"But strive for the greater gifts"

I was struck by the epistle reading for this Sunday:

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

12:12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.

12:13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

12:14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.

12:15 If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.

12:16 And if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.

12:17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?

12:18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.

12:19 If all were a single member, where would the body be?

12:20 As it is, there are many members, yet one body.

12:21 The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."

12:22 On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,

12:23 and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect;

12:24 whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member,

12:25 that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.

12:26 If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

12:27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

12:28 And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.

12:29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?

12:30 Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?

12:31 But strive for the greater gifts.

So can one congregation of TEC say "I do not belong to the body," and be any less of the body? By the same token, because the eye sees, has it purchased the right to be a body unto itself? Because the mouth eats, has it, through countless meals, purchased superiority to the hand? The foot that carries the body has paid the price of transportation; has it bought rights against the head?

You can see where this is going. What is more valuable? Independence? Or interdependence? Do we find the truth of God in our own convictions? Or in the struggles with a community that doesn't always agree with us, that sometimes, like God, forces us to change our minds, our practices, our behavior?

Who is striving for the greater gifts?

Clouds of Witness

Got into an interesting argument over who owns a building in The Episcopal Church, over at Fr. Jake's place. The assertion was made that Truro and Falls Church (at least) should be allowed to take their building and go, and the national church should not "spend huge amounts of money on litigation." Of course, under TEC polity and canon law, the diocese owns the building, not the church members. Which prompted this rejoinder:

Rmj - You mean the congregation who happens to meet there now and pays for the upkeep and maintenace of the building, and, given that these Virginia churches are large and wealth, who also pay a Diocesan apportionment? Those congregations who perhaps built the buildings? Or the Diocese who contributes nothing financially to the congregation?

I understand what the canons say. It doesn't mean I think the canons are just.
soccermom

The most intriguing part of the argument, of course, is that I give to the church because I am purchasing something; or at least my charitable intent carries this salubrious benefit. A curious theology indeed, but not one, I'm afraid, which is entirely alien to most "bog Christians," as the MadPriest calls them. So, under this understanding, church members who put money in the plate don't contribute to the church; they invest in it, like the stock market. They own a piece of the company, apparently, or at least make a payment on the physical assets, a payment which, at some point, entitles them to a property interst in said assets, or even in the real property. An interesting issue when a church member dies, then. If they have a property interest, it passes to their estate, no? If nothing passes, there was no interest ever created. What, then, if they leave? Does that property interest go with them? No, you say? Why not? Is it only there so long as they continue to attend regularly, donate regularly, and happen to have been doing both when they vote with the majority on that fateful day? A perplexingly ephemeral idea of property interest, indeed.

Clearly this idea flies in the face of all settled property law, and indeed makes a mockery of the idea of property law.

Consider a family, with 5 adult children still living at home. The children have even paid for a new roof on the house, and paid to remodel a bathroom. They decide, as the majority, that they now own the house. Do they? Can they claim an interest in the property and the attachments (i.e., personal property which is part of the improvements to the real property)? In what court of law would you bring such a case, and expect to win? Who would consider it "just" for the children to make such a claim in the first place?

There is also the attempted argument (made by someone else at Fr. Jake's) that:

If the diocese were named as owner on the deed, and if it paid for maintenance, utilities, capital improvements, etc, there would be no question as to who owns the building. But the situation is not that plain. Hence, the mext few years are likely to have a lot of property lawyers at work...

Now, by this logic, a tenant in an apartment or a duplex or even a house, gains a property interest simply by paying rent and footing the bill for the utilities. Try that the next time you rent a place you'd much rather buy; I don't think you'll get very far. And by the same token, if I paid to put a new roof on my father's house, that would not give me one sliver of property interst in his house, not even a cloud on the title. Property interests don't follow a line of cancelled checks.

If you want a Biblical parallel in this situation, consider the parable of the prodigal son. The son tells the father, "Give me my portion of the estate." Now, the only claim the son has to the property of the father is at the father's death. So the son is saying to the father, "You are dead to me, and all I want is the property I will have when you die." And the father, rather than slap the son silly, agrees. He divides his property, giving half to one son, half to the other. Now the father owns nothing.

At this point, of course, the jaws of all Jesus' listeners had dropped, and if they heard anymore, that was truly a miracle.

Notice that when the son comes back, the father gives away the property of the eldest son: the fatted calf, the ring, the robe. Remember, the father divided everything. He owns nothing. There is an interesting perplexity in that parable about property ownership.

But can we apply it to the present situation? If so, first we have to decide who owns the property. Is it the church, or the congregation? If the former, who is that? PB Schori? The Bishops? No. It is held by them, but held in trust. For whom? The clouds of witness, that's who. The church eternal, in time and across time: past, present, and future.

...by canon law, property of all sorts held by parishes is held and must be used for the mission of the Episcopal Church through diocesan bishops and governing bodies. As a Church, we cannot abrogate our interest in such property, as it is a fiduciary and moral duty to preserve such property for generations to come and the ministries to be served both now and in the future.

The property does not belong to the people who currently worship in Falls Church or Truro, any more than it belongs to PB Schori. It belongs to the church, and the church is not just here and now but present in the past as well as in the future. PB Schori says they have a fiduciary duty with regard to that property, and she is absolutely right. At law, that is the highest duty one can owe, and it ia always owed to someone else, for your custody and control of their property. You must treat that property with more care than you treat your own; that is the standard or fiduciary duty.

Under the canons of The Episcopal Church, as PB Schori explains it, no church building or grounds belong to any congregation, whoever that congregation may be this year. It belongs to the church, and not just the church this year but the church past, present, and future. It cannot be otherwise, and those who do not understand that are not entitled to a refund anymore than they were entitled to a possessory interest because they put money in a plate in that location rather than in another one. Church is not about purchase and it is not about control and it is certainly not about ownership. It is about duty and obligation and responsibility. It is not about you or me. It is about them: the clouds of witness.

Texas, our Texas

Just to prove I'm a local boy, too:

Hours after Texas Gov. Rick Perry kicked off his second full term in office, Ted Nugent helped him celebrate at a black-tie gala, but not all attendees were pleased by the rock guitarist's performance.

Using machine guns as props, Nugent, 58, appeared onstage as the final act of the inaugural ball wearing a cutoff T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag and shouting offensive remarks about non-English speakers, according to people who were in attendance. The Confederate flag was the symbol of the pro-slavery secessionist southern states in the 1861-65 American Civil War.

Perry's spokesman, Robert Black, downplayed the Tuesday-night incident.

"Ted Nugent is a good friend of the governor's. He asked him if he would play at the inaugural. He didn't put any stipulation of what he would play," Black said.

Others said the appearance was inappropriate.

"I think it was a horrible choice," Republican strategist Royal Masset said. "I hope nobody approved it."

Yes, you read that right: even a GOP Texan was appalled. And notice Gov. Goodhair's spokesperson didn't speak to how Nugent was dressed, or what he said; just the music he played. And yes, the Gov. loves him:

"What an honor to have a rock and roll legend perform the "Star Spangled Banner" at one of my events. Ted Nugent is a great patriot, a proud American and a dedicated supporter of the men and women in our armed forces. I am proud to call him my friend." --Governor Rick Perry, Texas

Ick.

Just to pretend to be current

and to keep up the new trend of starting my post titles with "Just"....

AG Gonzales, currently testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, just told the Senators that "illegal enemy combatants" don't play by the rules (!) and therefore don't deserve any legal protections, but the US, out of its magnanimity, gives them legal rights anyway, such as a status review hearing in Gitmo. And, one presumes, medical treatment and feeding tubes if they refuse to eat after being found to be a person who's status relegates them to endless imprisonment in Gitmo.

But I digresss....

What this really left me wondering about, was why we don't apply the clear intent of AG Gonzales's statement to criminals in the US. After all, criminals don't "play by the rules" either; otherwise, they wouldn't be criminals. They don't wear uniforms, swear fealty to a recognized national power, or bear arms in a validly established army. Why do we give them any rights, either? Why don't we just lock them up and throw away the key?

