Eggs with the dead

My wife asked me to make a hard boiled egg for her this morning. I put a pot of water on stove and opened the refrigerator door. I couldn't find the eggs right off, so the door swung wide open. The eggs were out of place, under some tupperwared leftovers on a bottom shelf, the door still open. I brought the egg carton to the stove, and opened it, to select an egg. That's when Memere started up.

"Close the door!" she admonished in her Yankee accent. "You're letting all the cold out!"

And Memere was right. After a fashion.

When she grew up, refrigeration came from the ice box. Literally, an insulated box cooled by ice, cut months before from a local pond. Ice being ice, the temps in the ice box never got below 32. There was no such thing as a freezer, which required electricity to plunge the temps below the freezing point of water.

So, cold was a precious commodity, impossible to replenish. Once lost, it was gone. It wasn't just a matter of waiting for the kitchen's magic cooling machine to get back to work.

Since that one rebuke from my grandmother 50 years ago, I have been arguing with her in my head. Sometimes, the argument is historical and technological: the days of the icebox are gone! Our technology is far superior! Sometime, the argument is scientific: But Memere, it's not just the air that is cold, but everything in the fridge. Even letting the cold air out is but a fraction of the "cold" stored in there. Sometimes the argument is economic and social: Memere, it costs pennies at most to recool whatever air might have been lost. Is it worth it to get us both upset over a few pennies?

There are so many voices like my Memere's rattling around in my head, and so many internal debates with those voices. They come from arguments that could not be formulated by a young mind. From comebacks that coalesced too late to be used in a fight. From responses that were too raw and cruel to voice, and needed a lifetime of reflection and wisdom to make with the necessary tenderness.

How much of our internal dialog is with people long dead? Is it good to keep our loved ones (not to mention our detested enemies!) so close to us? Can we find ever find peace with them? Or must we wait for that day when we meet face to face? Will the first business of Heaven be to reconcile with those whose voices inhabited our heads?

Star Light, star bright

It's Christmastime, and people are debating the Star of Bethlehem yet again. Neil DeGrasse Tyson skimmed over some of the theories about it on his StarTalk radio podcast. He mentioned Halley's Comet, which swung by our neighborhood in 12BC. But it was probably too early to herald Jesus's birth. Maybe it was a nova recorded by the Chinese around 5BC. Maybe not.

Conjunctions of planets have been used as candidates. Saturn and Jupiter had a triple conjunction in 7BC. But conjunctions are pretty common in the night sky.

But any astronomical candidate has to account for the strange behavior of the star of Bethlehem in Matthew's account, the only gospel that mentions the star.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage.

Then Herod called the magi secretly and ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearance.

And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.They were overjoyed at seeing the star, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother.

As others have pointed out, this was a weird star. It is both strange and ordinray, appearing out of nowhere, then "rising" as the celestial sphere turns. But after the magi's audience with Herod, the star moves oddly, leading the magi until it unmistakeably stops over Jesus's birthplace.

Was the star,then, directly overhead when the magi approached the stable? If so, how did the magi know precisely what location was directly under the star? Go outside on a starry night, look straight up and tell me (without a computerized star map) which house is directly beneath any star overhead. Is it your own house? The neighbor's? Or someone ten miles down the road? And if the star was not an actual celestial body, but hovered beneath the heavens -- maybe a hundred feet up, when why would highly-sophisticated magi call it a star?

Short of divinely-arranged discernment, it's hard to square Matthew's story with any thing in the natural world.

Which leaves us with few options. Either Matthew picked up a story, created by others, about Jesus's birth that was circulating in 85AD. Or, as many theologians like to think, he invented a highly symbolic story about the birth of Christ and its deeper meaning. Or he just made up a story to make Jesus seem important -- even from the day of his birth. He even threw in a few special celestial touches to tart up the story.

My sense? I am unconvinced by the astronomical possibilities. No one else in the world saw what the magi saw, as told by Matthew. But it seems equally unlikely that Matthew would have concocted a story with such meaning, peril and symbolic connections to the Scriptures. This was not just about crafting a better Hercules story. There are layers of depth and meaning to Matthew's account that suggest, at the least, that he wished to situate the nativity of Jesus into a cosmic, political and (most importantly) a moral context. So while I don't wonder anymore about what the Star of Bethlehem was, I am more transported by what it might mean.

