Ash Wednesday, 2008

You can't conceive, my child, nor I nor anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.--Graham Greene

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
2:1 Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, it is near-

2:2 a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.

2:12 Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

2:13 rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.

2:14 Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the LORD, your God?

2:15 Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly;

2:16 gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy.

2:17 Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep. Let them say, "Spare your people, O LORD, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'"

Isaiah 58:1-12
58:1 Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.

58:2 Yet day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God.

58:3 "Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?" Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.

58:4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.

58:5 Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?

58:6 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

58:7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

58:8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

58:9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

58:10 if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.

58:11 The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

58:12 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

Psalm 51:1-17

1:1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

1:2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

1:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

1:4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

1:5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

1:6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

1:7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

1:8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.

1:9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

1:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

1:11 Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

1:12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

1:13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.

1:14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

1:15 O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.

1:16 For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

1:17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

5:20b We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

6:1 As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain.

6:2 For he says, "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!

6:3 We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry,

6:4 but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities,

6:5 beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger;

6:6 by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love,

6:7 truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left;

6:8 in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;

6:9 as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see--we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed;

6:10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

6:1 "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

6:2 "So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

6:3 But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

6:4 so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

6:5 "And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

6:6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

6:16 "And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

6:17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face,

6:18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

6:19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal;

6:20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.

6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

All the triumphant Christianity should die right here. It should crumple against these words like a speeding car against a brick wall. If it sees itself as an unstoppable force, this is the immovable object it impacts, and who wins? And all the obsequious, timid, too scared to speak itself to anyone Christianity, should accept the mark of ash with pride, and get off its knees, and stand up and blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound the alarm on God's holy mountain, and remember the Lord is gracious and merciful and slow to anger and full of steadfast love, should remember that even humility can be selfishness, that too much contrition can make must as much a stone of the heart as too much triumph. No, this is not a day for humiliation, nor for victory. This is a day for restoring the balance. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it, and accept our ashes as the turn from Epiphany to responsibility. We must accept them graciously. By the end, we will have too much responsibility to bear. This is not a day for weeping, This is a day the Lord has made. This is a day to begin, again.

Someone challenged me, once, when I had used the 51st Psalm in worship. They challenged me about verse 15: "Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me." They wondered if that meant an infant was born in sin, born damned, corrupted, doomed from birth to hell. I didn't give a very good answer then. I can give a better one now. We have made sin the essential postulate of salvation, and so over centuries have put such a burden on the word as to make it a concept we dare not mention. "Sin" is ultimate condemnation. But it isn't. Sin is error; sin is doing what does not promote life. Sin is mistake and misdirection. If I am a sinner from my mother's womb, it is not because I participate in sin by the act of procreation, nor that sin is passed to me as my blue eyes and brown hair were from my parents. If I am born into sin, it is because I am prone to error, born in a condition in which mistakes will be made, created in a world in which I need direction, but am unlikely to take it. That's why I need to be purged with hyssop and washed clean, so my light will break forth, so the goodness that God gives will glow on the paths of all those who know me, all those who see me. I need to come and confess and be made clean, so I can be made whole. And I need to do this in the presence of the blessed community, in the public act of worship. I need to share this.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

This is the fast God chooses; the fast that means I am sharing with my brother and sister, not hoarding while I pride myself on my self-restraint, on my ability to know what it is to go hungry when my pantry is full, to be thirsty when I have more cups than I can drink from in a day, more plates than I can use in a week, so much food I will throw some out if I don't stuff myself with it now. That is why I need guidance, direction, to be washed clean by God: so I will see and know my sister and my brother and share my food with them, bring Carnival to my soul by sharing panem and carnem with those who have neither. Farewell to me, but hello to them. This is the feast the Lord desires.

Humility that is aimed at me is now that God desires. Humility that is aimed at hospitality, at opening my home to the stranger, at making what is mine available to someone else in need, that is the wisdom of God. "You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart." That is the wisdom God would teach to my secret heart, if I will only open it, if I will only humble it and listen.

What reward then, should I look for? Feasting and drinking and celebration are their own reward, but the works of humility are done in secret, so that God and not humankind will reward me. But what reward will that be? In the hereafter, in the sweet bye and bye, in the kingdom yet to come? Perhaps. Seems a long time to wait, and the rewards here are so plentiful and so easily taken. But what greater reward is there than kindness and openness and hospitality? If we have to account for every good thing we might have enjoyed and did not, what reward will we have for that? Pleasures are neither sins nor selfish, but selfish pleasures are sins indeed.Can I be washed of my sins and still enjoy my pleasures? Can I be led by God and still be free?

We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry,

but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities,

beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger;

by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love,

truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left;

in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;

as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see--we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed;

as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

But this everything is clearly "a condition of complete simplicity,/ costing not less than everything." That is quite a price to pay. Surely Ash Wednesday is about the price to pay, too. Surely that is the obstacle in the way. Surely there is no such thing as a free lunch!

Of course, there is not. But think of the price you are paying now, the interest accumulating on the debt you owe each other that can never be paid in full, the endless rounds of gift and exchange that can never be ended except by a violent irruption into the cycle! And how do you ever do that?! Without a complete interruption, without festival and celebration leading to humility and penitence, what hope is there?

Who is this who has said:
The house of God is a House of Sorrow,
We must walk in black and go sadly, with longdrawn faces,
We must go between empty walls, quavering lowly, whispering faintly,
Among a few flickering scattered lights?
They would put upon GOD their own sorrow, the grief they should feel
For their sins and faults as they go about their daily occasions.
Yet they walk in the street proudnecked,like thoroughbreds ready for races,
Adorning themselves, and busy in the market, the forum,
And all other secular meetings.
Thinking good of themselves, ready for any festivity,
Doing themselves very well.
Let us mourn in a private chamber, learning the way of pentitence,
And then let us learn the joyful communion of saints.--T.S. Eliot

Mourning we can do in private; indeed, when we mourn for ourselves, we have been instructed to keep it a secret. But the communion of saints can only be shared, can only be public. We cannot commune privately, individually, in our closed rooms. And we cannot learn from the saints by cutting ourselves off from the sinners, from the others as miserable and joyful, as misery-making and inspiring, as we are. Even Ash Wednesday is a day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it, and the pleasures it offers.

In some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes barefoot. Going barefoot is a joyous thing. It is good to fell the floor or the earth under your feet. It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes. One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway. Prayer is so much more meaningful without them. It would be good to take them off in church all the time. But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions. Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.--Thomas Merton

Rune before prayer (from Carmina Gadelica)

I am bending my knee
In the eye of the Father who created me,
In the eye of the Son who purchased me,
In the eye of the Spirit who cleansed me,
In friendship and affection.

Through Thine own and Anointed One, O God,
Bestow upon us fullness in our need,
Love towards God,
The affection of God,
The smile of God,
The wisdom of God,
The grace of God,
The fear of God,
And the will of God.

To do on the world of the Three,
As angels and saints
Do in heaven;
Each shade and light
Each day and night,
Each time in kindness,
Give Thou us Thy Spirit.

