holy Virgins, in deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through the strength of Heaven; light of Sun, brilliance of Moon, splendour of Fire, speed of Lightning, swiftness of Wind, depth of Sea, stability of Earth, firmness of Rock.

I arise today, through God's strength to pilot me: God's might to uphold me, God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to look before me, God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me, God's shield to protect me, God's host to secure me: against snares of devils, against temptations of vices, against inclinations of nature, against everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and anear, alone and in a crowd.

I summon today all these powers between me (and these evils): against every cruel and merciless power that may oppose my body and my soul, against incantations of false prophets, against black laws of heathenry, against false laws of heretics, against craft of idolatry, against spells of witches, smiths and wizards, against every knowledge that endangers man's body and soul.
Christ to protect me today against poisoning, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come abundance in reward.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

One More Reason I Love the Intertubes

The pleasure of watching a journalist tell this President to "Shut the hell up!" is not to be dismissed lightly.

Send in the Clowns

Futility, utter futility, says the Speaker, everything is futile. What does anyone profit from all his labour and toil here under the sun? Generations come and generations go, whil the earth endures forever.

All things are wearisome. No one can describe them all, no eye can see them all, no ear can hear them all. What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it can be said, 'Look, this is new?' No, it was already in existence, long before our time. Those who lived in the past are not remembered, and those who follow will not be remembered by those who follow them.--Ecclesiastes 1: 2-4, 8-11

I'm not going to argue with David Brooks. I'm simply going to examine some of what he says, and consider it in light of the larger discussion, the one most people never seem to be privy to. Start with the last few paragraphs of his NYT column today:

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.

Or, as Anti-Climacus put it 150 years ago:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.

If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation.

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established itself, then there could only be one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.

Just to say, we've been down this road already. Yes, there is still a fight going on in philosophical circles over Descarte's "ghost in the machine" (itself a derisive term meant to remove the metaphor of the "soul" sitting in the mortal shell of the body from Western philosophical discourse), but the idea actually goes all the way back to Plato's Phaedo, and try as we might, we can't seem to dislodge dualism from our Western thinking. I've seen great claims for neuroscience having done that on the "Philosophy" shelves at Barnes & Noble, but somehow I don't think that revolution in thinking (replacing dualism would truly represent a major shift in Western thought) has happened yet; nor is it likely to anytime soon. But the very question of the self itself? The discussion predates Freud (who broke us up into Id, ego, and superego) and has long ago moved away from his categories (we still like to talk vaguely of our subconscious, the realm that either makes us behave insanely, or reveals the hidden truths we prefer to bury; such is the confusion of our discussion). At any rate: the self is relational? And we needed science to tell us this?

More likely science is simply reflecting the dominant paradigms of Western thought. After all, if you don't know what you are looking for, you can't find it. Even science understands that. One point, then, for Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms."

Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.

Not something I didn't learn before I went to seminary, actually. And didn't we learn this from anthropology by now? Indeed, the basis of structuralism is that all human societies have more in common than they have in distinction. Neuroscience may add to that understanding, but it only does so by confirming the paradigm structuralism (at least) has handed to it. Which brings me, skeptic that I am, back to Kuhn. But it takes the neuroscientists on to the experience of the sacred, which, since they can see it on an instrument, means it must be real!

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Well, the leap from third to fourth is practically a "leap of faith." I won't argue with it, so much as argue the necessary connection ain't necessarily there. But what is the difference between the testimony of a Julian of Norwich or a Teresa of Avila, and a neuroscientist, except the paradigms they approach the experience from? We are supposed to eschew subjectivity in favor of objectivity, but what is Freudian psychology except the elevation of the subjective to science? Which, of course, is why Freudian psychology is no longer in favor, but what other theory of the psyche so well explains our "inner" (itself a term of Cartesian dualism) life? The Humean answer that we are merely a bundle of neural responses leaves us still begging the question: what is responding, and why does it feel so much like a "self"? Because the responses themselves are a relationship?

Huh. Still feels like science-fiction to me.*

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate.

Actually, that's the stupid debate; but that's hardly Mr. Brooks' fault, and I understand why he brings it up here. Still, he brushes that aside in favor of what he considers "the real challenge":

The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

Or from Christian monks like Thomas Merton, or mystics like Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, or Hildegard von Bingen. Mystics have a disturbing tendency to move away from "cultural artifacts" as their experience of the Divine increases. It's why most churches generally prefer to keep their mystics on a very short leash, one the mystics are always slipping off. And then there are the philosophers of religion, and the theologians. But these are three groups nobody listens to, because they don't have government funding and laboratories and white coats. Or maybe because nobody makes movies about mad monks who want to take over the world, or theologians who want create artifical life, or mystics who unleash deadly viruses that turn us all in to zombies. Or something.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.