Like the magi, we are strangers in a strange land, guided by forces we don't fully comprehend. We risk being trapped by the fears and selfish agendas of our fellow, weak human beings. And we carry gifts with us, which (when moved be the wisdom of the heart) we share with those in need. Our joy and gift is to have encountered the divine, even when disguised in poverty and humility. And made wiser by our encounter with divine strength in human weakness, we return home by another way, to tell our story to those who lacked the grace to have seen the star at its rising.

Another one bites the dust

I was catching up with an old family friend -- one of my mom's high school classmates, actually -- who told me that her younger son was an atheist. "Ethan," we'll call him, has worked in the aerospace industry for many years. I'm not surprised that a person with his talents at scientific thinking would find it hard to fit his logic-driven personality into what the Church has to offer.

But what, frankly, have we got to offer to those who (like me, to a great extent) buy into the scientific worldview?

Frankly, little, And of that, much that is debatable.

Take the Bible. To believers, it is the literal word of God, correct in all aspects. But to those taking an outsider's perspective, it is (at best) a record of what certain people in a certain place at a certain time thought about God and the Universe. Unfortunately, that "certain people" was a small group of disorganized and unruly nomads, kicked around by the world's larger and more advanced powers. The "certain place" was Israel and Judea -- not the great centers of learning and commerce like Rome, Alexandria and Athens. And the "certain time" was the Bronze and Iron Ages -- long before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. As our own age speeds past the Industrial Revolution, the Space Age and the Digital Age -- and our heroes are scientific and technical geniuses like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Watson, Crick, Gates and Jobs-- it's not surprising that the older heroes -- Jesus, Moses and David -- seem inconsequential and ineffective by comparison.

And take our theology -- sprung from the values and worldview of the blood-soaked, demon-haunted world. If Christ were to become incarnate today, would we be obsessed by the spilling of his blood as were the early Christians? To us, blood is a mess to clean; not a relic to fetishize.

So I get how moderns would find it hard to find meaning in the old stories.

But I fear that  my fiend Ethan, like many of his contemporaries, has cut himself off from the human story, which contains many of the same hardships and questions as it did in previous Ages. And it does so with beings whose world is still grasped with the feeble power of the 3-pounds of wetware between our ears. Scientifically and technologically, we are light years ahead of our Bronze Age counterparts. But emotionally (and dare I say spiritually) we are just about as advanced (or retarded) as they were. Our wars are no less brutal, and our grasp of our own motivations no more clear than they have ever been. We can simplify our view by excluding God, but that makes it no less painful to experience the death of a loved one, nor any more clear to guide a child through the hazards of young adulthood.

Neither a fundamentalist approach to the Bible nor a commitment to the Bronze Age ethics that undergird Church teaching will speak to those who worldview is so different from those who came before us. But by rejecting all that the Church teaches, including its Creator and Author, folks like Ethan are losing a chance to reinvent the great story of humanity. They may leave little behind for the soul-seeking children than a world full of technical gadgets and marvels without meaning.

Duck, duck, goose

Phil Robertson, pater familias of the Duck Dynasty reality series on A&E, got everyone's feathers ruffled with his comments in GQ magazine. For starters, Phil just can't understand the attraction of homosexuals for non-female body parts.

“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”a

Well, spoken Bearded Heterosexual Male! To Phil, it's not a biological preference that determines what a person finds attractive, but sin, or its absence. A normal, unsinful person, one like Phil, I guess, will crave the genitalia of the opposite sex. But when sin gets hold of you, all bets are off!

 

 But it's when he was asked what behavior is sinful, that Phil really got rolling.

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

The left-wing blogs and magazines had apoplexy over this one. Good God, Dobson, Robertson has equated homosexuality with bestiality! Perhaps. But Robertson has simply paraphrased what is stated in 1 Corinthians 6:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

But for all his skill at quoting Paul, Phil leaves out the context of the statement -- which was Paul's admonition against Christians suing fellow Christians. Seems the Corinthians were a litigious bunch. Paul was upset because in the Kingdom, Christians will be set up as judged over non-Christians. We are supposed to judge them, not ourselves!