Amen.

The painting is "Ash Wednesday" by Carl Spitzweig.

Mardi Gras 2008

There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment, for these are from the hand of God.--Ecclesiastes 2:24

"Carnival celebrates the unity of our human race as mortal creatures who come into this world and depart from it without our consent, who must eat, drink, defecate, belch, and break wind in order to live, and procreate if our species is to survive. Our feelings about this are ambiguous. To us as individuals, it is a cause for rejoicing that we are not alone, that all of us, irrespective of age or sex or rank or talent, are in the same boat"--W.H. Auden

We shall have mead,
We shall have wine,
We shall have feast.
We shall have sweetness and milk,
Honey and milk,
Wholesome ambrosia,
Abundance of that,
Abundance of that.

We shall have harp,
We shall have lute,
We shall have horn.
We shall have sweet psaltery
of the melodious strings
and the regal lyre,
Of the songs we shall have
Of the songs we shall have.

And the King of kings,
and Jesus Christ,
and the Spirit of Peace,
and of grace be with us,
Of grace be with us.--Celtic Blessing on Ash Eve

One will have to give account in the judgment day of every good thing which one might have enjoyed and did not.--The Talmud

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace

Reading this:

The belief that the ethic of force will last forever is a presumption of the totalitarian mind. It says: none of the lights of the old morality can guide us through our latest plans. It says: our dangers are unprecedented, and so are the methods we must employ. This cry is heard on many sides, in America, while the world looks on dismayed, because they have never seen us like this before, and they can trace no proportion between the cause and the effects.

At the end of an otherwise excellent analysis of Attorney General Mukasey's "legal analysis" of torture, all I can think is: "Oh, please."

Start with the Native Americans, who were here and treated to every form of brutality we could muster for over 400 years. One of Columbus's first acts was to make slaves of the people he found here. Slavery became the theme of this country, and we soon had to import them, running a profitable trade in rum from the West Indies to Europe, and slaves from Africa to America. (Makes that logo bitterly ironic, doesn't it?) That lasted 300 years, and we're still working out the consequences of it. Then there is the sordid history of the Cold War, and what we did in Central and South America. School of the Americas ring a bell for anyone? That's their logo at the top of the post. And while the name has changed, the school still functions.

The world has never seen us like this before? No; finally, we see ourselves as the world sees us. Finally the part of the world that matters, i.e., Europe, Australia, Japan, sees us for what we are. Finally, we are beginning to care. Or are we? Anyone calling for Mukasey's impeachment? Any Senator denounce him last week?

I didn't hear about it, either.

Would it be torture if it were done to you? Is that what it takes to make us see? At least Simeon was a good and holy man, and when he saw the truth, it was a blessing.

Candlemas 2008

I almost let the day slip by without recovering this (those who don't live in God's Time Zone, i.e., Texas, will say I'm too late! Hah!, sez I!) There is, as usual, some information out there which strikes me as ridiculous about the origins of this day, one I know more from the Church of England than any other source, and that only because I have a copy of The Oxford Book of Christmas Poems which includes this Robert Herrick poem about the custom of taking down the greenery on Candlemas Eve (and not before!).

CEREMONY UPON CANDLEMAS EVE

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas hall;
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.

From the ridiculous to the sublime, Google presents me with this link which attaches Candlemas rigidly to two "pagan" holidays out of Ireland, and to St. Brigit. Well, maybe, except for the fact New Advent links the date of Candlemas to Mosaic law, which seems a slightly more plausible reason for making it February 2nd. As New Advent notes, the earliest attestation to any observation of the day is in the Jerusalem church, where the event was observed on February 14th, meaning Christ's birthday was, as at least one version of The Cherry Tree Carol has it, on Epiphany, not December 25th. (Interestingly, that carol has roots in Pseudo-Matthew, where it's a palm tree, not a cherry tree (of course), something I didn't know, but suspected. Chapter 20, if you're wondering. Interesting how these "apocryphal" stories persist, isn't it?)

Anyway, the folklore connected with this day is that now, finally, Christmas is over, because the last public act of Christ the child is conducted. This is a very appropriate day for the Nunc Dimmitus, the last song of Luke's four songs related to the nativity, which Luke originally wrote like this:

Νϋν άπολύεις τον δοϋλον σου, δέσποτα,
κατά τό πήμά έν είρήνη
οτι είδον οί όφθαλμοί μου τό σωτήριόν σου
ό ήτοίμασας κατά πρόσωπον πάντων τώυ λαϖν
φϖς είς άποκάλυψιν έθνϖν
καί δόξα νλαοϋ σου ‘Ισραήλ

I mention this because here, at the end of the celebration, comes the άποκάλυψιν, the apocalypse, again. What Simeon sings is that this child, presented at the Temple, will be a revelation, an "apocalypse," to the έθνϖν, the "ethnown," the Gentiles. People like Luke. People like most of us. Lord, now let us depart in peace.

And Ash Wednesday already just around the corner I do not hope to turn....

Ecce Homo

It was 40 years ago today...


The famous image from Vietnam that "helped change American opinion of the Vietnam War."

Steve Inskeep ended his comment on this picture and its history saying it showed Americans "the brutality of war." As if war were a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake. When, in fact, war is human; all too human.

It isn't war that is brutal. It is our acceptance of war that is brutal. After the debacle of Vietnam, I was sure this country would think long and hard before going into war again. Instead, it is as we'd been warned: when you have a standing army, you have to find something to do with it. If you don't have a war, you start one. All those soldiers standing around, and all that weaponry, makes the trigger finger itchy. Even our "liberal" Democratic candidates now have to vie for the coveted title of "Commander in Chief." I don't remember Kennedy, or LBJ, or Nixon, or even Reagan, Bush, or Clinton, running to be "Commander in Chief," but that has become the distinctive designation of the President now. It's only the last inevitable shift following our decades long, now generations long, insistence on having a standing army and keeping the weapons of war primed and ready.

It isn't war that is hell. It's our acceptance of war. It isn't war that is brutal. It is people who are brutal; and our acceptance of war as a condition of our existence; the same way we accept poverty, and hunger, and homelessness. It doesn't have to be this way. That we let it be this way, is what is brutal.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Change is the new pink

"Classic--a book which everyone praises, and no one reads."--Mark Twain

Martin Luther King is in danger of becoming a classic, so I want to consider the words of a man who really stood for change. His sermon on 31 March 1968 was: Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution . He took as his text Revelation 21, and he started off with the story of Rip Van Winkle who slept through the American Revolution, a revolution which, as Dr. King noted, changed history.

First, think about how truly frightening this statement is (and the fact that it was made over 40 years ago; there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun):

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away."

Why do I call it "frightening"? Because I learned in ministry that the one thing people do not want, is change. We all say we do. We all claim we want to be different, that "change" is good, that "improved" is better than the status quo, that we have to "move forward" toward an undefined goal which is always identified as better than what we have now.

And yet nobody wants that.