That seems a logical conclusion to the AG's argument. I mean, by his reasoning, we'd be magnanimous just locking up criminals in warehouse prisons, rather than shooting them on sight. Actually giving them trials, or even the right to challenge their imprisonment, as he said, puts us at a disadvantage. "We" play by the rules, "they" don't? What are we, nuts?

UPDATE: in the same hearing, Sen. Leahy brought up the Arar case (the Canadian citizen who was detained here and sent to Syria), and when Gonzalzes refused to say explain why Arar was sent to Syria (or, indeed, to say anything about the case in this hearing), Leahy responded (and I attempt to quote): "We knew damned well that he wouldn't be tortured in Canada! We knew damned well he would be tortured in Syria!" Leahy went on to describe it as a black mark on the US. and to point out we had sent many people overseas to be tortured in the past 5 years. Gonzales didn't venture a challenge to any of those statements.

Hopefully this will appear on the news bites tonight.

Just War or a "Just War"?

I'm really not a nice person; not when it comes to the subject of violence. I actually grew up in a culture of violence (well, America; we're fed a diet of violence from the moment we can sit upright before a TV that would make a Roman legionnaire blush), and tend to react violently when I'm frustrated, scared, angered, opposed. You know, the usual triggers. I control it because I'm supposed to, not because I am, by nature, a pacifist.

But I really have no patience with "just war" theories. For one thing, the very resort to war seems to me a violation of any notion of "justice." "All's fair in love and war" is the only truism about war worth retaining. Vietnam was "unjust" because "we had no reason to be there." Not because the US alone dropped more ordinance in that war than all the warring sides used in WWII. But WWII was a "just war," even though we did precisely what the Germans did, an action deemed so barbaric and hideous it actually justified the Allieds doing it: we bombed civilian areas. Dresden. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Munich. To this day, we claim those sites had "military significance." By that reasoning, so did Guernica, or London, and the Germans would have been justified in burning Paris (which, fortunately, at least one German realized was futile madness). So just how "just" is war, anyway?

Perhaps we fail to appreciate the barbarism of war. If so, might I recommend reading All's Quiet on the Western Front? Or Gulliver's Travels, or Twain's "The War Prayer" (the single best refutation of the argument of "just war" I know of). It really isn't that hard to find literature which describes war, or puts you in the middle ot if. If you don't want the quasi-saccharine view of Stephen Spielberg (the boy can't help it), watch the bluntly realistic battle scenes of "A Very Long Engagement." It includes not just the sounds of bullets whistling by, the the dull thud of impact in a human body. War is hell, but a hell far beyond the imagining of those who have never experienced it.

I read Studs Terkel's book The 'Good War' when it came out. My uncle, who'd actually fought in WWII (the subject of the book) saw the title and didn't notice the quotation marks indicating the irony of the designation. He told me he didn't know there was such a thing as a "good war." I often dream of passing that anecdote on to Tom Brokaw, although I'm sure it wouldn't make a dent in his hagiography of my uncle's generation.

And, as I told Pastor Dan, I'm enough of a Niebuhrian to recognize that nations don't do things for moral reasons; that, indeed, morality is so antithetical to the nature of nations as to have no place in their deliberations. This seems like an extreme position (indeed, Pastor Dan thinks it so), but it isn't. What's extreme is clinging to the notion that modern nations are simply new configurations of "nations" as that term is found in the Bible. But iin that anachronism lies much of the problem.

The "nation" of Israel in the Hebrew scriptures is a collection of at least 13 tribes tracing their ancestry back to a common figure. But that figure is first Abram, and later Abraham, indicating the figure may not have been so "common" after all. Indeed, no one today is sure he ever existed. But the historicity of the claim is irrelevant; it is the confession of the claim that is important. And even that wasn't the central claim of the Hebrews. They called themselves children of Abraham, but in Deuteronomy, after the return from Exile, they are reminded to bring the first fruits of the harvest to God with the words: "A wandering Aramean was my father...." The emphasis in that ritual is a reminder that the land and all that comes from it (life, essentially) comes from God. This is the tie that binds the children of Abraham into the nation of Israel. But it is in no way the "nation state" of 19th century European geopolitics.

Indeed, it is common now to decry "tribalism" in favor of "nation state," which is how the idea was originally sold. The latter is progress, is an "improvement" over the former, now commonly regarded as a "benighted" state (one doesn't have to look far to find critiques of the situation in Iraq right now which blame some variant of "tribalism". "Tribalism" is bad and parochial; the nation-state is good and cosmpolitan. Except which was used as an excuse for invasion?). But there is a vast philosophical difference between the two, and it was this difference Niebuhr insisted on.

Morality requires, ultimately, that I regard the needs of another above my own needs. At the very least, it insists on the paradoxical position that my needs are best served by regarding first the needs of others, not my own (this is the problem, at root, with John Rawls' Theory of Justice, by the way. He attempts to make utilitarianism appear moral with his "sensitivity to initial conditions," but it's the same old selfishness allowed to hide from itself. But I digress....). As Niebuhr understood, this is all well and good for the individual to decide or even to live by, but it is an impossible burden to lay on others, or, more bluntly, to be decided for them (as the Desert Fathers understood, which is why they became "the Desert Fathers.") How many people, after all, challenge pacifism by asking: "But what would you do if someone were attacking your family, raping your wife and children? Would you stand passively by then?" When they make that argument, they are making Niebuhr's essential argument. I can decide for myself to accept pain, punishment, torture, even death, for the sake of morality. But who am I to decide that fate for others?

A king, perhaps. Consider the example of Nineveh, in the book of Jonah. The king listens to the preaching of Jonah and repents, and all the kingdom repents with him. But that's the nature of a kingdom: the king provides for you, and what the king does, you must do (that is the ideal, anyway; although hardly the reality). We have no such society today, not in Western culture; we don't even retain that structure in the family (to the extent we do, it isn't that highly regarded, and is usually subtly or overtly condemned).

So "just war" as a moral concept has a dubious basis in political or even moral philosophy. Again, it is no accident the theory was first proposed by Augustine, he of the "City of God" and convinced of the virtue of imperial rule (think Nineveh). Who among us accept that philosophy of rule today, or lament the passing of the Roman Empire? "Just War" may be a fine concept for an emperor; but for a democracy? We may be able to argue morality in the public square; but can we really impose it on others, even when those others are citizens of the same nation?

If we are going to have war, let us have war. But don't put lipstick on a pig and tell me it's beautiful. It is war. It may be justified, but it is never just. It is just war. And that is never anything less than the abandonment of justice.

The seductive lure of the big idea

Yes, I'm on my hobby-horse, and I'm not inclined to get off anytime soon. I'm determined to ride until I know the winner.

It seems no accident that historically we are enthralled by John, whom we cannot understand, rather than Paul, whom we can but would prefer not to.

Courtesy of the MadPriest, who gets all the credit; one consonant blog to another. Actually, Bishop Marshall's letter is a gold mine of thought, but I'm starting here. That hobby horse, you know.

The other day, for no particular reason (except maybe that it was a Sunday night, and I was bored), I saw both Joel Osteen and Robert Tilton on TV. Osteen was telling his congregation they all looked like "victors" instead of "victums" (that's the way he pronounced it, presumably to make the consonants almost rhyme), and assuring them God wanted them to have all the rewards of life: which presumably meant the American Dream of 2.5 kids, a 2 car garage, and an iPod in every ear. Pardon my cynicism, but I can never help but wonder how that line of preaching would go over in Third World countries, where people are the "victums" or the very system that makes people like Joel Osteen so very rich and materially comfortable.

But I digress.

