Loose the hounds! The church of the emboldened spectator

We've all heard (and maybe generated!) the complaints coming out of Mass. "Lord, if only the guitarists tuned their instruments!" "The sound man must have asleep at his post today. I could hardly hear the homily!" "It was so cold in there I wanted to throw in an extra 5 bucks for the oil bill!" "If Father would just stop telling jokes at Mass, I might feel Jesus in the room!"

As accurate (or catty or snide or "helpful") as these comments might be, they show how much we don't see ourselves as integral to the worship service. Like a meal at a fancy restaurant, worship is provided to us, and we, the recipients, get to judge its quality.

This spectator mentality is one of the by-products of living in an age when we do so little for ourselves. We are fed TV and radio programs and served at drive-throughs and restaurants. Even our education is fed to us by teachers serving curricula we didn't choose or have a voice in designing. We are all output and no input. Sure, we can yell at the TV (my poor wife shoos me out of the room when I groan too loudly at the lovelorn blather of The Bachelorette) but we have next to no say about network programming decisions. Other than deciding which shows to watch, our voices don't matter much to the people who fill the airwaves (and our brainwaves) with tales of love, murder, shock and schlock.

The internet hasn't helped much. True, we now have the opportunity to respond to news stories and TV Shows via comments. But we too often respond with abuse and appalling ugliness. We respond at, rather than to, giving ourselves points for the wittiest or sharpest put-down. We gravitate to websites that promise slapdowns of our enemies. "Watch Jay Z Slap Down Admirer Trying to Flirt With Beyonce" cries one. "Watch a certain president slap down climate change deniers with one simple point" promises another.

But what happens when that spectator mentality is transferred to our worship lives?

Being a Catholic, I know that being a spectator has a long history. We have been preached at for millennia. And we have been taught at for centuries. You might say that Church has set us up to be passive recipients of information. Catchers mitts of salvation. We certainly have not been taught to be critical of our bishops or theologians or papal teachings. Our role -- to pay, pray and obey -- is deeply ingrained. We may not even be aware that we have bought into it. Even when we no longer have nuns hovering over us to enforce our acquiescence.

As spectators, we expect to be entertained constantly. The church's ministers exist solely to make our lives interesting for the 1 or 2 hours a week we deliver ourselves into our care. Church musicians are critiqued mercilessly for not providing CD quality music -- and only of the variety we personally enjoy. Church decorators are mentally graded on the beauty of the floral displays, banners and the tarnish on the gilded crucifix. Priests are evaluated on the quality, brevity and orthodoxy of their sermons, and on whether they use the microphone well. And on and on.

Not that I'm any better. Believe me, I have been on both sides of the equation. I have railed incessantly about terrible homilies and clueless priests and bishops. And as a musician, I have been regularly skewered and given backhanded compliments by those who didn't think my music, voice or hymn selections were up to snuff. There are times that I think I have been hit by the karma bus when I have a less-than stellar day on my guitar, only to get pointedly complimented for my voice.

People who serve the community are our neighbors and our friends -- co-journeyers in a religion of love for starters. They put the little time they have, and their limited talent, into the work they do. The Bersteins and the Michelangelos can write and paint for the centuries. But we are putting our meager gifts to work for the glory of God and the enjoyment of our friends. It's unkind in the extreme to constantly point our our supposed flaws, especially when our critics have less skill or time to contribute. Save your clever carping for the symphony or Broadway. But cut your local artists a little slack. Don't complain about the weak voices in the choir, join! Don't turn you nose up at a tasteless liturgical banner, volunteer to make one! Don't tsk-tsk your presider's lack of organization, help him organize!

Over time, a church full of spectators will erode the spirit and strength of a community. It demoralizes those giving their time and talent. It drives sensitive people away from service. It is self-indulgent. And it doesn't improve anything.Try to recognize the warning signs in your own community and steer it toward compassion, love and service. Ask the critics what they can bring to the service, aside from their critique. And maybe, slowly, the climate will change. Your presiders, musicians and other ministers will relax a little. And maybe give you the performance you have been looking for!