What we want is what we have: the familiar, the known, the same cereal/soap/politics/spirituality, just in a shinier, re-designed, labeled "NEW & IMPROVED!" box. We don't want something we've never had before; we want more of what we know. I look back over the 40+ years I've been observing/participating in American politics, and I realize no real change was ever in the offing. The ending of the interminable Vietnam War was supposed to change things, finally. A generation later, here we are again. The Civil Rights struggle was supposed to change how we talk about race in this country. 40 years after the death of Dr. King, the hidden wound of racism in America means we still discuss the candidacy of Barack Obama in terms of race. Some support him simply because of race, others say almost any criticism of him is inherently about race; and how does one argue they are wrong? Any attempt to slap that tar baby just gets you mired more deeply in that which you assure yourself you don't participate in. Change is the most frightening thing of all. It is a frightening thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that is taking place in the world today.

But Dr. King could speak words of reassurance as well as challenge, something seldom heard from public officials today (and almost never heard from politicians). Change can be what happens to us; or it can be what helps us in our predicaments. The impact of "automation and cybermation" makes it possible for you to read these words right now, for me to access the sermons of Dr. King and read them again and again, even to listen to them. Change can certainly be a good thing, but that kind of change, again, largely happens to us, not with us. Someone brought us computers, the internet, blogs; and we took them and accepted them and adopted them. "And there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away." And still nobody wants that. Look; look at how much has not changed:

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I’ve seen it in Latin America; I’ve seen it in Africa; I’ve seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God’s children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, "I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The federal government hadn’t funded them, but they were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they unemployed, they didn’t get any kind of income—no old-age pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that’s about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

The hidden wound is racism; but the hidden wound is also denial. We willfully inflict this wound on ourselves everytime we deny the reality of poverty, of sin, of selfishness and evil. Two words in there are theological ones, and perhaps are too freighted to be included in that catalogue. But they are not just concepts; they are realities as much as selfishness and denial are realities. Still, Dr. King puts it just a bit better, when he introduces the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and he points out that the rich man didn't go to hell becaus he was rich:

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

Dives went to hell because of his sin; because he was selfish; because his selfishness was evil.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

Does this mean hell is a place, and the country itself will end up there? Not at all; but can anyone who has observed the national scene for the past 7 years seriously argue that the country hasn't gone to hell, and that our national selfishness, our pursuit of evil to ostensibly defeat evil, hasn't taken us there? We can quibble about the terminology, or we can focus on the reality. But don't take my word for it; consider the words of Dr. King:

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That’s the question facing America today.

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Auden famously removed his poem "September 1, 1939" from his canon because it ends with the line: "We must love one another, or die." "That's a damned lie," he explained; "we are going to die anyway." But there is physical death, and there is spiritual death, and the choice between nonviolence and nonexistence presents both to us. But one comes individually, and as a nation we are clearly willing to pay that price over and over again. The spiritual price, however, is another matter. That's the one we don't even acknowledge paying anymore; that's the one we're almost not permitted to acknowledge paying. I can't help but wonder, if Dr. King were to preach this sermon today: would the IRS investigate the church he preached in, for violating its 501(a) status*?

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

I've let Dr. King's words to most of the talking here as, indeed, how could I not? But his words speak to us today as much as they spoke to his audience 40 years ago. If change is the new good we seek, and certainly change from the political status quo of this country is a good thing, a desirable goal, what kind of change do we seek? "New styles of architecture/A change of heart," as Auden once described it? Or something more fundamental, more radical, something digging down to the root and seeking replacement, not just redecoration? "Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away." That is God speaking, not us. That is not the voice of the politician, or the preacher, or the pundit, or the blogger; that is the voice of the Almighty, and when God says all things are new, former things have passed away, who are we to cling to those former things and insist this "new" not include them? We want the box to be new, but the cereal inside to be the same; the soap inside to be familiar; the politics and policies to continue the status quo. Most of all, we want to be safe, to be assured the future will look like the past, and deviate from the present only by leaving what we don't like, behind. But as Dr. King never tired of pointing out, there are very few times in history when we have that luxury; and this time, is not one of them, either:

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.

Our goodwill is not proven by how well we take care of ourselves, or our own; it is not proven by how secure we are in our goods, in our possessions, in our comforts, even in our opinions. We are sleeping through the revolution if we don't realize the revolution must include a change in our hearts and minds also, that everything old must pass away in order to realize, to see, the new that is being made.

The words from Revelation Dr. King cites come at the end of the long symbolic descriptions of destruction and judgment that book is famous for. Dr. King makes no reference to that theme, but it is an important one. Just as there is no Easter without Good Friday, there is no new heaven and new earth without the destruction of the old heaven and old earth, and the hope is in the redemption after the calamity, not in avoiding the calamity altogether. Revelation is about how unjust the world is, and about how God will ultimately bring justice. The Greek idea of John's culture was that creation would return to chaos; while John saw that creation would ultimately be redeemed by justice. The idea that science or nature (evolution) leads inexorably to a telos or even makes progress, is rooted in John's assurance that all things shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Even our science, our knowledge, is rooted in this confidence, despite the chaos our senses percieve and history teaches. So we don't have to speak in terms of sin and evil and salvation, in order to understand justice and morality, or even to pursue ethics. But we do need to understand: the problems that face us today are the problems that faced us 40 years ago, are the problems that have faced us for millenia. And the only valid response to them, the only proper answer, is a massive act of conscience, and the agreement, the confession, that we aren't going to follow the old ways, anymore. And we aren't going to sleep through this revolution; because if we do, there'll be no revolution at all. And we'll have only ourselves to blame, for that.





*King's sermon was given at the National Cathedral, an Episcopal church. Coincidence? I think not.

I am lazy and indolent at the moment

so all I can say is: what Barbara Ehrenreich said:

All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being. We’ve seen the economy grow without wage gains; we’ve seen productivity grow without wage gains. We’ve even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life “on the ground,” where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they’ve taken to talking about “the real economy.” If there’s a “real economy,” then what in the hell is “the economy”?

Once it was real-er, this economy that we have. But that was before we got polarized into the rich, the poor, and the sinking middle class. Gross social inequality is what has “de-coupled” growth and productivity from wage gains for the average household. As far as I can tell, “the economy,” as opposed to the “real economy,” is the realm of investment, and is occupied by people who live on interest and dividends instead of salaries and wages, aka the rich.

So I’m proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are in most in need of help. Yes, when a parent can afford to buy Enfamil, it helps the Enfamil company and no doubt “the economy” too. But let’s not throw out the baby with the sensual bubble bath of “stimulus.” In any ordinary moral calculus, the baby comes first.

(I especially like her metaphor for the economic "stimulus" package, but this is a family blog...sort of...so you can read the whole thing for yourself. And "moral calculus" in a discussion of economics; what a concept! I feel so, so..."radical" and 19th century and all!)

"Good fences make good neighbors"

On the occassion of repairing/replacing a section of fence (the one between our lot and the neighbor's), I wonder why we often mock the sentiment of Frost's neighbor (along with Frost), yet when we speak of repairing old relationships, or damaged ones, we call it: "Fence mending"?