And then there was Robert Tilton, assuring me even more bluntly that Jesus wanted me to be rich, and if I just ordered Tilton's book Strike it Rich, and read it, then Jesus would enter my heart (which, since high school, I've always thought was a rather confined space for Jesus to get into) and I would begin to experience the blessings God had in store for me. Very material blessings, of course. And, of course, though they never said it, the one gospel Tilton and Osteen and every Bible-thumping "evangelical" preacher has in common, is the Gospel of John. Indeed, their credo, doctrine, and theology seem to begin and end with John 3:16. It is no accident you almost never hear an evangelical preach from the letters of Paul, or mention the gospel of Luke (social justice), or Mark (the disciples are idiots) or Matthew ("Lord, when did we see you?"). They love John, however, even though, as Bishop Marshall says, we don't understand John at all.

It is no accident that Rudolf Bultmann's magnum opus is a lengthy, scholarly, and very philosophical treatise on the gospel of John. With Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments in one hand, and a running argument with fellow faculty member Martin Heidegger in the other ear, Bultmann delivers a tour de force of 20th century existentialist thinking almost wholly grounded in the 2nd century gospel. Bultmann deals with the three synoptic gospels in one volume devoted to their textual history, and almost entirely overlooks their distinctive theologies. His work on John's gospel is nearly three times as long, and it, not his later popular work on "demythologizing" the gospels, is his true contribution to Christian theology. The gospel Bultmann insists is the touchstone gospel for modern humanity is the same gospel evangelicals insist is the touchstone for their literal reading of the Bible and for the assurance that only belief in Jesus as savior and filus dei saves. When Bishop Marshall says we don't understand John, but prefer it to Paul, he's right on the money.

Paul, of course, is the popular whipping boy today for all that is wrong in the church. Despite the fact he traveled with and regarded women as his apostolic equal, he's blamed for all the misogyny Christianity has been heir to. Despite the fact it was Paul, not Peter, who wanted to make the preaching of the Gospel inclusive (we distinquish by race, national origin, or gender. In the early church, they distinquished by ancestry: there were the children of Abraham, and the rest of the world. Of course, for the Greeks and then the Romans, there were Greeks or Romans, and barbarians, or "everyone else.") and not set entry requirements to the worship of Jesus based on circumcision or food laws. I am, I realize, grossly oversimplifying, but the point is Paul, with all his prickly particularity and our tendency to mis-read him thanks to Augustine, is the influential Christian writer we prefer to reject, precisely because we understand him. And since we understand him, we have to wrestle with him. Far easier to read the gauzy gnosticism of John, and get it wrong, and claim we have the insight reserved for the elect, the chosen of God. It flatters our ego so.

I mentioned before that John uses the word "semeia" rather than "dunameis." The former is "sign" or, in the context of Luke 2:12, proof or evidence (what the angels announce to the shepherds, to prove their statements about Jesus). The latter is the word preferred by the Synoptic writers for Jesus' healings and other supernatural activities. The former is so much a part of John's gospel that scholars identify a document that was source material for John, like the "Q" document for Matthew and Luke, and they call it the "Signs" gospel.

But John doesn't use the "signs" as proof of Jesus' divinity. Indeed, in John, the signs seem to be counter-proofs, almost negative examples of the divinity of Jesus. Not quite negative, of course; and that's where the confusion comes in. But John is constantly confusing. Take, for example, the famous exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus in the third chapter of the gospel. "Nobody can perform the miracles (semeia) you do unless God is with him," Nicodemus says. And rather than congratulate him on his insight, Jesus immediately tells Nicodemus something which simply makes no sense. Unless, of course, you already have the key, the gnosis:

"As God is my witness: No one can experience God's imperial rule without being born from above." Witnessing signs means nothing. The experience of the basileia tou theou is from God, not from human experience or even human understanding. When Nicodemus responds to this curious statement with a question, he speaks for the rest of us, and rather than explain it, Jesus launches into another set of odd statements:

"As God is my witness: No one can enter God's domain without being born of water and spirit. What is born of the human realm is human, but what is born of the spiritual realm is spirit. Don't be surprised that I told you, 'Every one of you must be reborn from above.' The spirit blows every which way, like wind: you hear the sound it makes but you can't tell where it's coming from or where it's headed. That's how it is with everyone born of the spirit."

John 3:5-8, SV.

Which seems to mean, or at least imply, that witnessing the signs themselves is"born of the human realm," living as we do in this material world. On the other hand, what is the purpose of the signs if not to show God's power? And yet it is the powerlessness of Jesus that is doubly reinforced in John's gospel, where Jesus banters words with Pilate just before his crucifixion, but meekly accepts the punishment the Romans mete out to him, because he must. But he goes on to tell Nicodemus that "everyone must be born from above" without explaining what that birth means, except in reference to the freedom and illusiveness of the spirit, which seems to mean that you don't know anything, and can't know anything, and won't ever know anything, because the spirit does what it wants to. Which leaves honest seekers like Nicodemus seemingly perpetually in the dark. And what of us? Are we wiser than Nicodemus? Do we know where the Spirit is blowing, and whom it is blowing in? Or does Jesus mean we can never know where those born of the spirit are coming from, or where they are going? Seems a very exclusive club, indeed.

It is all a darkness.

The rest of the chapter does little to clear it up. To Nicodemus' final question "How can that be possible?" (virtually the same question Mary asks Gabriel) Jesus is brutally dismissive: "As God is my witness: We tell you what we know, and we give evidence about what we've seen, but none of you accepts our evidence. If I tell you about what's mundane and you don't believe, how will you believe if I tell you about what's heavenly?" Notice, here, the emphasis that is the theme of John's gospel, and it is that theme which makes this one the favorite, even as we don't understand it: the necessity and importance of belief. But belief in what? In being "born from above" and in being part of the Spirit, coming from who knows where, going who knows where? But what does that mean? What is it I must believe in, and why is this belief so important? "This is how God loved the world: God gave up an only son, so that every one who believes in him will not be lost but have real life." All well and good, but what am I believing in, and how am I to know I believe unless I know what I believe? These are not idle questions, but John is not exactly anxious to answer them. The miracles of the synoptics are radically inclusive: those healed or blessed make no confession of either sin or faith before, or sometimes even after, their miracle. But in John's gospel, even those who honestly seek to understand, seem to be dismissed as hopelessly benighted.

But, of course, if we understand, if we penetrate the code of John's mysteries, if we unlock the ciper of John's stories and sayings, we have earned our salvation, we have proven ourselves worthy of God's secrets, fit stewards of God's authority. This is, of course, all of a piece with Greek epistemology, where only like knows like. It also flatters our egos. If we can achieve insight by our own efforts, it's better than being saved despite having no insight at all. Think of Luke's anointing, versus the one in John. In John the anointing has moved from the head (Mark and Matthew) to the feet, but the message is in accord with the synoptics: it's a preparation for death. John is obscure about spiritual matters, but underlines his themes of servanthood with a fine narrative hand. Mary washes Jesus' feet after Lazarus is raised, and later Jesus, rather than feed his disciples, washes their feet, like a good servant. It has the same effect on us as Luke's anointing: we overlook the fact the woman has shown no real "love," preferring to think she deserves the blessing she recieves (after all, blessings should not be unearned!). and we overlook the sacramental possibilities of the foot-washing in favor of the more familiar practice of being served a meal. Like knows like, and we know what we like. And of course there's the ego consolation that the knowledge John is giving us is spiritual, which means only those born of the spirit can understand it; and likewise, only those who understand it, are born of the spirit. So if you can't understand it, well....

And yet John undermines this teaching at almost every turn. When it comes time to feed the five thousand (evidence, again, that John's is the most recent gospel, and he knows the stories of the others. This gospel mentions this story as if it's a well-known part of Jesus lore, but look what John does with it.), it isn't just a miracle, but a sign: "When these folks saw the miracle he had performed they would say, 'Yes, indeed! This is undoubtedly the prophet who is to come into the world.' " (John 6:14, SV). But Jesus slips away for the night, as he knows they want to pronounce him "king," based on this sign. And the next day:

'I swear to God,' Jesus replied, 'you're looking for me only because you ate the bread and had all you wanted, not because you witnessed miracles. Don't work for food that goes to waste, but for food that lasts--food for real life--which the son of Adam will give you; on him God the Father has put his stamp of approval.'

John 6:26-27, SV.