Love wins!

I would be remiss in missing this opportunity to mark the Supreme Court's historic  judgment on Obergefell vs Hodges, which allowed same-sex marriage to become the law of the land in all 50 United States. It was only 11 years ago that my state, the fabulous Commonwealth of Massachusetts, became the first to recognize that privileging only some citizens with the benefits of marriage could not be sustained by the state Constitution. Our Puritan forebears, peering into the future, would have been aghast, of course, But that's how moral change works -- insight by insight, opened heart by opened heart. We claw our way from  one moral paradigm to another only by the passage of time and the slow measurement of our actions against our ideals.

In many ways, the Puritans and we have a lot in common. They were desperate to flee an overweening church hierarchy that limited their freedoms.We do the same, fleeing (legally, if not geographically) from church structures that put limits on our ability to apply the gospel of Jesus Christ in it purest form: to love one another as we love ourselves. It was the brilliant moral framework that Jesus hinted at that allowed us finally to imagine a world in which the love of homosexual partners for each other could be seen as no different from to the love of heterosexuals for one another.

Love is love. And we have finally stopped trying to place various forms of love on a scale or worthiness.

I can only end with the lyrical words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who said it so brilliantly:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered. 

God bless us. God bless our gay brothers and sisters who have been redeemed from lives of  exile, oppression and secrecy to a life of stability, mutuality and acceptance. Love wins!

Squaring the circle of life

The scene: the audience chamber at the Vatican. The papal chair is placed on a carpeted platform. Tall windows give out onto St/. Peter's Square. Enormous 18th-century painting of religious motifs -- ring the walls. A group of American business men is led into the chamber by the papal camarlengo, their sharp steps echoing in the cavernous room. Smiling, Pope Francis rises from his chair to greet them. In turn, they shake hands as the camarlengo introduces them -- captains of industry all. A few, Catholics, presumably, self-consciously kiss the papal ring.

Francis: My children! You have a come a long way and must be fatigued. Please, be seated!

As the others take seats, sitting uneasily at the edges of their seats, Rex Tapper, the spokesman for the group, keeps his feet and addresses the pontiff.

Tapper: Your grace, Thanks for the welcome, but we're busy men and don't have much time to spare.

Francis: Yes, my child.

Tapper: Thanks, your grace. I'll get right to the point. See, it's this encyclical of yours, this "Laudato Si." We think you're making a big mistake, her, your Holiness.

Francis: How so, my son? Is the translation not well done? My American bishops reviewed it and said that its message was clear and easily undertandable.

Tapper: Well, sir, your Holiness, well that's the trouble. It's a bit too clear, if you catch my meaning.

Francis: Go on, my son.

Tapper: Well, you see, we in this room (gestures) to the nervous men behind him) we have a lot riding on the way folks back home will take to that encyclical. Speaking plainly, it's going to be awfully bad for business if every Catholic in America, and some of their lunkhead atheistic enviro-nuts, start looking into every wee little drop of oil or wisp of smoke that gets into the wrong place. Completely by accident, of course.

Francis: Yet the encyclical does not address accidents, Senore Tapper. It addresses the wholesale deliberate destruction of God's Creation. Surely you have read Laudate Si, si?

Tapper: Well, sir, not as such. But we've heard enough to know what's it's about. And what it's about is just plain bad for business. You can't make an omelette with breaking eggs, you see, and you can't run a paper mill -- like the one that manufactured the paper your encyclical is printed on -- without clear-cutting a few forests and tainting a few rivers!

Francis: Yet Senore, the encyclical is quite clear that we need not choose between a love of modern comfort and the well-being of our environment. It is a false choice that goes against God's gift of Creation to Mankind. In the beginning, did He not create for Man a garden? And gave it into his care, and made him lord over all that He had created?