But Paul goes on:

That is what some of you used to be; but now you have had yourselves washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.^d

Interesting. Paul knows that some of his own flock have been mighty sinners!
What disappointed me about the media reaction to the Robertson's interview was the focus on homosexual sins. Too bad. We lefties might have made common cause with Phil when it came to beating up on the thieves, slanderers and robbers. Very much in line with the rhetoric of the Occupy movement. But no one would know with all the focus being put on non-financial sins.

So what do we make of this?

First, that that Phil's mindset is hardly different than that of most fundamentalist Christians. He reads a bible verse, and runs with it, usually without regard to its context.

Second, that it is dangerous to allow uneducated people to speak on topics they barely understand. There's far more to even seemingly straightforward scriptures like the one Phil quotes. Like, what was Paul's understanding of sodomy and homosexuality? Did it match ours? And where does our modern understanding of biology fit into the way we might filter biblical verses? Paul had no idea about DNA, genetics or chromosomes. He did not have any knowledge of germs, viruses or prions. To him, there were two "facts" about human beings. They were created perfect by God. And any problems they might have -- from painful childbirth to illness to death -- were caused by sin. That is Paul's worldview, and it's sad (in the light of so many scientific advances) that many Christians still hold to it today. I guess it makes it easier for them to blame the sufferer for their problems.

But let's give Paul (and maybe Phil) some credit. While most educated people no longer see homosexuality as a disease or as a choice, no one believes the greed, slander and theft are biologically determined or a matter of viral influence. Ripping off your neighbor or your workplace or your national economy are still wholly under the influence of the will. By putting our focus on moral issues we can all agree on, we might be able to move beyond the current silliness with Duck Dynasty.

God bless the Satanists -- defenders of the Constitution

Chalk one up for the separation of church and state:

Once the Oklahoma Lege approved putting the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the State Capitol, that opened the door big and wide for other “religions” to have tributes to their beliefs.

The first to apply?

The New York based Satanic Temple, of course.They are submitting a plan for a $20,000 designs. The Ten Commandments tribute was only $10,000, the but Satanic one will include “an interactive display for children.”

The interactive display for kids was a nice touch, I have to admit. That's guaranteed to give some fundie heart failure.

This is why I am a more-or-less absolutist on keeping religion out of the government. Once you give one sect special privileges, it's next to impossible to keep out the rest. Letting "In God We Trust" on our coinage and "Under God" in our pledge, and it's just a matter of time when some will want to pledge "under Lord Satan" or demand nickels engraved with "In the Triple Goddess" We Trust."

If it were up to me, we would keep nativity scenes off the public square, chaplains out of Congress, and prayers out of the public classroom. There are so many other places to express religion without forcing other-believers or non-believers into participating in religion against their will or against their faith. Letting mangers onto the public square just invites a sense of superiority feelings from Christians and a sense of exclusion from everyone else. Pitting citizens against one another is a curious way to foster civic-mindedness.

As for our lawmakers, by what power of heaven or hell do they have to anoint themselves in holy armor before rushing off to start wars, rob the poor, torment the sick and enrich the wealthy? Seem to me that the best way they can express their religion is by taking care of their fellow citizens. After all, some version of the Golden Rule is common to all peoples.

Even Satanists.

Poles apart

We are such a polarized society -- rich versus poor, Democrat versus Republican, white versus black/brown/red/yellow; believers versus atheists. If you're not one, you must be the other right?

But polarization is at least as much of a habit of mind as it is a description of reality.

In the world of religion, we see this habit in the way we approach topics like the Bible, abortion and creation. I often see it on Facebook on posts from friends who are science-minded or deeply religious. If you believe in evolution, natural selection, the mutability of genes, the randomness of genetic change, the seeming fact that weather and natural disasters are not sent to punish the wicked, then you must be anti-religion. If you believe in God or that fetal life is sacred, then you must be a fundamentalist. If you think that the Bible reflects the truths and biases of the writers, then you can't belong to a Church.