"I too have sailed the world, and seen it's wonders

for the cruelty of man is as wondrous as Peru/But there's no place like....!"--Sweeney Todd

Interesting. Scout Prime is right:

So now Mississippians are in the same boat as New Orleanians. Once upon a time they were applauded for pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and now they are lazy begging losers in a loser state. It really was inevitable. When reality can be twisted once it can be twisted again and again. And as I feared, being caught in the middle and used in a false narrative is a dangerous proposition and so very cruel in the end......

She is responding to comments on an article about the troubled recovery of Pearlington, Mississippi, comments like this one:

MY GOD! Get up off your butts and do the work yoursevles and quit begging and depending on everyone else in the country to keep taking care of you. For all the sake in the world, get jobs wherever you have to. Get out of that losing state if you have to. Get a life for real. It's been three, do you hear me, three years that the rest of the country has taken care of you and we are sick of it.

And this one:

So, according to these posts, Pearlington is a soup bowl filled with crime, drugs and lazy, stupid idiots who look for handouts, and play the blame game. Huh, sounds like New Orleans.

But in another post, she also links to this:

As informed citizens who study the past, historians have a unique opportunity, and thus a particular obligation, to make the present comprehensible in terms of what has gone before. Like any occurrence in the here and now, Hurricane Katrina derives its meaning partly from contemporary circumstances and partly from perceptions that are shaped by accumulated experience, or what is sometimes called historical memory. The relationship between Katrina and its historical context is, of course, dynamic and recipro cal. As historians have long recognized, current events—especially traumatic shocks that disrupt the status quo—alter our perceptions of the past. In the shadow of human catas trophes, scholars are pushed to formulate new questions and to revisit old orthodoxies as they probe for fresh meaning in what Robert Coles has described as “that flow of human affairs that gets called history.”[1]

But as the comments about Pearlington seem to establish, the conversation on Katrina in its historical context seems to be one only professional historians and a few other scholars can have.

We are a country which has always preferred false narratives. The West was "won" by independent pioneers free of governmental restraint. Except the land west of the Mississippi was settled by people given land grants and incentives by the Federal government to claim and settle the Louisiana Purchase made by Jefferson, and the railroads that eventually linked the continent were built on government land grants and at government urging. The capital expense would have been too great for private enterprise, the return on investment too slow and uncertain. Slavery itself was poverty enforced and insured by government backing, and it was the string of forts, established by the federal government, stretching from San Antonio, Texas, along El Camino Real, that made settlement and trade possible from Texas to California through the northern Sonoran desert. Without those forts, few would have ventured into that wilderness.

But the dime novel mythology of rugged independence dies hard. We all know American history, and we all know it chiefly involved John Wayne; just as we all know Texas looks like Southern California, or perhaps the Trans-Pecos region or the Davis Mountains. Most people don't even realize how big Texas is, much less how varied its climates and geography are. From the Gulf Coast to El Paso is nearly half-way to California, and you haven't left Texas yet, yet you've gone from sea level grasslands to high desert. Then there are the stories (recounted when Bill Richardson first announced he would run for President) about New Mexico, and how many Americans don't realize that's a state of the Union, not a designation for a foreign country. Ignorant as we are of simple geography, or even the states of the Union, how surprising is it that our history comes from Hollywood? And on and on it goes.

We are not very good at history, and empathy is even harder. Empathy is commonly considered a particularly Christian trait, but empathy has little to do with the commandments of Christ to his followers. Jesus never said "feel sorry for the poor and the destitute, so you will be moved to help them." He simply made it a commandment. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, take care of the unjust as well as the just, in the same way that God makes the rain fall on both of them (rain, of course, being a valuable commodity in a desert culture). Empathy, sympathy, having the "bowels of compassion" as the phrase would come to be, being emotionally motivated, in other words, had nothing to do with it:

But to you who listen I say, love your enemies, do favors for those who hate you, bless those ho curse you, pray for your abusers.

Give to everyone who begs from you, and when someone takes your things, don't ask for them back.

If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? After all, even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what merit is there in that? After all, even sinners do as much. If you lend to those from whom you hope to gain, what merit is there in that? Even sinners lend to sinners, in order to get as much in return. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. You reward will be great, and you'll be children of the Most High. As you know, the Most High is generous to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be compassionate in the way your Father is compassionate."--Luke 6: 27, 30, 32-36 (SV).

And the model for that compassion that Luke presents, is the Wonderful Father; the man who is so irrational, even his eldest son doesn't know how to respond to him. And yet the father there doesn't command even his eldest son to have empathy for his returned brother. Empathy cannot be commanded, cannot even be expected. We cannot rely on empathy to make us do what is right. The question is: what will? And the answer is: not individual motivation; not human emotions alone.

In the America of 2007 only the most irrepressible optimist would imagine a world in which the opinions of historians were actively sought by those in the high councils of government. But for citizens on the storm-wracked Gulf Coast, optimism has become a Darwinian survival trait, and if Lawrence Powell is correct in his assessment of Katrina as a “detonating event,” the winds of change may have been concealed within Katrina’s ferocious eye wall.

The question is: where will that change come from? This event, and the response to it, are embedded in "that flow of human affairs that gets called history." The response so far is, frankly, muddled. In a country so concerned with economics (the state of the economy, we are told now crowds out concerns about death and destruction and our part in all of that, in Iraq), but, as Lawrence Powell notes:

Resilient cities that rebound from disaster almost always benefit from vibrant economies. But ours is in shambles. According to one outside economist, “This is the first time in U.S. history where a city has sat dormant for almost a year.”

And still there is no national cry of: "My God, what have we done?" If empathy will not move us, what will?

In America, optimism has always been a "Darwinian survival trait." That's one reason we cling to it so fiercely. But we need it, because while the right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away. And that, too, is as American as violence and cherry pie.

Mr. Powell's article is probably the most accessible to the non-historian, largely because it deals with New Orleans as it is today, and has been only since Katrina struck. But he also has a real gift for getting to the heart of the matter:

People with resources—homeowners and proprietors of small businesses—are not faring well, either. The city has made a hash of posthurricane planning, and the invisible hand of the market is raising its middle finger. The view from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers or the top floors of mold-remediated homes is clouded with uncertainty. Markets are all about coordinating expectations, but that is tough to do when the future is so opaque. Residents’ simple questions lack clear-cut answers: Will the neighbors down the street ever return and at least cut the grass? Should I take out a small business loan in the hope that my dry cleaning customers will move back next month—or next year? Today entire neighborhoods are struggling to prove their right to exist by showing they can rebuild. The odds are steep, and the struggle is, to quote organizers from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), “grossly unfair.”