Tapper: Well, yes sir, he did. And we are doing just that -- taking God's very gifts of coal and oil and minerals and livestock -- and turning them into useful things that help Mankind -- like cars and warm houses and stores full of material goods.

Francis: This is true, and yet the manner in which these gifts are used leads to ruined waterways and oil-fouled birds and beaches and depletion of fish stocks and rising sea levels. Shouldn't those be calculated into the equation?

Tapper: Maybe so, But that's just the price of doing business. You won;t send us back into the caves, would you? Plenty of clean water and clean air when we lived in caves, you know. And not a lot of fancy buildings and clothes, like the one we are in or the ones your are wearing.

Francis: Ah, Signore Tapper, there is that binary, this-or-that thinking I warned about. We must use our God-given ingenuity to find ways to safeguard our forests and oceans while we make a living.

Tapper: Begging your pardon, Holiness, that's all very nice, but we don't have time to replace every blade of grass that gets disturbed when we bulldoze a mountain top to get the coal God hid under there. And what are the oceans for but as the perfect dumping ground for the waste products of our responsible use of the minerals in the earth? Why, God himself designed the perfect way to conceal the products of industry -- into the deep seas. What else in Gods name are they for? Seems perfect to us! (Here the assembly of business leaders nodded vigorously.)

Francis: My children, I'm afraid that I will not be able to retract even one word of my encyclical. It is based on the truth of science as well as the revealed truth of the sacred Scriptures.

Tapper: Well, your grace, at least you could try to make it your useful...

Francis: Useful? How so?

Tapper: Well, sir, your church's other teachings have been  very useful to us, I mean politically. I mean, if you could find a way to tone it down a bit, give us something to work with..

Francis: I am confused by your use of the word "useful,:" my child. How are the church;s traching useful?

Tapper: Well, sir, take your church's stance on abortion. That a mighty useful teaching.

Francis: How sir, Signore?

Tapper: Well, sir, between you, me and the lampost, sir, the people are awfully simple-minded. They need clear guidance to make the right decisions.

Francis: Si...

Tapper: And they do understand the righteousness of your church's  stance on the sanctity of human life. We just piggy back on that clear and righteous teaching to move them in the right direction.

Francis: Ah, I see. You link the church's teaching about the sanctity of human life to the pursuit of your business goals, is that right?

Tapper: Just so, Holiness! And a finer marriage of morality and commerce has never been concocted this side of Heaven, if I may borrow a bit of your palaver. And it has made us, the stewards of God's riches, ourselves rich in the process. And that's the righteous reward for our labor, as I believe St. Paul said, somewhere or other

(Here the Pope paused to collect his thoughts.)

Francis:I see that I have much to teach and you have little time to learn! I shall keep you no longer. We shall agree to disagree for now, but I pray that you consider my words and find them as "useful" as you have found our other teachings.

With that, the pope rose from his chair. The camerlengo made a small motion and the audience stood.

Francis: As you depart today, please take a token of our affection. A jar of Trappist jam, created by monks on using sustainable farming methods and a solar-powered fan. I find it quite refreshing in our hot Roman summers!

Cassocked assistants offered trays of jam and fans to the businessmen, but there were few takers. And those thought mostly of the resale value of the papal gifts, and they took an armful.

---

In the passenger cabin of the private jet, winging back to America after the audience, Tapper and a small group of cronies nursed their neat scotches-on-ice as they lounged in leather seats.

One dared to speak. " You know, we can't let this kind of thing catch on, don't you? If we lose the moral high ground to this eco-nut, we'll never sway our people to our agenda. What's that old saying -- "Who will rid me of this meddlesone priest"?

Tapper swirled his drink, letting the ice cubes clatter against the sides of the glass. "We don't need to get medieval, here. We are modern men,. Americans. We have other ways to deal with men like Francis. Hell, I'll bet not one bishop in ten gives a damn one way or the other about polar bears or melting ice shelves or any of that other claptrap.

He took a careful sip of his whiskey. "We have other ways of dealing with a Francis."