Weirdly, this reflect reality, since many people have difficulty holding beliefs that fall into two political categories. They seem to find the one or two issues that matter to them, gravitate to that pole, then accept whatever other beliefs are associated with that pole -- whether they cared about them before or not. In the book "What's the Matter with Kansas," Thomas Frank argues that this need to aggregate at poles is what has driven the popularity of conservative politics in America, even when tenets of that belief may harm the economic interests of its supporters. The formula goes like this: identify a wedge issue -- abortions, gay marriage, illegal aliens, whatever -- that a segment of the voting population cares about. Label that view "conservative." Then, watch as people cluster to that pole of the political spectrum and adopt other "conservative" beliefs -- like trickle-down economics, or union-busting, or lowering taxes. Voila, instant "conservatives," who will vote their social conscience, while getting robbed on the economic issues.

The true work of democracy lies in helping citizens to recognize that their beliefs are getting in the way of their well-being. It is in helping them to recognize the flimsy barriers that separate "us" from "them." As John Kennedy said, at the height of then Cold War, in relation to Soviet citizens, our enemies:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal.

Speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963

Finding the common ground that unites us, that makes us communio,  should be the goal of the our leaders -- whether government or religious. It's what leads to peace, amity and cooperation. Splitting the community into self-interested factions is the work of diabolo, the Splitter, the Divider, who constantly whispers in our ears that the other guy is getting a better deal, that we are being screwed, victimized, robbed -- even when we might enjoy the lion's share of our  community's resources.

The first step must be to remove the blinders that Diabolo invites us to wear, and they we don willingly. The blinders to others' pain, to others' value, to others' dignity.  The blinders to our own entrapment in the illogic that allows us to condemn the breaks that others get without admitting to the breaks that we have enjoyed.

Saying "no" to the accepted wisdom of our culture is hard. In this Advent season, it makes us a voice that cries out in the wilderness. But if the stories of the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, are indicative, even the lonely voice crying truth will bear fruit, pointing to the birth of what will free.

No voice, no sacrifice, no freedom.

 

Be that voice.

Give it up

I created this poster today, both as an Advent exhortation, but also as a rejoinder to those who see Christianity as a means to further demoralize and disenfranchise the poor. Yay me. Then I got nervous. What if that last sentence -- "Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages" -- was taken the wrong way? What if some readers understood John the Baptist as telling the poor to stop agitating for a living wage? Would J the B oppose raising the minimum wage?

I hope that people see John as telling soldiers that their wages should be sufficient for them -- that they didn't have to supplement them with blackmail and extortion, alienating and impoverishing the very people they were supposed to protect. What's not clear to me is whether the soldiers that Luke talks about were Roman soldiers, or Jewish officers like those who protected the temple. It's more likely to be the latter, since Roman soldiers or their mercenaries would likely not have spoken Aramaic, the local language. Not to mention, Roman soldiers would not have understood "foreign" concepts like repentance and the end of the age.

 

But I probably have nothing to worry about. John's words are about sharing clothing and food with those in need. He links those words with advice to two sets of cheats -- tax collectors and the military. Perhaps in John's mind, these three groups were similar. Each keeps what is justly belongs to the poor.

 

What a Christmas it would be if we modeled ourselves more on John the Baptist than on the Magi. We might spend the day giving freely from our surplus rather than expecting to expand it!

Lord, we are hard of heart and unwilling to relinquish our grasp on our treasure. Teach us to be more openhanded and freer with the excess bounty that clogs our closets, attics and basements. Amen.

Nelson Mandela -- the very, very bad man

His body had barely started to cool when the attacks on Nelson Mandela's remarkable life began to circulate. His supposed communist associations were raised. Bill O'Reilly said, “He was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right? But he was a great man! What he did for his people was stunning!… He was a great man! But he was a communist!”  Thanks, Bill, for another bit of your patented idiocy.

Why idiotic? Didn't Mandela write a book called "How to be a Good Communist?" Weren't some of his supporters South Africans communists? Might he have held a position in the SACP, or South African Communist Party? True, true and maybe true. Mandela apparently penned the book around 1961. He formed the ANC's militant arm, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) with help from the SACP. And he may have held some position in the SACP, though he denied it later.