And probably unworkable. As Thomas C. Schelling, the Nobel Prize–winning expert on complex bargaining, observed in December 2005: “There is no market solution to New Orleans.” Yet that is exactly what is being attempted in my adopted city, with the consequence that everything feels stuck-in-limbo. The iconic Lower Ninth Ward remains desolate; north of St. Claude Avenue, where a break in the Industrial Canal levee unleashed a minitsunami, one-quarter of all homes have been razed, and fewer than 3 percent of the former residents have applied for electrical permits. In the wealthier Lakeview neighborhood, the affluent are at least getting by. But in New Orleans East, where much of the aspirant and upwardly mobile black middle class once lived, the news is mixed. Electrical permits are up, but only 17.4 percent of the former population has applied for them. Those dismal statistics bear out a recent survey that found one-third of the city’s current population (a population half its pre-Katrina size) is contemplating leaving for good.

And, in making his argument that Katrina was a "detonating event," Mr. Powell notes this:

But for every radical novitiate evangelized by dedicated anarchists and global justice activists, there have been ten apolitical volunteers who have been drawn to New Orleans by faith-based organizations, professional gatherings, or the simple call of conscience. There have been Barefoot Doctors, Mondo Bizzaro Productions, a multidisciplinary arts group, and the Rainbow Family of Living Light. Faith-based volunteers stand out. They come as Bible study groups, sleeping in rvs and tents, chainsaw-toting pilgrims on missions of earthly salvation. Katrina recovery is “the biggest domestic relief effort we’ve ever faced,” said a spokesman for the United Methodist Committee on Relief. The newly elected president of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, shaken by a tour of Lakeview and the Lower Ninth (“It looks like something after a nuclear bomb”), pledged to get the word out to the autonomous churches constituting his confederation. “I have access to the Baptist press, and I’m going to use that,” he told the Times-Picayune six weeks before Katrina’s first anniversary. “I have a weekly address, and I’ll use that. I’ll be speaking all over the nation for the next six months, and I do pledge and promise to make New Orleans’s neighborhoods a point of great emphasis for our ministry.”

His promise and similar pledges by like-minded religious leaders have not been empty. Thousands of faith-based volunteers have been arriving in the Katrina zone every month to spend a week or two, but sometimes longer, pulling Sheetrock. One Iowa volunteer drawn to New Orleans by the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana gave up her job in the Des Moines statehouse in order to help manage volunteer operations on the ground. Samaritans have usually returned home transformed by the house-gutting experience. “Now that we are back in Michigan,” wrote an Ann Arbor volunteer with the Catholic Charities program Operation Helping Hand, “we are urging others to band together, travel to New Orleans and help as well.” It is hard to haul curbside the sodden contents of another family’s life—its broken dishes and waterlogged photo albums, their snapshots dissolved into tie-dyed artwork—without stretching the boundaries of one’s moral obligation.

One has to note that some of that effort is spurred by empathy, not just by the commandment to love one another. That is not a critique made in anger, but an observation made in sorrow. It is also a recognition of reality, because the other problem with relying on empathy is that all the efforts of all the motivated volunteers in the world, whatever their motivations, is never equal to the effort that can be, should be, expected of governments:

But is volunteering enough? Can the methods of a nineteenth-century barn raising drag a twenty-first-century disaster area from the mud and the muck? Even prior to Katrina, as the cutbacks in social spending sank in, mainstream volunteer organizations were starting to question whether “compassionate conservatism” could do everything being claimed in its name. Or as Sara Mosle has put it: “The problem with volunteering isn’t with volunteering, but with what we’re asking it to do.”[32] It is a realization that has started to dawn on many outside volunteers. You only have to spend a backbreaking week pulling drywall and mucking out houses to appreciate that altruism alone cannot restore electrical grids or fix broken pipes, let alone solve the myriad insurance and financial problems that currently stymie the post-Katrina recovery. You only have to strip one or two houses down to their studs before asking, shouldn’t government be playing more of a hands-on role in the recovery? Those conversations have already started across backyard fences. It is more than likely that an entire generation of young activists will look back on their volunteer service in the Katrina zone as a life-changing experience, as a time that shaped their political values for years to come. Every generation has defining memories. For mine it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. For this generation it may turn out to be 9/11 and Katrina—and maybe more so Katrina, whose aftereffects may become more iconic, at least of the failure of government, than the toppling of the twin towers.

My world was shaped by the same forces: the assassination of Kennedy; Vietnam; Martin Luther King. Yet now our country is run by people whose philosophy of governance was also shaped by Vietnam, and Watergate, and even the assassination of Kennedy (how else to explain Bush's paranoia?) We all take different lessons from the same events; we all have different levels of empathy, different classes of persons we will allow ourselves to empathize with. If empathy born of national experiences is the only hope of change we have, we have little hope of change at all. But then, with history, it's always something:

The problem with writing instant history is that there is always a new instance. I derived this article from a talk that tried to encapsulate a moment in the post-Katrina recovery that I was sure fell somewhere in the middle of the story. It is now clear that the narrative is stuck near the beginning, and that it will require at least another ten years for the saga to reach its conclusion. Even so, little has happened since the Mobile conference in March 2007 to change my mind about Katrina’s political aftereffects. It is safe to say that there was more national news coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse in August 2007 because of the heightened public concern about the state of national infrastructure engendered by the levee failures in New Orleans. Moreover, there is continued movement toward the enactment of a national catastrophe fund, an emerging debate over so-called catastrophe bonds as a market-focused way of spreading post-Katrina risk, and investigations by both Congress and the courts into allegations that insurers shifted their own damage claim liabilities onto the federal flood insurance program. The Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans, continues to attract volunteers, except now they are coming to stay, not for a week, but for a year. Two new developments are worth noting. Since March, the troubled Road Home program has turned some kind of corner, closing on more than sixty-four thousand applications as of mid-October 2007, but now faces a possible $6 billion shortfall. The other development has surprised me: the reemergence of the poverty debate. There may be no better measure of Katrina’s power to unleash ethical energy than the return of that subject to the national agenda.

Katrina, in short, continues to cast a long shadow over national politics. Paul Krugman recognized as much in a New York Times column, “Katrina All the Time.” It is one of the most frequently e-mailed of all of his opinion pieces. He wrote, “Future historians will, without doubt, see Katrina as a turning point. The question is whether it will be seen as the moment when America remembered the importance of good government, or the moment when neglect and obliviousness to the needs of others became the new American way.”

I remain guardedly optimistic that Katrina marks a turn toward the former.

Optimism is a survival trait. We have to guard it well. But I'm not confident that "neglect and obliviousness to the needs of others" is a new American way. Because one point these articles are clearly trying to make, is the one Faulkner made: "The past isn't over. It isn't even past." What we do about that is up to us; and not just up to our hearts, either.

Sweeney Todd: A Theological Consideration

No, I'm not kidding. Saw the Tim Burton version of what I consider the greatest musical ever written (a play about a serial killer barber and cannibalism set in a Dickensian vision of London, with music by Stephen Sondheim. What's not to love?), and while I consider this Burton's best movie (it's ideally suited to his talents, and yet restricts some of his more idiosyncratic excesses), I was actually thinking about it this morning in terms of that quote at the top of the blog:

"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

Rather a stretch, isn't it, to consider this musical in light of "the central doctrine of Christianity"? Well, perhaps....