And so over the next months, Tapper's plan took shape. Fox News ignored the encyclical, or discussed it with critics who paired the encyclical's message with the Church's handling of the priest abuse crisis. Their message, "If you can't trust the Church with your kids, you can't trust them with your planet." Rush Limbaugh regularly attacked Francis on his radio show. Ann Coulter's new book, Talking to Popes and Other Leftist Cranks, If You Must" hit the bookstores. Evangelists across American receive Koch-funded brochures spelling out how the papacy's attempt to save the planet and rein in industry was a part of the ancient Catholic conspiracy to take over the world. A few American bishops were enlisted to cast subtle doubt on Francis's orthodoxy, saying that Man's Fall meant that he must suffer. And wasn't drought and pollution merely God's means of bringing about that suffering? Catholic politicians complained that then Pope's pro-planet agenda meant was an abandonment of his pro-life. They argued that pro-life mean pro-human life, and that the planet would heal itself anyway, as it had always done and would always do.

And so was set the great battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. The winning side would not be known for many years.

Bubbles of oblivion

Their entire Facebook oeuvre is Disney-themed. On July Fourth, it's Mickey in a tricorn, waving a Betsy Ross flag. At Christmas, Mickey and Minnie dress up as Santa and Mrs. Claus. They post shot after shot of their latest trip to the Orlando land of make-believe. With Chip and Dale. With Cinderella. With Baloo the Jungle Bear. In a car screaming over the big drop at Thunder Mountain. They arrive at their weddings in a horse-drawn pumpkin carriage. They wear their mouse ears on the plane ride home.

Or it's ethnicity.Endless shamrocks, alcohol jokes and references to leprechauns, fairies and Catholic school from the Irish. Endless... Actually, only the Irish are like this!

Or it's sports. Selfies between innings at ball parks. Cooking steaks at a tailgate party. Booklets full of sports star autographs. Evenings spent in front of the television screaming at a bad play in a forgettable game in mid-season.

Or it's alcohol. Evenings and weekends drinking this, drinking that, drunkenly yukking it up with friends, Dancing to a too-loud rock band. Blurry cab rides home.

Or it's church. Inspirational posters of a dewy eyed, lovable Jesus. Anguished, crucified Jesus, Jesus with kids, Jesus on clouds welcoming souls to heaven. Promises of angelic visits, or miracles (if you share this post withing 3 minutes). Saints to pray to or to emulate. The latest bon mot from Joel Osborn or Rick Warren or that great sage "Unknown.".

Or it's politics. Screeds against the president. Pleas for the return of a previous president. Pitches for candidates. Proofs that Democrats (or Republicans) are destroying America. Proofs that the same parties will save it.

Whatever world you project onto social media (and onto your long-suffering friends) is a reflection of the life inside our heads, of our passions and obsessions, fears and desires. It's so easy to get lost in our bubbles, to deny the value of other bubbles, to try to entrap others in ours. Bubbles are comfortable, giving us a safe retreat from life's complexities and ambiguities. But comfortable, sometimes to the point of making us oblivious to other bubbles, or even life beyond bubbles.The reality that we create and painstakingly maintain is such a small slice of the life that we have the chance to sample.

Pop your own bubble once in a while. Imagine what life might be like in another bubble. Visit another bubble. Grow your bubble. Watch a movie or read a book about other bubbles. Imagine billions of bubbles, some expansive and encompassing; others shriveled, mean and cold, some filled with millions, some with room enough for a solitary, shrunken soul. Imagine all being nudged into bumping into others, stretching their skins to breaking, darting, merging. Into the bubble of all bubbles, the very mind of God.

Reframing God's mistakes

Caitlyn Jenner was unveiled this week on the cover and the pages of Vanity Fair. The former Bruce Jenner, hero of the the Olympic decathlon and Wheaties boxes, showed the world that for all of his external manly form, inside, there beat the heart and mind of a woman.