Let me slow down that onrushing train of thought right here, and point out that "revelation" as a source of knowledge is a debate that goes back to the first encounter between the Hebraic (or Semitic, if you prefer) cultures, and the Hellenistic (or Greek). The former relied on revelation, the latter on discovery; hence the Hellenistic preference for reason over all other areas of human mental endeavor. Or maybe that preference lead to the preference for discovery; it's a chicken-or-egg question we don't really need to tarry over. And revelation is not limited to "that which is revealed by the Divine." Buddhism is no less interested in revelation than Christianity, although Buddhism would radically suppress any consideration for a divinity in the orthodox Christian sense. And as for science and religion joining hands, well, theology was once seriously considered the mother of all the sciences. Everything old really is new again.

There's a delicious irony in this oncoming debate, because even as science says we must not rely on individual experience (i.e., subjectivity), it is being understood as reinforcing individual experience (thought waves exhibit evidence of the transcendent!). Individual experience, of course, is what American culture is all about ("This Bud's for you!"), and that emphasis on the individual arises, not from scientific reasoning, but from the reaction to scientific reasoning and the technology it produced in 18th and 19th century Europe: Romanticism. Once set up in opposition to science (Frankenstein is the prototype of the mad scientist, but his ancestor was Goethe's Faust; both Romantic heroes defying nature and fate), science now employs the tenets of Romanticism to explain data it gathers with its new technologies ("Magnetic helmets"!). So how much progress are we making, really? This much, apparently:

Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Reckon I should send Mr. Brooks a copy of Bultmann's work from the early 20th century? Or introduce him to the German Biblical scholarship of the 19th century, itself a "scientific" endeavor that discovered a great deal about the Bible, and exposed a great many errors in our assumptions about its provenance? Indeed, it was the cultural effects of that "scientific revolution" which spawned fundamentalism, just as the technology science gave the West (the "Guns" and "Steel" of Guns, Germs, and Steel) prompted Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East (although, interestingly, not among the majority of the world's Muslims, who don't live in the Middle East). Or should I just direct him to Ecclesiastes?

One further warning, my son: there is no end to the writing of books, and much study is wearisome.

Amen, brother. Amen.

*I should explain. Clark's story, "Dial "F" for Frankenstein," rests on the premise he mentions in that interview: complexity gives rise to life (a variant on the "And then a miracle occurs" in step two of the famous cartoon). The idea of the story was that, given sufficient interconnection of telephones, a "mind" would result, which, rather like HAL, would make its own decisions about what is best. Any day now, the Internet's gonna wake up; just waitin' for that last person to log on; and...it could be you!

Or, maybe not.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

Once or twice before, I've mentioned a picture published in the UCNews, the "house organ" of the United Church of Christ. In an odd moment of serendipity, I found that picture at last, over at Sadly, No. Here it is:



It's even more horrific in color than it was in black and white. But this is war; this is reality. This is what we do to other people in the name of national security, or freedom, or revenge, or self-preservation. This is "collateral damage," this is the face of the "unfortunate" families we apologize to when our "smart bombs" aren't smart as we are sure they must be. These are the people hurt when George W. Bush says "bring 'em on." When Bush says this:

“Kick ass!” Bush said. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!”

And this:

“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way,” Sanchez quoted the president as saying. “Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking.”

This is what results. This is what he is not blinking at.

I've recently received an e-mail, one that purports to tell me the sender declines to engage in "guilt by association," but he has found a website on the "truth" about William Ayres, whom Obama, per the e-mail, now considers "mainstream." I deleted the e-mail as cleverly disguised spam, but couldn't help thinking: why is Bill Ayers still subject to vilification 40 years later, but when George Bush does this over 1 million times, for both Iraqis and US soldiers (IED's are no less destructive than smart bombs, no less reprehensible), why isn't he hounded to the edges of respectful society and considered a pariah to the end of his days?

Yeah, that's right, it's about Moms today....

I am so using this because Athenae did:



And because it's my favorite Kate Bush song evah!

"Oooh, it's hard on the man/now his part is over/Now starts the craft/of the father..."

A truer experince of being a parent was never set to music. Makes you want to hug your mother, it does. By the way, don't tell her "Happy Mother's Day." It's too late now: you've bought her the card, you've sent her the flowers (heaven help you if you didn't!). Maybe you took her to brunch (heaven help you if you did! What were you thinking?)

Just let her know you still love her.

Now I got somethin' in my eye......