...or perhaps not. The structure of "Sweeney Todd" is what I consider the typical American musical, which is to say: it's a love story. (Quick, think of a great American musical which isn't! I'm sure there are some obscure and bad musicals which have almost nothing to do with romance, but anything notable come to mind? Mine, either.) But the entire story (movie/play; there are slight changes between them in the storyline, so I'll focus on the movie, which I just saw and found rather improved for not being quite the Victorian pastiche the play was) is about misplaced love.

Start with Todd, which is where the story starts. He tells Anthony his story in song, about the "barber and his wife/And she was beautiful!/A foolish barber and his wife/She was his reason and his life!/And she was beautiful!/And she was virtuous!/And he was naive." The wife catches the eye of the true villain of the story, Judge Turpin; a man who, the movie makes clear (and the play not quite as clear; a song excised before the Broadway production illustrated just how perverse and deviant Turpin's ideas of "love" are; in the movie, Turpin presents to Anthony his collection of erotic literature from around the world, much to Anthony's, and our, discomfort) has mistaken lust for love (and I mean here, throughout, romantic love).

When Todd meets Mrs. Lovett, we learn with him more about the Judge's idea of love: after Todd was sent to Australia, Turpin lures her to his house where he rapes her during a costume ball. The party-goers, Mrs. Lovett (don't neglect that name!) tells Todd, thought she must be feeble-minded, and so watch the rape with sophisticated, not to say perverse and evil, delight. Before the play is over, everyone is villain, because everyone misunderstands the true nature of love.

Anthony, of course, sees Johanna, and it is for both of them love at first sight. Judge Turpin notices Anthony's attention and warns him away, but Judge Turpin keeps an eye on his ward through a hole in her bedroom wall (we are left to imagine he has observed her at other times than sitting primly in her bedroom windowseat), and announces to his beadle his plans to marry his ward, in order to "protect her."

There is more than a little selfishness in this play, which is perhaps the best opposite of love there is. Todd nurses his grief and injustices until he is a perfect monster of revenge. Even as he sings a love song to his razor blades, Mrs. Lovett sings a love song to him, one Todd is oblivious to, and there we see together two misdirected loves. Todd's only "friend" is his set of razor blades; Mrs. Lovett has apparently loved Todd from afar ever since he was the barber Benjamin Barker. Todd mourns Lucy, especially after Mrs. Lovett tells him about her rape and how she took arsenic afterwards, but as Todd has said to Anthony's question about Lucy at the beginning of the story: "All that was many years ago/I doubt that anyone would know." Many years ago, yet he nurses it still. His love for her has perverted into hate for Turpin which, when it seems he has lost his one chance to get Turpin into his barber's chair for vengeance, turns to hatred of all humankind. Todd's love is for Todd's hatred and lust for revenge.

And then there is the young boy, Toby, the assistant to Signor Pirelli who is himself the first victim of Todd's razor, just as Toby will make Todd the last. By the end of the story the boy sees Mrs. Lovett as his salvation, little thinking that she is as responsible for murder and horror as Todd is. He loves her as a child loves his mother, and while she is hardly a mother figure, she's the closest he's ever known. He tells her that: "Nothin's gonna harm you/Not while I'm around," and "Demons are prowlin' everywhere, nowadays/I'll send 'em howlin', I don't care, I got ways," the simple assurance of a child in a world of horrors he almost, but not quite, takes for granted. His is one of the closest to a clear moral vision the story supplies.

Johanna's is the other, and here the movie is superior to the play. In the play, Anthony goes to Fogg's Asylum to rescue Joanna, under pretence of being a wig maker's apprentice looking for blond hair of a certain shade. When Anthony confronts the asylum keeper with a gun, the director senses Anthony's reluctance to shoot, and Anthony drops the gun in despair. Joanna, however, takes it up, shoots, and they make their escape. She has lived the horrors of the asylum, if only for a few days, and she will do what must be done, what innocent Anthony cannot bring himself to do.

In the film, Anthony is bolder, and leaves the asylum's doctor to the tender mercies of his charges (who descend upon him like the Furies). Back in Todd's shop; well, here's the dialogue from the script:

ANTHONY
Don't worry, darling, in those
clothes, no one will recognize you ...
You're safe now.
(She picks up the largest razor, looks at it, an eerie echo of
her father.)
JOHANNA
(darkly ironic)
Safe ... So we run away and then all
our dreams come true?
ANTHONY
I hope so...
JOHANNA
I have never had dreams. Only
nightmares.
ANTHONY
Johanna ... When we’re free of this
place all the ghosts will go away.
She looks at him very intensely:
JOHANNA
No, Anthony, they never go away.

She's right, of course. Robert L. Short, in his work on theology and the comic strip "Peanuts," used a few cartoon panels to explain original sin. Lucy leaves Snoopy with a balloon, and strict orders to hold it until her return. Snoopy clamps it in his mouth, falls asleep sitting so still, yawns, and releases it. In the last panel, he's walking down the railroad tracks with a stick and bundle over his shoulder, thinking: "You make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life." Yes, and eating sour grapes sets your children's teeth on edge.

All of this misdirected love ends up as it must: Todd murders the beadle and the judge, but also murders his own wife, now a mad street person (interestingly, in the play she's also clearly a prostitute, but none of this is hinted at in the movie), and nearly murders his daughter (whom he doesn't recognize, having never seen her except as an infant). When he realizes the mad woman was his beloved Lucy, he gives Mrs. Lovett a fitting end, tossing her into the giant oven where she cooks her meat pies. Her young protector, hiding out in the cellar bakery and now himself quite mad, having seen the body parts and realized where the meat for the pies is coming from, slits Todd's throat as the barber grieves over the body of his dead wife.

There is no redemption here, no salvation, no Aristotelian recognition of responsiblity, so it isn't even appropriate to call this grim tale a proper tragedy.* In the play, when Toby reappears to slit the throat of a grieving Todd, his hair has turned white, the hoary Victorian chestnut that indicates a frightful shock. In the movie, Toby emerges from the sewer as grim faced as Todd and Lovett, his face powder white, his eyes blackened as a prize-fighters. If the sin is not genetic, it is certainly as contagious as a virus.

It seems, here, that sin is not in the genes; but love is. Augustine posited sin as passing down, father to son, mother to daughter, through the act of procreation, and so we all were "sinner[s] in our mother's womb[s]," in the words of the Psalmist. Sin is not, however, the general state of the world in "Sweeney Todd." Evil comes from the institutions, from the fact that the history of the world, as Todd sings to Lovett, "is those below serving those up above." Love is genetic. Joanna knows love, not perversion; Anthony, despite having sailed the world, has beheld only its wonders, not "the misery of man" Todd responds he has seen. Anthony is an innocent, even more innocent than his beloved. In this he is like Todd. Sin, however, is contagious, and Todd catches it from Turpin, as Toby catches it from Todd. Toby is an innocent, too, despite his appetite for gin. That appetite is foisted on him by, again, the system. He is not born a gin drinker; he's made into one, at far too early an age. But he is born seeking love, and when he finally has a mother figure to give it to, even if that mother figure is the cannibalistic Mrs. Lovett, he does so unreservedly. But he learns, as does every character in this play (except, perhaps, Anthony; but undoubtedly that's another story), that if you don't love, you're dead; and if you do, they'll kill you.