Which seems fairly clear; except, like Nicodemus, we still aren't clear as to the nature of this food. And at the end, Jesus proves that he, too, eats and drinks (as Dr. King said, the distinction between the sacred and secular, between body and spirit, is not a Biblical one) when he appears to Peter and the others on the lakeshore after his crucifixion. It's the only resurrection story in which Jesus eats.

So John, like Luke, is another subtle theologian. But we flock around John's gospel and trample over the subtlety, sure we understand what it means, and pitying those who cannot understand our explanations, or who fail to understand its message of radical inclusion of those already chosen to be among the understanding. And we leave Paul alone to dirty his hands with his messy quotidian issues like who gets to eat at the table, and what worship is appropriate, and how to reconcile disparate beliefs and cultures. We who are born of spirit are above such things; and besides, being born of spirit, we all think alike, and are right in our thinking, and have no need of such mundance concerns. And when someone says it is all a darkness, we are sure it is only because they cannot see the light, which can only mean they are creatures of darkness. And we seldom question whether we are taking darkness for light ourselves. Perhaps because the alternative is too much like planting trees in concrete, Or perhaps because it just so much easier to imagine Jesus really does love us, and wants us to be happy, and wants everyone else to learn to think like us, so they will be happy, too. And this is a sign unto us: not the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger (what kind of sign is that? Peasant babies are wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in mangers every day in 1st century Palestine!), but that we are happy. Because, after all, the quiet and irresistable pursuit of truth is just so much work! Far easier to believe we were born with the secret decoder ring, and that all we need to do is read the signs; the signs we are sure only a few special people can read.

Paul is just so quotidian. And where's the power and the glory in that?

Which means we should feel badly about ourselves? No. But just as religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all, without humility, there is no presence of Christianity either. And not the false, "aw shucks" humility that presumes you are worthy of praise but just good at humbly accepting it, nor the abasing humility of "We are not worthy!" No, the true humility of the servant, the one happy to be of service to others, the one who doesn't look for a reward, but isn't a doormat. Think of Mary, talking to Gabriel; or to her son, at the wedding in Cana.

There is a great deal more wisdom in Mary than most of us Protestants give her credit for. After all, she's not interested in big ideas. Her focus is mostly on the everyday, the ordinary, on other people; which seems plenty big enough for her, and for the rest of us.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

Shakespeare's recipe for tyranny.

So what is this?

Former Arkansas USA Bud Cummins told the Wall Street Journal that "a top Justice official asked for his resignation in June, saying the White House wanted to give another person the opportunity to serve." Cummins was finally forced out in December, replaced with Timothy Griffin, formerly the research director of the Republican National Committee.

And this?

Ending days of speculation, San Diego-area U.S. Attorney Carol Lam announced Tuesday afternoon in a news release that she will step down from the job on Feb. 15.

News stories first surfaced last week that she had been asked to resign, but no government source was willing to go on the record with the information.

The release did not provide a reason for Lam's resignation nor did it say if she had been asked to resign. Reached by phone late Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the 47-year-old Lam said that there would be no other comment.

In a Tuesday phone interview from his Washington office, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, said Lam was asked to step down.

Issa declined to name the source of the information, but said "it was a high-ranking administration official involved in the decision process."

U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president.

As TPM says, 7 US Attorneys asked to step down in such rapid succession is unprecedented. Sure looks like pay-back for November, though.

Isn't anyone else curious about this?

And already I find, yes, apparently they are:

U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan announced his resignation Tuesday as chief federal prosecutor for coastal Northern California, ending a 4 1/2-year tenure marked by high-profile cases on stock options fraud and steroids in sports and some high-level criticism of his management.

...

It's not clear what effect Ryan's departure will have on his office's investigation of Bay Area companies for allegedly concealing their backdating of stock options granted to top executives. Ryan appointed a task force last summer to look into the practice and has obtained two criminal indictments and a flurry of executive resignations.

His resignation came amid accusations by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other Democrats that Bush was pushing U.S. attorneys out of office so he could appoint their replacements without Senate confirmation under a little-noticed provision of the USA Patriot Act passed by Congress in 2001.

Citing a Wall Street Journal article Tuesday that listed Ryan among seven prosecutors around the nation who reportedly were being forced out, Feinstein said she was co-sponsoring legislation that would reinstate a 120-day limit on the president's power to name an interim U.S. attorney without Senate approval. After 120 days, federal judges would make the interim appointments, as they did before the Patriot Act.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in San Diego who brought corruption charges against Republican Rep. Randy "Duke'' Cunningham, also announced her resignation Tuesday. The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted an unnamed law enforcement official last week as saying the Bush administration had asked her to leave.

U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang of Los Angeles quit last month for apparently unrelated reasons. Of California's top federal prosecutors, only McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento, is staying at his job.

The article goes on to mention evidence for Ryan's administrative 'problems,' though it's sketchy, at best. What's really interesting, though, is that every US attorney in California, except one, is out. Is Bush just that excited at the prospect of replacing people without Congressional oversight? Or is he that determined to give the corporations and the politicians their pound of flesh?

Either way, the answers are not comforting. Wonder what signing statement he'll append to Sen. Feinstein's amendment to the PATRIOT ACT?

Further update: I think it may be simply Bush's way of poking federal judges in the eye, too, since they are now out of the loop on replacing US Attorneys:

The text of the speech, scheduled for delivery at the American Enterprise Institute, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. It outlines, in part, what qualities the Bush administration looks for when selecting candidates for the federal bench.

“We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

Perhaps national security is one example; perhaps another is US Attorneys.

Martin Luther King Day--2007

I have archives, and I'm not afraid to use them.

Today, of all days, we should remember King was vilified for his anti-war speech at Riverside Church (which means these two headlines speak volumes), and when he died he was leading a protest for economic justice for sanitation workers.

And, from the famous letter, which is more and more my touchstone for Dr. King's thought, we can add to today's discussion on "The Big Idea" and ecclesiology:

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Walleye gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Par from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it vi lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom, They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jai with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, ham and all over the nation, because the goal of America k freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Amen.

"Reject the easy way of apathy...choose the hard course of action"

Start with the Gospel reading for this morning, the first "sign" or semeia, from John:

1And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:

2And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

3And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.

4Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

5His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.

6And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.

7Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim.

8And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it.

9When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom,

10And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.

11This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

First, everybody translates that word as "miracles," but John consistently calls it "semeia," or 'sign.' And he consistently undercuts their importance. Everyone who sees the sign and believes, John clearly implies in his gospel, believes in the wrong thing. Think of Nicodemus. Or remember at the end, when Thomas sees the scars of the Risen Jesus and believes, and Jesus says "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe!" There is always a hierarchy in John, and those who believe without signs are always truer believers than those persuaded by the signs. But that's not where we are going with this.

My other favorite bit of this story is Jesus' question to his mother, and her response. This is a woman who knows her son. He says to her "Why are you telling me?" She tells the servants "Do what he tells you." A mother knows. But that's not what we're going to do with this, either.

No, the whole thing is a springboard today (and so a cheat, of sorts) into the thoughts it aroused while listening/not listening (pastors do it, too!) to the sermon this morning. And the thoughts, in hastily scribbled notes, ran this way:

"Dying to old life; rising to new [related to the water and the jugs held for the purification. Crossan and Reed, by the way, note a place for ritual baths was a common feature of Jewish homes in 1st century Palestine]. But what does any of that have to do with me? If all change is internal or external, it to me but not of me, what is that to me, except external? [i.e., if my make an empty confession (external) or claim an inward change with no real change in who I am (internal) Is an internal change, then, the only sign of Xianity? Is it really taht I must be born again? But once I am, am I different? Or am I the same? Am I still looking to the big idea to save me?

'He did not ask of us anything great.' (attributed to Abraham Lincoln, in response to sermon) [Israel means 'struggles with God, but of] what is the use of struggling with God if the struggle is not a great one? Who of us has experienced birth that was not a struggle, found new life & identity without tremendous effort? (think of adolescents becoming adults, adults becoming parents or even simply newlyweds; starting a new job, a new profession, changing professions. Who am I if not what I do, and yet what do I do?) Why, then, should we imagine love of God, love for neighbor, would be an easy and empowering task?