It's a measure of how far we have come that Caitlyn's unveiling caused barely a ripple in the zeitgeist. There were a few days of big play for the VF cover, but no longer the shock about the idea that a man might inwardly feel female, or a woman male. But there's a great deal to think about, from a theological perspective, about the possibility of a "mixup" between one's genitalia and one's gender self image.

Conservative Christians are not happy with the story, though there has been relatively little backlash, at least in my corner of Facebook. My FB friends are foaming about the Gardisil vaccine against HPV and against welfare recipients who take drugs, but not (yet) about Caitlyn/Bruce.

Yet there is something earth-shaking about the acceptance of Caitlyn's existence. And that has to do with our understanding of the relationship between God and Creation. The news media might not have registered the tremors on their cultural seismographs. But just as in some earthquakes, the aftershocks may be mightier than the initial jolt.

The foundation of natural law is that by studying God's creation, we can learn something about God. Genesis tells us that after each day of creating, God surveyed his work and called it good. We can share in that sense of goodness by admiring the beauty of the stars wheeling through the heavens, the mighty roar of the boundless oceans, the endless drift of desert sands. We see these things and marvel at their grandeur. We see how nature's myriad elements fit so wonderfully together. The bee feeds from the apple blossom and is dusted by its pollen, guaranteeing the fertilization of another tree. Lionesses stalk herds of antelope, culling the weak from the herd, ensuring the strength of the next generation of prey. The human eye, brain and hand, with their interrelated intricacies, allow us to discern colors, shapes, sounds and textures, build amazing tools and delve into the mysteries of nature.

Through all of these observations, human beings have discerned a God who amazingly brilliant -- capable of designing beings and a universe that are bafflingly intricate. This God is the watchmaker's Watchmaker. An unparalleled Designer and Creator.

But what to make of a world in which the intricacies of our  species' most intimate component -- the  machinery of sexual expression and identity -- seemingly go awry? What of the old bumper sticker "God doesn't make mistakes"? If anything cries out "mistake," it's siting a male mind in a female body. Or making a man who is sexually attracted to another man.

No wonder the conservatives are freaked out by transgendered people, homosexuals and cross-dressers. They tell of a God who can be separated from Nature itself.

It seems clear that if Nature says anything about God, it's that God is remarkably careless in his designs. Rater than a fastidious Watchmaker, God must be more of a bumbling ad hoc creator, flinging out wild ideas and seeing which will stick. He is the creator of designs that not infrequently lead to seemingly non-procreative ends -- women lying with women, men with women, and men choosing to have their genitalia removed. Conservatives can only deal with this kind of behavior by calling it perverse, willful sin. Homosexuality and transgenderedness have to be the sick and twisted choices of sinners who perversely choose to thumb their noses at a God who made them beautifully, heartily "normal." It's kind of like a person who drinks motor oil because, well, God designed him to drink water.

But it can also be that God really isn't behind every nook and cranny of human evolution. It wasn't God's idea to give deer antlers, or bees a sting, or birds wings or humans a voice. It's a God who has some distance from Nature who would give rise to the complex and tangled sexuality of human beings. Who would stand aloof from the complex hormonal, social and cultural cues that lead to the varied combinations of genitalia, sexual self-identification, sexual attraction and gender roles that we see today.

For thousands of years, we have tried to jam God's actual creation -- the varied forms and expressions of sexuality and gender -- into a 2-sizes fits-all paradigm. If the mind of God is to be found in Nature, it's in his preference for unbelievable complexity and uniqueness, rather than enforced conformity. Those who insist that a gender stereotypes reflect the mind and will of God need to look at the actual nature that is Creation: one that is diverse, endlessly, varied and uniquely expressed. If God is present, and if all the gays and transgendereds are not lying, then we  need to see him in his preference for variety and experiment -- and even "mistakes."