Although initially committed to non-violent protest, he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961 in association with the South African Communist Party, leading a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. (Source: wikipedia)

So what are we to make of this. If a man ever shows interest in communism, does that forever make him a communist? Has communism then become an indelible part of his character? Or can a moan move on from earlier associations and remake himself?

I call this the Jean Valjean syndrome. If a man is starving and steals a loaf of bread, can he be then forever labeled a thief? This was the view of Jalvert, the antagonist in "Les Miserables," a police official so impervious to the idea of human conversion that he hounded Valjean, even after he had clearly amended his life and transcended his past. Given the number of Les Miz fans worldwide, it's amazing how the views of Jalvert still hold sway.

Consider Mandela's position in the early 1960s. He desperately wants to free his people from the tyranny of the apartheid white regime. He is unable to free them on his own. Western powers, including the US and Britain, show little interest in condemning the brutality of the white supremacist government. With nowhere to turn, he was two choice: accept that his people will have to suffer, probably indefinitely, or to turn to the one model of liberation at his disposal: communist liberation movements.

What would you do?

But the communist label is usefully toxic. To have had any relationship with communism is to choose to be permanently blemished in the eyes of those wishing to discredit you. Those who ignored your pleas for humane treatment can now besmirch your aspirations, and attempt to diminish your legacy.

But Mandela was larger than that. Regardless of to whom he turned for help in liberating his people 50 years ago, he helped to establish a democratic state in which bloodshed between former white oppressors and former black victims was nearly completely avoided. He overcame the bitterness in his own heart and invited his former Robben Island guard to attend his inauguration as the country's first black president.

Those who need to smear Mandela as a communist must do so by ignoring his actual achievements. It's a special kind of white arrogance that allows a person to negate a lifetime of achievements by a black man who suffered personally and who transformed that suffering into a chance or millions of his countrymen to succeed on the world stage. To call Mandela a communist for a past association with the only group interested in advancing the aspirations of his people is to diminish the aspirations of all people to live in freedom, peace and prosperity.

Rest in peace Madiba. Your achievements will outlive the hatred of your detractors.

Who's got your back, Francis?

It's been fun watching the reaction of the plutocrats to Pope Francis's calling out of unrestrained capitalism as "Marxism "(Rush Limbaugh), "kind of Liberal"  (Sarah Palin) and "neo-socialism" ( Stuart Varney of Fox News).

These folks have made their careers over the last 30 years of persuading the American public that there is only one legitimate economic theory, unregulated capitalism, and that all other economies are the devil's own creation. How else to understand why ordinary people, made to scrape and suffer under a system that funnels 40% of its wealth to the top 1% of income earners, can support the system that impoverishes them and reduces opportunities for their children? When called upon to help the unfortunate, the only response of our wealth-idolizing class is to double down on their beliefs, swearing that the rich need to be taxed less than ever before and the poor need to be bled more deeply. So deep is their faith in the system that even its complete collapse would hardly dent their fervor.

I have been worried about the pope's well being since just after his election. He has clearly signaled that the Church needs to be true to its call for justice and its option for the poor. Disciplining the Bishop of Bling was one of Francis's first shots across the bow of the Church of Luxury. Washing the feet of women (a Muslim woman, to boot) signaled an end to the exclusive boys-only club that the Church has become. Embracing a man with facial tumors called us all to see beyond the externals to a person's soul. And Evangelii Gaudium placed the pontiff squarely on the side of those disadvantaged by the soul-sucking refusal of western capitalism to deal with the ever-widening gap between the super-rich and the rest of us. At what point will the pope's openness and accessibility become a liability? Will someone take a shot at him? Arrange a convenient accident?

We should probably enjoy this season of the Church's openness to the poor while it lasts. In myth, based on John's timeline, Jesus preached for three years. More likely, if you look at the Synoptics, he preached for less than one. Brutal military/economic systems don't tolerate rule breakers for long.

The Devil may be fated to lose the war in the long run, but he sure can rack up many small, heartbreaking victories along the way, along with body count. Pray for the pope's safety. Pray to thwart the plans of those with an interest to silence his message of joy and hope.