Everyone in this story loves the wrong person, or for the wrong reasons. Todd's love for his wife turns him into a monster; Turpin's lust for sex makes him as monstrous as Todd, and the origin of the evil in the story. Mrs. Lovett loves a man long dead (as Todd declares Benjamin Barker to be), and cannot see past her own fantasies to recognize the monster Toby describes to her when he promises to be her protector. Anthony loves Joanna and the idea of love itself, and while Joanna loves Anthony, she is neither so idealistic, nor so in love with an idea, as he is. Toby's love is closest to Joanna's; having never known a world in which he could dream, he doesn't even have nightmares, just a child's trust and a heart searching for a mother to finally imprint on. When he does love Mrs. Lovett, he doesn't really love her, either, but only what she's done for him, only the relative kindness she has shown him, the first he's ever known. His trust, however, his naivete, keeps him from seeing her for what she is, and like every other character in this story, he loves his idea, rather than the person. This is the fatal error of the story, and leads to the Grand Guignol ending, with Todd kneeling, throat slit and dripping blood, over the similiarly bleeding corpse of his wife.

One thing you will notice in this description, if you know the play, is that "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" is missing. That ballad serves as the Greek chorus in the play; introducing the story and explaining the feelings of Todd as the story progresses. At the end, the ballad underlines the "moral" of the story:

Sweeney wishes the world away,
Sweeney’s weeping for yesterday,
Hugging the blade, waiting the years,
Hearing the music that nobody hears.
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall,
Sweeney leans on the office wall.
No one can help, nothing can hide you--
Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?
Sweeney wishes the world away,
Sweeney's weeping for yesterday,
Is Sweeney!
There he is, it's Sweeney!
Sweeney! Sweeney!
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd!
He served a dark and a hungry god!
TODD
(sharply to Mrs. Lovett)
To seek revenge may lead to hell.
MRS. LOVETT
(coldly to him)
But everyone does it, if seldom as well--
TODD AND MRS. LOVETT
--As Sweeney...
GHOSTS
As Sweeney Todd...
The Demon Barber of Fleet...
The ghosts begin to disappear ... fading into the shadows of
the bakehouse ... leaving Todd and Mrs. Lovett alone...
GHOSTS
... Street!

All of that was in the script, too, but excised from the movie. Movies can do things intimately that plays cannot. In the play, when Todd finishes his ballad to his razors, he raises his hand with a gleaming razor in it and declares in a near scream: "At last, my arm is complete again!" Johnny Depp does it quietly, alone in his garrett, and it is even more chillling because we seem to be standing right beside him, not watching him in the middle of an empty stage, in the glare of the spotlight. One way is not right, one way wrong; both work well for the different media. The movie excludes the ballad entirely, and the ghosts of Todd's victims, the people who populate the streets of London. Morality and redemption are not on offer, even though Todd sings of it in the movie, in his angry declaration of his soon-to-begin murderous spree:

You, sir, too, sir--
Welcome to the grave!
I will have vengeance,
I will have salvation!

But he doesn't, of course; because he doesn't love. He did love, once; and for that, he had to die. As almost everyone in the story does. But memory and loss have replaced all feelings for him, and he has become a solely possessive creature, incapable of taking what is offered to him in the here and now, or of giving up any portion of that self he has self-created. In the most beautiful ballad in the play, as he casually slices the neck of one customer after another, Todd thinks about the daughter he has never known:

And are you beautiful and pale,
With yellow hair, like her?
I'd want you beautiful and pale,
The way I've dreamed you were...

And if you're beautiful, what then,
With yellow hair, like wheat?
I think we shall not meet again--(He quietly slits the
Gentleman's throat)
My little dove, my sweet...

Goodbye, Johanna,
You're gone, and yet you're mine.
I'm fine, Johanna,
I'm fine!

You stay, Johanna...(He quietly cuts the
customer's throat)
The way I've dreamed you are.
(Todd notices dusk outside
the window)
Oh look, Johanna-,
(Pulls the lever and the
customer disappears)
A star!(Tossing the customer's
hat down the chute)
A shooting star!

And you'd be beautiful and pale,
And look too much like her.
If only angels could prevail,
We'd be the way we were.
Johanna...

Wake up, Johanna!
Another bright red day!(He slits the customer’s
throat)
We learn, Johanna,
To say...
Goodbye...
As the note continues, he pulls the lever and the customer
disappears down the chute...

The moral focus of the story is in that song. Todd is doing what he's doing for an idea of a child he's never known, a woman he has, by his own admission, all but forgotten (he can only tell Mrs. Lovett his Lucy had "blond hair.") "If only angels could prevail/We'd be the way we were" he says to Johanna, but it isn't angels he relies on, it's the demons Toby warns Mrs. Lovett about. And there's the theological crux of the story, too: "If only angels could prevail," but since they will not save us, we must provide salvation for ourselves. "I will have vengeance, I will have salvation." Todd will, of course, have one, but not the other, and the reason is not just because he confuses the two. Having chosen that course, he is, of course, right: "We learn, Johanna/To say/Goodbye."

So Todd becomes "Töd," the angel of death; and Mrs. Lovett makes the first expression of love in the play, but she can only "love it," her idea of Todd, not the person himself (whom she clearly cannot see, not until her final scene, and by then it's too late); and "Lucy," the patron saint of light as Lucia, brings finally to light all the evil Todd has done in his perverted memory of her, while Johanna, a feminine form of John, refuses to believe in signs (semeia) even as she lives her life by them (her love for Anthony is purely "love at first sight," but there is the unanswered question of whether she loves Anthony, or simply sees him as the means for her escape from Turpin, a confusion she may yet puzzle out for herself). Just as Todd ultimately gives up his only begotten child, not for the world's salvation but simply, he thinks for his own. The two questions play themselves off throughout the play: the question of ethics (given that the history of the world is those below serving those up above, how should we then live?) and the question of salvation (if society will not save us, mustn't we save ourselves?). The moral question is never even asked. Even Toby fears only that Mrs. Lovett has made a deal with the devil, a deal which will cost her more than she can pay; as, indeed, she has. But he doesn't represent a moral vision in the story, any more than the guileless and naive Anthony does.