Born again--am I the one involved w/being born again? or is that the act of God? If it is an act on me, is it external to me? If so, isn't it, even though from God, the "Big Idea" which save me from me, without any effort by me? And of what ultimate value is that to me?

The question, in other words, of the big idea. And precisely how existentialism comes to Christianity, and how Kierkegaard is still relevant today, if not still ahead of us. And perhaps even the way Romanticism points us in the direction out of the morass of solipsism we find ourselves (collectively) wandering into, again and again. When Kierkegaard launched his "Attack upon 'Christendom'," he was, and still is, largely misunderstood. He was not attackin Christianity, or declaring that only the most devoted could be disciples (a la Bonhoeffer almost 100 years later, who likewise realized he'd gone too far in one direction). What Kierkegaard was actually critiquing was the notion that one could be a Christian by birth only, by virtue of one's culture, of one's nationality. Indeed, what he saw coming to an end has ended for all intents and purposes in Europe: the "big idea" that something outside of us, which could stay outside of us, would take care of everything for us. That "big idea" is still the generally accepted salvation principle of Christianity: that a certain set of beliefs, properly applied and agreed on, is all that is necessary to set us off from the heathen; or the "non-traditional" Christian, or the faithless believers, the sinners, the apostates, the what-have-you. That's all the arguments of fundamentalists v. everybody, or "traditional" Episcopalians v. The Episcopal Church, or the Anglican Communion v. Presiding Bishop Schorti, come down to: whose "big idea" is going to be the one that rules.

Fortunately, so far at least, PB Schorti has refused to engage that battle. But that's also another issue.

But what if the big idea is contained here, instead?

31"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' 37Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' 40And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,[a] you did it to me.'

41"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' 44Then they also will answer, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?' 45Then he will answer them, saying, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

What if the big idea is less what you believe, than what you do? What if the big idea is, say, acompanamiento? That would make the teachings of Christ truly apocalyptic, because that would change our entire world; or at least the world you, and I, and other believers and followers of Christ, live in.

John Edwards said today, in Riverside Church:

Forty years ago, almost to the month, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at this pulpit, in this house of God, and with the full force of his conscience, his principles and his love of peace, denounced the war in Vietnam, calling it a tragedy that threatened to drag our nation down to dust.

As he put it then, there comes a time when silence is a betrayal -- not only of one’s personal convictions, or even of one’s country alone, but also of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.

That’s the thing I find the most important about the sermon Dr. King delivered here that day. He did not direct his demands to the government of the United States, which was escalating the war. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence, and to take responsibility for bringing about what he called a revolution of values.

A revolution whose starting point is personal responsibility, of course, but whose animating force is the belief that we cannot stand idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world.

* * *

Silence is betrayal. Speak out, and stop this escalation now. You have the power to prohibit the president from spending any money to escalate the war – use it.

And to all of you here today – and the millions like us around the country who know this escalation is wrong – your job is to reject the easy way of apathy and choose instead the hard course of action.

Silence is betrayal. Speak out. Tell your elected leaders to block this misguided plan that is destined to cost more lives and further damage America’s ability to lead. And tell them also, that the reward of courage...is trust.

The big idea will get you started; but it won't do the task for you. Doing the task is up to you. Your salvation is secure; but it is also in your hands. Go, and seek the Lord among those who need you. Go, and find the Creator of the Universe, among those who are invisible. Go, and don't look for signs; the signs are all around you. And they all point to your brother, your sister, your neighbor, your friend: the ones you know, and sit in a pew with every Sunday; the ones you don't know, and who may never know you. Go, because the teachings of Jesus the Christ are truly apocalyptic; they truly reveal the truth: that the kingdom of God is here, now, among you. And that when you begin to live it, you see it.

And blessed are those who do not see it, and yet believe. Amen.

Something in the air....

First, note that the "opposition" is emboldened enough to state the obvious:

This is the first specifically positive development in a long time for those who hold traditional views.

People who want to act in a militant and mandatory way will not be dissuaded. The great value is the moral force of an international forum saying our position is recognized and our provisions adequate. It gives us the moral high ground in all this.

The "positive development" is "permission" to ignore or not ordain women as priests, not to ban gay bishops and drive gay priests out of the priesthood. As Fr. Jake notes, a very serious attempt at "rollback," indeed. Fr. Jake handles this matter quite well. What is interesting to me is less the honesty of intent espoused here, than the boldness with which it is said; a boldness which, I think, has suddenly become anachronistic. Not just because Fr. Jake has filleted such reasoning to a fare-thee-well, but also because other people are paying attention:

The cat is out of the bag. It is about sex, after all.

The breakaway parishes in the Episcopal Church make all the right noises about their struggle for theological orthodoxy, biblical purity and traditional Anglican values. Cut through all the verbiage, and their issue is sex, specifically homosexuality in the church's leadership, with a side order of bias against women.

As Mr. Gushee understands, it is all about power, when it should be about justice:

That is the height of ecclesiastical arrogance borne of mind-numbing hubris. Bishops of different jurisdictions do not muck about in another bishop's territory, but this sanctimonious crowd observes no such niceties. They alone, they claim, know the truth and read Scripture accurately.

The great danger in all this — apart from the disgraceful treatment of homosexuals — is the growing power of bigots to use the Bible to condemn those who are different. Christians have long done that against Jews, blacks and women.

The power to judge is the power to condemn is the power to destroy. Somebody tell me where, anywhere in the Gospels, Jesus ever advocated the use of that power by his disciples.

What's really interesting here is that the zeitgeist seems truly to have shifted since 11/7. Probably (certainly, in fact) it was a long time in coming; surely it has been building slowly, almost subterraneanly, and is now ready to force a reverse of the trend in the political and religious and even spiritual culture of (at least) this country over the last several decades (at least since the revolutionary spirit of the '60's petered out into yuppies and dinks and the Internet bubble). Is it too early to predict such a sea-change? Perhaps.

But it's not too early to see that something is in the air; and it's not necessarily coming from the "leadership," and it extends beyond politics and Washington, D.C. The more boldly "they" speak out, the more emboldened "we" are to claim our rights, too.

Keep awake, therefore, for you never know the hour....

You can't make this stuff up

The catalog entry for a book due out in May from a major publisher:

There is a tremendous thirst today for finding the hidden truths of Christianity--truths that may have been lost, buried, or even forbidden by institutional religion over the last two millenia. Among the most compelling of these lost traditions is Gnosticism, which has survived in many (sometimes secret) forms and under many names, such as Egyptian desert mystics, Jewish Kabbalists, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, New Age Spirituality, and in the novels of Philip K. Dick and Dan Brown.

First, the outlines of the problem of the blending of Hellenistic rationality (actually Neo-Platonism) and metaphysics. I'm still trying to figure out if they meant to reference the Desert Fathers in that listing at the end; but certainly "New Age Spirituality" is a mishmosh of every kind of metaphysical grab-bag thinking one can imagine. But what really got me was the link to Philip K. Dick (who used all manner of hallucinogens and psychoactive drugs) and Dan Brown (of whom the less said the better, IMHO.)

Were he still au courant, the only person missing here would be Carlos Castaneda. On the other hand, this is the excerpt from the book:

Sought or unsought, honored or dishonored, gnosis will always be with us. It is both our birthright and the destiny to which each of us will sooner or later be called.

Remember what I said about the bastard child of Platonism and Romanticism? Go back and underline it.

There's nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. But it is just wrong, nonetheless. The whole point of gnosticism, after all, was that it was secret; that it drew a sharp line between "you" and "them," and "they" were the poor, benighted ones who would never walk in the light as you, who had the gnosis, walked in the light. A light they couldn't even see, because they lacked the gnosis (a Greek word meaning "knowledge," by the way; and not necessarily esoteric knowledge). I mean, the whole idea of a mystery cult is that it's a mystery!

But, of course, that doesn't sell books to a mass audience, each one of which has to be convinced they are unique. And they are; but it's not because of the gnosis.

What's the Big Idea?

One of the handiest ways to avoid responsibility for your actions is to blame other people. The corollary to this is that you have to depend on the system to get the work done for you, since people are no damned good and will screw up a perfectly rational and sound idea by their incompetence. Eric Alterman aptly labels this "the incompetence dodge." If there is a failure, the failure is never due to the "big idea," but to the people who carried out the idea. "Big ideas," of course, make it easier for us to get through our day.

Which is all most of us are looking for, let's be honest. The concept that we were looking for something else started with the Romantics, as a reaction against the dehumanizing model of industry which technology was making possible in the 19th century. Workers stopped being serfs and field hands and farmers (all of which gained a patina of "romance" which blinded even the rational Thomas Jefferson, to some degree) and started being servants of the machine. The reaction to this absolute dehumanization of the person (serfs and peasants weren't exactly considered 'human' either, and their lives, as Thomas Hardy chronicled, weren't exactly filled with "Englightenment") was to elevate the individual and delve deeply into his or her memories and emotions ("The Child is Father to the Man" was Wordsworth, predating Freud by nearly a century, but building on the work of Locke regarding human identity. We are what we remember, and that memory is writ on a tabula rasa.).

It was Kierkegaard who challenged us, largely in reaction to Hegel's idealism, to take our individuality seriously, to be Christians in our souls, not just in our culture. From that has sprung all manner of blessings as well as curses, but it is the curses we most suffer with today, as we try to reduce his hard words to something kinder and gentler, to make us feel worthy without the effort his Knight of Faith required.

What Hegel espoused and Kierkegaard critiqued can be fairly referred to as the "postulates." (No, this is not a fair summation of either Hegel or Kierkegaard, but bear with me.) The postulates are Hegelian only in the sense that only the postulates are real, and, rather like Plato's idea of the Good (and hence the basis for his morality), only the postulates (i.e., the "Good") are real, and human actions meant to either enact them or follow them are false, mere shadows, apprehensions of the possibility of what the postulates achieve, albeit in some metaphysical realm. To quote myself:

But "religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all." If we are going to draw from Christianity the notion that an idea is all we need to save us, then we had better at least take responsibility for drawing that lesson in the first place. No one can be allowed to build a system they are not willing to live in. No one can escape responsibility by pointing to the weakness of the other to live up to the requirements of a system they do not hold themselves accountable to. The Deuteronomists did not hold Israel accountable any more than the prophets did. They spoke for God, and stood under judgment and accountability and responsibility along with all the members of their nation. David Brooks, and William Buckley and Frances Fukuyama before him, want to speak for god, too. But their god is the "big idea" they have fashioned from reason and comfort and easy occupations lived out among people amenable to their ways, or at least agreeable to being of aid to them.

This puts, of course, entirely too much of a burden on individuals, many of whom are:

those who want to go to church with other folks like themselves and feel comfortable and not be challenged every Sunday. If needy people show up, they take them in, but then the needy are expected to shape up and become like everyone else.

Some of them face serious problems in their daily lives, and on Sunday, they want to sing a few songs and listen to a sermon which is exciting and in which the preacher will tell them, in simple words, with some degree of certainty, how to solve their problems.

That's certainly a fair description of most church attenders; and God be with them. To sit in the seat of judgment is to appoint yourself superior to someone else, and that the teachings of the Christ simply do not allow you to do (what Christianity allows you to do is another matter). There is a fair question as to whether or not the preacher ever does tell them how to solve their problems (one size does not fit all), but that's an unfair question in this context. We will simply note it, and let it pass; because our interest here is not ecclesiology but theology, and the question of "self-actualization."

I actually trace that concept back to Kierkegaard, if not all the way back to Wordsworth. It was Kierkegaard who gave it a religious edge (Wordsworth was more generally "spiritual"), and it is from that new edge that much mischief has flowed. Because while Kierkegaard struggled to do all he could to address 'the individual,' even encouraging the readers of his "Edifying Discourses" (which were really undelivered sermons) to read them aloud so as to hear the words in their own voice, his ideas have been generalized into a "system" (none more debilitating than the three volume Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich) in which each of us is to generally "actualize" our "selves" in order to be the person we were meant to be.

Thus does Platonism meet Romanticism, and their child is a perfect bastard. And so today we are all "individuals" in our identical clothing, sipping our uniquely identical "gourmet" coffees, driving cars that are virtually indistinguishable one from another (only our car dealer knows for sure). All watched over by machines of loving grace.

The odd thing is, the Bible speaks to this, too. All of the Hebrew scriptures are the corporate confession of the people of Israel of the experience of God. (Yes, even Proverbs; yes, even Ecclesiastes; yes, even Ruth.) Yes, even the Psalms. But the Psalms are almost relentlessly in the first-person. They are a corporate confession every individual can sing (and as Luther said, when we sing, we pray twice).

Coming by chance across another comment by Mimi allows me to underscore my point:

The Communion is already broken and the meetings of the Windsor bishops and the Design Group and the ABC wringing his hands can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

In the end, the English and the Anglicans from other countries will have to choose sides.

This is not a representative comment of weak thinking or expressing a "bad idea." This is the common level of frustration we all come to, at one time or another. What's the big idea?, we ask. What do they think they are doing? Can't we all just agree? Or at least agree to disagree? But if "they" are not tolerant, does that let "us" off the hook? If you are not tolerant, am I allowed to exclude you from my company now, in the name of tolerance? Does that exclusion improve my tolerance? Or just protect "the big idea"?

The Big Idea, of course, is essential; not in the sense of necessary, but in the sense of constitutive. The infant regards herself as a universe, and only slowly understands individuation and differentiation, and that "extension" means "beyond the boundaries of the self." But when the Big Idea becomes too important, it becomes god to us, and we sacrifice everything and everyone else to its propitiation. However, without a Big Idea which is larger than we are, the individual becomes the Big Idea, and again we sacrifice everything and everyone to its propitiation. "Two conditions that often appear alike."

In the end we return to the wisdom of Israel, which means "struggles with God." It is no accident that angel renamed Jacob, or that that story of the encounter near the Jabbok just before Jacob met his estranged brother Esau, is central to the identity of a people. It is part of the Big Idea that is constitutive of our understanding of our relationship with God, and so it should be. "The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife sown in the sod." Those are not the comforting words some people want in their daily lives, but they are true, and they can be trusted; and, as ever, the truth will set us free. We can cling to comforting childhood notions of solutions to problems, of answers to difficulties, but we will always be disappointed, and we will make larger and larger sacrifices of our time, talent, treasures, and even family, to an indifferent god which is ultimately nothing more than a false idol. It cannot hear, it cannot help, it cannot assuage; and belief in it can only hinder. But judgment on that belief and those believers is also a hindrance and a pursuit of a false idol; it is also vanity and striving after emptiness. As the Preacher concluded, there is only one truth, if you would follow the path of knowledge and through knowledge, authoritative understanding: "Fear God and keep his commandments."

That is our guiding star, but it is easier said to others than done, and easier not said at all. Is that, then, what church is for, to remind us of our duties? Not entirely. The church always has that awkward duty of caring for its members while being an organization established for the benefit of those who aren't its members, just as Jesus constantly preached and healed and ate with those people who were not decent members of 1st century Palestinian society. But disciples have to eat, too and have to be given a word, and fed in the spirit if only by their communion with each other. This is not an either/or institution; it is a both/and institution. Which means we have to repeat the stories and the gestures and the exercises over and over again, not in pursuit of some goal of perfection (that is Hellenistic thinking; that is Plato leading us all back to the Good from which we have fallen), but because of what Auden so memorably noted; the nature of the quotidian, in which we all live:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake."
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

Part of the lesson of the struggles with God of Israel, is that the world deserves its due, too; that it ian't all about God; that we have our needs, and our expectations, and our right to expect some of them, the best of them, the worthiest of them, to be fulfilled.