It is easy, at this point, to step outside the story and point to a morality which judges Todd and so save ourselves from the story's implications. And it is true the story raises questions its limited universe cannot answer, as any good story does. Does our world, however, provide those answers quite so easily? If we see the story as one working out of the idea that, if you don't love you'll die, and if you do love, they'll kill you, what does it offer us? Sweeney cannot love, once he has been sent away on false charges, and Benjamin Barker dies. Lucy and Johanna and Anthony and Toby and Mrs. Lovett do love, and only two of them survive, one by a lucky accident. It's a story; it's not the world we live in: but isn't it? It's a story, it can easily produce questions it cannot answer; but is our world any different? The central issue of the play is not love, but where love is directed: to whom, and to what purpose, what end? When Johannes de Silentio asked: "Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical," he was asking that question of precisely the universe of "Sweeney Todd:" a universe where the ethical is always teleological, just as Aristotle intended. So de Silentio was positing a paradox: a suspension of the ethical precisely to achieve a goal not contemplated, or even contemplatable, by the ethical. That, of course, would require positing yet another system, one that encompassed the ethical but was greater still, great enough to answer the question the ethical could formulate, but not provide an answer for. What do we love, and why? That is the question of "Sweeney Todd." The question should be, of course: who?

And therein lies the dilemma, and the purpose behind the statement. It isn't what we love, or that we love; it is who we love, that most matters.

*The script and the play include the tragic elements of a chorus and a seeming acceptance of responsibility by Todd, in both the final scene and the opening and closing ballad. The ballad declares that Todd "serves a dark and a hungry god," with the implicit statement that he accepts the responsibility for such service. While Todd accepts responsibility for his crimes in the play, he is defiant to the end, slamming a heavy metal door on the audience on the final note of the ballad, ending the play in clangor. The movie script has Todd unbutton his collar and offer his neck to Toby, perhaps because the boy in the film is more obviously a child than the actor in the original production, and no one wants to see a child slit a man's throat as dispassionately as it is done in the movie. Johnny Depp is more ambiguous in his portrayal than the script calls for; he leans back, his throat exposed, seemingly lost in his grief, apparently oblivious to the presence of Toby. It is an ending more Shakespearean than Sophoclean; more Othello than Oedipus Rex or Creon grieving his errors in Antigone. But even the complicity in Todd's death is unclear, and it seems more likely the sin, the contagion, is simply passed on.

Going political too early in the morning

Or, Why I am not on the Digby Bandwagon.

Digby posts this, which earns approval from Baby Blue (a/k/a Not the Great Orange Satan):

If the Democrats win the presidency, expect many more of these little dramas. The inflated egos of powerful Democratic Senators and Congressmen require that they consistently step forward to knee-cap their president whenever possible lest anyone get the idea that he (or she) is actually in charge.

Okay, now I'm confused: who is in charge? The President, or the Congress? I thought the Imperial Presidency was a bad thing, and that we wanted Congress to be in charge. Or is that only true when "our" guy is in the White House? And since the Congress can't speak with one voice, having 535 of them, who does speak for Congress? And isn't the problem with the GOP the subordination of the individual to the mass, something we like Democrats for not goind (do we really want the DLC in charge? Do we really imagine we could make a "DLC" that would operate the way we want it to, without imposing its will on the party, or doing so only for the "good" of the party?

You know, we really can't have it both ways: we can't condemn the excesses of Bush and then praise the wisdom of Any Democratic POTUS. We can't declare an "11th Commandment" for Democrats without becoming even more like the party we oppose. As it is, it's hard to slip a piece of paper between Hillary and Obama and John McCain, which is probably why he's considered the candidate hardest to defeat (per an NPR report this morning). As it is, John Edwards' question last night is still the only one we should be asking: "How many hungry children is this going to feed?" Which is a rather more even-handed slam at both Bill Clinton's bitching and Ted Kennedy's whining.

But otherwise? This is politics as usual. As Will Rogers famously said: "I am not a member of any organized party. I'm a Democrat." Do we really want to ape the GOP in all things, until it's not even Tweedlee and Tweedledum anymore, just Tweedledee and Tweedledee+? Because we're practically there already, and apparently the only fundamental difference between the parties is who shows greater loyalty to the King...er, I mean, the President.

Feh!

MLK Day observed: January 21, 2008

If I hadn't posted something about the Rev. Dr. King recently, I'd be ashamed of myself for not doing so now; but such is the day that I have little time to write, even though it's a holiday for me.

Then I saw this article, all the more surprising because it's by the AP. We really do need to remember that the Rev. Dr. King was neither a uniter nor a divider; he was a prophet.

Oddly enough, that, too, ties in with what I've been reading in Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, and Dr. King's many struggle bring into sharp relief the distinction I want to insist on between "morality" and "ethics."

Now if I just had a few more days off....

O noes, not miracles!

Thanks to olvlzl, we have this for our edification and entertainment, and it is simply too good to leave in comments alone:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

The article (if you haven't read it yet, stop, do so, and come back) is about Carl Sagan's book A Demon Haunted World. As I've mentioned before, I'm not exactly a fan of the late Dr. Sagan's reasoning on this point, although I was (full confession) a huge fan of "Cosmos." I would not characterize Richard Lewontin as "fan" or "not-fan," but he is a very clear headed thinker who recognizes that reason, like all other forms of human thought, has its strengths and its weaknesses, and above all, has its limits. And when reason becomes a substitute for truth, a shortcut, if you will, all it yields is truthiness.

My seminary professors, interestingly enough, were as anxious to dispossess of us our trust (i.e., faith) in miracles as Dr. Sagan would have been. Their goal, however, was not to make us scientists, but to loosen our reliance on that which could not be established. I went 'round and 'round with my professors because I realized precisely what Lewis Beck did: if I confess a belief in the Creator of the Universe, how can I reject any belief in miracles? On the other hand, even the author of the Gospel of John realized there are miracles, and there are miracles. And are we looking at what is miraculous, or are we looking for signs that confirm our preferences, our prejudices, if you will? Reason is a wonderful thing, but do we realize that, even if it is not a formal system, it is still closed? That it can generate questions which it cannot answer?

Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.

Funny coincidence; I've been working on a post about John's gospel. It's about providing just that power; the power to discover the truth. Which is not to say that gospel contains, or even reveals, truth. But it raises some very interesting questions about the nature of truth; more interesting than, so far, I've been willing to give it credit for.

Like I said, this is gonna be fun!

Blessed are the Peacemakers

New Proposed economic stimulus package: $1600 per household

Cost of Iraq War: $4100 per household.

Cost of the tax rebate: an estimated $145 billion.

Cost of the Iraq war: $500 billion has been allocated by Congress. The expected cost is now estimated to be $1 trillion. To put that in perspective:

The cost of the war in Iraq and other military operations has soared to the point where "we are now spending on these activities more than 10 percent of all the government's annually appropriated funds," said Robert A. Sunshine, the [Congressional] budget office's assistant director for budget analysis.

But, of course, "the institutional investors understand the limits to the government's ability to enact economic change."

Besides, there's only so much money to go around, right? And most of it needs to go to businesses, as in the President's latest proposed "stimulus package," or as in the war in Iraq. Spending money on human beings is just...socialism, or something.

I'm sure that's the reason, anyway.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, the proposed "rebate" from the Administration won't cover people who didn't pay taxes. It's a "tax rebate," not a handout! Which means this money ain't free! It's gotta come from somewhere! Of course, taxes have not been raised to pay for the Iraq war, which means it will be a bill to the nation for decades, according to the CBO. But that's different; somehow.

I'm sure it has to do with avoiding creeping socialism.