We just need help from each other, from God, to know which those are. Because otherwise, we start to think there is answer to life's problems; that the Big Idea we've come up with, is the solution. And that it's a solution that would work, if all these people would just get it right, or get out of our way. But that's the opposite, again; that's when everything becomes an It, and nothing a You. We vacillate so badly; but we can see where we should be moving. We can glimpse what we should be waiting for:

A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph

Because that is more true, and more trustworthy, than any Big Idea we can imagine, or imagine we can implement.

Another Day which will live in Infamy

Today is International Shut Down Gitmo Day. It is the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first "detainees" to the camp.

There are protests in London. There was a protest in Washington, D.C. (that link may not last long). And probably elsewhere.

Just wanted you to be aware.

A Question about the Emperor's New Clothes

The story making the rounds is that more troops will solve the problem in Baghdad, and by extension, if we solve the problem in Baghdad, we solve the problem in Iraq.

There is, of course, the alternative explanation, which is that a military solution simply is not possible. But to the man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail, so we're stuck with pursuing military solutions for the time being.

But this is the usual analysis given of "what went wrong":

"Our misstep here was we believed we could do this on the cheap, to be very candid. Now, the individual who drove that was half-right because we actually won the (invasion) on the cheap," Looney said.

"What we have not been able to do is stabilize the country and create the environment for success. And the military advice was it was going to take three times what it took to win the war, to stabilize the country," he added. "It was not heeded."

This analysis, however, raises a question:

1) US troop levels at one poin in Iraq were 160,000 or so. This "surge" will bring the troop levels back to that high point, or as close as we can get.

2) The military told Bush they had only 19,000 troops to send in (no breakdown yet, apparently, on where the extra 2100 are going to come from, but educated guesses can be made).

3) We've lost over 3000 so far, and the number of wounded exceeds 20,000 (how many of those can no longer fight is unclear, but it's probably well over half, and nearer to 75%. Still, we'll assume half, to be safe.)

So here's the question: when did we ever have enough men and women under arms to conduct this invasion and occupation? Isn't the deeper question here one of: "What military are we paying for, precisely, and why are we paying for it?" The war I was sold for most of my life was the "inevitable" war with the Soviet Union (even some peace groups were convinced nuclear weapons would someday be launched against the Soviets). That war was largely envisioned, in the popular mind, as a war which would involve the exchange of more and more destructive weapons, until (or maybe just on a first-strike by each side) there was no one left to launch any weapons, and no infrastructure to launch them against. Invasion and occupation weren't really considered, since: (a) "we" didn't do that, and (b) there'd be nothing but radioactive moonscape to occupy anyway.

We never thought much about our army trying to occupy "their" country. Indeed, this was one of the generalized complaints about Vietnam: that we never really tried to hold anything, that our "mission" was never "clearly defined." What was never acknowledged was that a "clearly defined mission" in war means either extermination or occupation. Our model was WWII, which was all about "liberation." But we invaded Iraq; Iraq didn't invade anyone else.

Which is part of how we got to where we are today. We built a massive war machine in a fantastically short amount of time, and basically matched the industrial output of Germany, which had been working on its war machine for quite some time, and the industrial output of Japan, who also had a head start, and who decimated our Navy at Pearl Harbor. It was an astonishing feat. And then, as Eisenhower warned us, we didn't know how to stop. Now we are the musclebound body builder who looks fearsome but can't really do anything, because even our bombers and airships can't insure we kill the right person. We have the most expensive and powerful military money can buy, but we don't have the personnel to do anything with it. We've reduced Iraq to rubble, which was part of the invastion plan. But having kicked over the anthill, we find we can't rebuild it and are surprised that the chaos we created in order to invade, is not amenable to our attempts (feeble and pathetic as they are) at control. And the consensus seems to be coalexcing around the idea that we failed at control because we didn't put enough boots on the ground.

Assuming arguendo that a military solution will always trump a political one, we still have a problem: when was the military solution ever available? When did we ever have enough troops under arms to control Iraq? Even with the "Coalition of the Willing," we weren't able to do that.

Which is what makes this latest excuse for another chance at victory, such a tragic farce. Condoleeza Rice says: "We cannot afford to fail." But the fact is, by the Administration's own terms: we already have. We failed before we even started.

Let's be clear about one thing:

This "surge" is to secure Baghdad. Not to "win the war" (what war? Who are we at war with?). Not to pacify the country. Not to stabilize the society (and when did the military ever do that, except maybe in Sparta?).

This troop increase, and the $5.8 billion that is supposed to accompany it, is to secure one city. One.

The mightiest military power in the world. And after 3+ years, we can't secure one city.

But 21,500 more battle weary troops, and another $6 billion, will do the trick. And if you believe that, I've gone some fine property in southern Louisiana to sell you. Trust me. You'll love it.

"Religion is responsibility...."

So, it's a good thing this war is not a religious issue, huh?

The displacement of Iraqis from Iraq is now the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world.

The UN estimates that 2.3 million Iraqis have fled violence in their country; 1.8 million have fled to surrounding countries, while some 500,000 have vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq. An estimated 40,000 people are leaving Iraq every month for Syria alone. Other countries through out the Middle East, including Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Turkey are also seeing increased flows. Most Iraqis are determined to be resettled to Europe or North America, and few consider return to Iraq an option. With no legal work options in their current host countries, Iraqis are already exploring the use of false documents to migrate to Western nations.

Well, we certainly don't want any illegal immigrants in America, now, do we? Why, that'd be...illegal! And immoral? Well, maybe...as long as we don't ask why they are immigrants in the first place.

“Iraqis who are unable to flee the country are now in a queue, waiting their turn to die,” is how one Iraqi journalist summarizes conditions in Iraq today. While the US debates whether a civil war is raging in Iraq, thousands of Iraqis face the possibility of death every day all over the country. Refugees International met with dozens of Iraqis who have fled the violence and sought refuge in neighboring countries. All of them, whether Sunni, Shi’a, Christian or Palestinian, had been directly victimized by armed actors. People are targeted because of religious affiliation, economic status, and profession – many, such as doctors, teachers, and even hairdressers, are viewed as being “anti-Islamic.” All of them fled Iraq because they had genuine and credible fear for their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

So here's the moral question, all over again: we broke it; did we buy it? An e-mail read on BBC Worldservice this morning said the US voters re-elected Bush, so we are responsible for the mess in Iraq, and if that means we need to have a draft in order to have enough soldiers to send over there to stabilize the country, so be it. It is our moral duty, now, to sacrifice whatever it takes to restore order to that country.

Assuming, of course, that even more American soldiers in Iraq will restore order. The question of moral responsibility, however, is clear. We are responsible for the situation in Iraq; we kicked over their ant-hill. Introduce so much chaos into any situation, when you have no real intention of colonizing or otherwise occupying the country, and this kind of chaos is inevitable (which is not to say control of the country by an occupier was ever possible, but we never really tried that, because even Rumsfeld didn't want to pay that price). So, now what? Now we've created a refugee crisis. Listen to the interview with Sean Garcia at Democracy Now! We may not know much about war in this country, but we've had recent experience with refugees, with people forced to flee due to government incompetence and ineptitude. But there is no Astrodome in the Middle East for people to flee to, no Houston that can absorb hundreds of thousands of persons, no larger country that can disperse the suddenly homeless to new homes and shelters.

Dramatically short of funds and staff in all three countries, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees can’t provide adequate protection and assistance to Iraqis. The agency lacks the resources to process refugees’ documentation adequately. Without staff to monitor borders, UNHCR depends on national governments for updated information on new arrivals. UNHCR is also unable to provide significant assistance to Iraqis, and receives very little support from other UN agencies that do not seem to acknowledge the extent of the crisis. The fact that Lebanon, Syria and Jordan are not state parties to the 1951 Refugees Convention further reduces UNHCR’s ability to protect refugees.

Same song, second verse; but this is in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Just don't expect to hear any mention of this subject tonight, or any acknowledgement of national responsibility anytime soon.

The United States must begin by acknowledging that violence in Iraq has made civilian life untenable, creating a refugee crisis that is essentially exporting the nation’s instability to neighboring countries. To deal with this crisis, Refugees International proposes the following:

1. Given its central role in Iraq, the US should lead an international initiative to support Middle Eastern countries hosting Iraqi civilians. The US should recognize and support the constructive role Syria is playing in hosting Iraqi refugees and help it keep its borders open.

2. Donors must significantly increase their support to UNHCR and other UN agencies must participate in the relief efforts for Iraqi refugees.

3. Western countries, including the US, must agree to resettle particularly vulnerable groups, without prejudice to their right to return to their country as recognized under international law.

Slip slidin' away

Parse this carefully, and our military are the monsters:

The number of Guantanamo Bay detainees participating in a hunger strike has more than doubled in recent weeks to 11, including five who are being force-fed, the U.S. military said Monday.

Military officials describe the hunger strike as an attempt to build public sympathy and opposition to the detention center, which on Thursday marks its fifth anniversary of existence at the isolated U.S. military base in Cuba.

The jump in the number of strikers comes as Guantanamo's critics are using its fifth anniversary to call for the prison to close.

"The hunger strike technique is consistent with al-Qaeda practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield," said Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantanamo Bay spokesman.

These detainees are not human being driven to starvation by desperation. They are clever enemies willing to kill themselves in order to make war on the US. Of course, if they truly intended harm to the US, as the military insists, that case could be proven in a court of law and prisoners could be tried for crimes and imprisoned, while the innocent would go free. But these "enemy combatants" are so frightening, so demonic, that we must simply trust our military to know what is best and to imprison anyone they say is a threat, and represent them as too evil even to deserve to be heard from.

"I don't see it as at all curious that they should be desperate enough to starve themselves," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.

That, of course, presumes they are human beings. Once you do that, you might even have sympathy for them. And once you have sympathy for them, you might decide the military is wrong to label them "enemy combatants." And once you decide that, you might decide that military doesn't have, and shouldn't have, the power of judge, jury, and jailer over any human beings.

It's a slippery slope, indeed.

WWPD--Part II

Ed Note: I may be pushing this out of the nest prematurely, but time to see if it can fly.

In England, what passes for "Megachurches" have way more committed membership than the Church of England.
Chike

There is still the burningly relevant question of commitment: what is it, and how do we measure it?

Surely, you say, that’s a simple question. Commitment is measured by one’s passion for a subject. But that’s a very recent definition, one that extends no further back in Western culture than the 19th century. It’s an invention of Romanticism, a yardstick of devotion created in reaction to the Enlightenment, indeed, to Western thought going back to Hellenistic times. When, for example, left rev. cites the experience of Wesley, she refers to a decline in passion, in emotional fervor, for the gospel:

When John Wesley was 83, he undertook his last, arduous circuit around all the Methodist societies and chapels in England, Ireland, and the Channel Isles. He discovered that the people had cooled off a bit. They had succumbed to what Max Weber refers to as a "routinization of the Spirit" and had lost that sense of being driven by grace and, indeed, were experiencing a crisis of grace. Why had this happened? That "grand poison of souls" had taken its toll-"the increase in goods," "the love of the world," "the taking pleasure in the praise of men," "laying up treasures on earth." (James C. Logan, "After Wesley: The Middle Period (1791-1849)." Grace Upon Grace: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Langford.)

But this is simply what Christian monks long ago learned to call acedie; and the problem is spiritual, not just emotional. Indeed, it’s the reason the Desert Fathers retreated to the desert: to avoid the seductions of the world, because they knew whatever emotional commitment they made to Jesus would fade. For centuries, Christians understood that commitment to Christianity was a matter of discipline, not emotion; of diligence, not excitement. We can’t go on; we go on.

What mega-churches and “thriving” churches promise today, of course, is an emotional experience. But it’s the same thing Hollywood promises. In the entertainment industry they call it “high concept,” meaning the plot of the movie or TV show can be explained in a few words. What they really mean is, it’s already familiar, and we can emotionally respond to it because we know what to expect and when to expect it. Watch any sitcom and pay attention to the rhythm, not the story or the jokes, and you can quickly figure out when a new character will enter, who that character will be, and when the next joke is coming. It’s as regular as clockwork. Watch a familiar sitcom in re-runs and you’ll notice that the early shows are usually fresh and different and almost unique. And, if the show lasts very long at all, they stop being fresh and different and almost unique, and settle quickly into a familiar pattern. The characters all lapse into caricature and cliché. Is this because the writers are lazy and stupid? No, it’s usually why the show has any longevity at all: it lapses into the familiar, the better to appeal to the emotions of the audience, emotions which the audience wants stirred on a very simple, a very familiar, level. All the characters become familiar and settle comfortably into their roles, as we settle comfortably into our couches and put down the remotes.

It is no accident that "user friendly" "seeker services" are as much like TV shows as possible. After all, what is more "user friendly" than what we are already familiar with? And what better way to lure large crowds of people, than with an emotional stimulant?

Wesley is not guilty of some secret sin because he wanted Christians to be passionate and stirred in their faith. The best worship service I ever preached in was at a small African American church in southern Louisiana. The people shouted "Amen!" during the sermon (a strange response when you've finally gotten used to people listening very quietly to what you have to say) and sang and shouted and praised so vigorously even my daughter, on the way home (and much younger then) said: "And I didn't even get bored!" The only other African-American service in my memory is one I attended in seminary. At the end, the pastor had to appeal to people to leave, so the next service could start on time. Both churches clearly had their passion in the right place, and knew how to use it; so it isn't passion itself that is suspect.

It is the reason we've come to rely on passion. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a passionate preacher; but I defy anyone to read his letter scribbled on stolen scraps of paper and smuggled to the outside world, and deny he was also seriously rational in his fervor. No more was Wesley a man carried away by his emotions. But emotions have become the easy touchstone of our lives. Sure of our ability to detect hypocrisy in reasoned words even if (perhaps especially because) we can't analyze their logic, we trust in passion to reveal the truth we are certain reason obscures. This is part of the reason Americans distrust "eggheads" and prefer the truth revealed by emotions. All of our dramas hinge on it. Compare something like "Antigone" or "Othello" to, say, "The Death of a Salesman." All three are tragedies, and great ones. But Creon is undone by his passion and paranoia, not revelatory through them. Likewise Othello is undermined by his trust and his unreasonable jealousy, egged on by Iago and exacerbated by being alone in a foreign land unaided by the reasoned counsel of cooler and wiser heads. But Willie Loman's passion for success reveals his true nature, even as it reveals the weakness of the American Dream he so passionately believes in. Even Miller is more rational than emotional. Name a TV sitcom or drama, or even popular movie today, that doesn't turn on passion rather than reason for it's story. Even the scientists in "CSI" are passionate about their field (rather than dispassionate, like Sherlock Holmes). I haven't seen it yet, so I could be wrong (someone correct me if they know), but I expect the trajectory of the plot in The Queen is that Queen Elizabeth II "hides" behind an emotionless facade, and at the climax of the film she finally reveals, or (just as telling) refuses to reveal, her 'true' emotional self.

We are, after all, what we feel; not what we think. That we even think that is almost a truism is a legacy of Romanticism. So now we measure "commitment" by passionate involvement, or at least excitement. And we measure success by the ability to stir people to passion.

Which, of course, is one reason Hitler scares us so much, to this day: because he was reportedly such a fiery speaker, and so ably manipulated the emotions of the otherwise rational German people, a culture which gave us the intellectually passionate music of Bach and Brahms, the contained power of Beethoven, the erudite reasoning of Kant, Schopenauer, Heidegger, Bultmann, and the powerful schools of Scriptural exegesis which continue to affect Western culture today. It was the passion Hitler unleashed, we say, which fired the second World War and sparked the Holocaust. Because if any of that was reasonable, where is the hope in reason?

But if that was a nationwide emotional response, how can we trust emotion to reveal the truth about us that our intellect hides? And if we can't trust something else to reveal ourselves to us, how can we ever know the truth? Or is truth something beyond our individual experience?