Murder in the blood

In what might be the oldest evidence of murder in the human line, scientists studying human remains in Sima de los Huesos (The Pit of Bones) in Spain have discovered a human skull in which are the marks of two lethal, pre-mortem attacks. The pit was apparently in use about 430,000 ago as a place to dispose of human bodies. The two marks are seemingly made by the same weapon--presumably a rock or stone tool--ruling out that the injury occurred when the body was thrown into the pit. As such, they suggest an act of deliberate aggression between human beings, or a precursor group like the Neanderthals.
8Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out in the field.” When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD asked Cain, Where is your brother Abel? He answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper" God then said: What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!

Genesis 4:8-10

What interests me is the similarity between the biblical account and scientific discovery. But also the differences. Science and the Bible both confront us with the insight that violence between human beings is deeply rooted in our experience. Cain and Abel, after all, were first children born to the first parents, Adam and Eve. Fratricidal jealousy and hatred were experienced by the very first fratres, or brothers. Science shows us that human-on-human violence was part of our makeup - even before we could be said to be fully human.

But the difference in the two narratives is interesting also. Science will suggest that intra-tribal murder was programmed into us and is embedded deep into our DNA -- as deep as is the tool-making capacity that led to the creation of the murder weapon. Murderous propensities are a part of who we are, unfortunately. The Biblical writers, with no insight into paleontology, DNA or evolution, but stuck with the idea of a Deity who created a perfect world, suggested that the problem of violence was something that humans brought upon themselves. Violence seems part of the curse that came with the disobedience of Adam and Eve. They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were sentenced to painful childbirth, the subjugation of women to men, the need to work for a living and finally, death. Evidently, the capacity of their kids to act with lethal vengeance upon one another was also part of God's judgment.

I don't buy the idea that God cursed humanity because of the seemingly innocuous sin of eating a fruit. But I am impressed with the insight of the minds that crafted Genesis, who reached out to discover God's plan with such clearheaded view of their race's own flaws. Only recently have scientists discovered the intra-species violence that occasionally occurs in nature: the lethal inter-troop murder sprees of chimpanzees, for instance. Sure, there is violence in  nature -- males battling males for territory and access to females, for instance. But to the ancient  mind, and even to our own, non-human animal violence pales by  comparison to the absurd lengths that human go to destroying each other. The Bible's writers and editors put that insight at the forefront of their story of the origins of humanity. And science has now confirmed that insight.

What to do?

In Genesis, God does not destroy murderous Cain. How could he? Murder was part and parcel of the Biblical writer's world. Obviously, God had allowed the first murderer to live. God does put his mark on Cain, but it is a protective mark that warns others not to kill him. In this way, God allows Cain to propagate his proclivity to violence to the entire human race. And with God's tacit permission.

Perhaps God realizes that a race that reasons for itself (because of the fruit it tasted) has inevitably lost its anchors in the pre-programmed behaviors and ritualized combat that mark so much of the rest of the natural world. Rams may butt heads until one combatant skulks away, defeated but alive. Deer may lock horns until one prevails. But humans, having the "gift" of reason, can plan, conspire, cajole, threaten their way to victory. Violence may be the inevitable companion of a mind freed of the restraints that keep other animals from destroying others of their own species. It is impressively wise that our biblical forebears encoded this same insight into the myths they wrote about our origins.

Ultimately, the wisdom of the Bible lies not in the biographical tidbits it provides about our earliest ancestors. The wisdom it provides is about ourselves -- our unique place in creation as the only animal that uses reason (the knowledge of good and evil) to carve out its own destiny. No alley cat, opossum, vole or amoeba can do much more than to follow the urgings of its DNA and cognitive programming. Human are cursed and blessed with the ability to follow other behavioral pathways, some to our detriment, like jealousy, anger and fratricidal murder, and others to our benefit, like love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

May we choose wisely!

Where freedom comes from

On some social media sites, there's an option to describe a relationship you're in. When it come to my relationship with Memorial Day, I have to say "It's complicated."

Memorial Day is when we don our national sad face to give honor to those who have given their lives in America's wars. "Freedom isn't free," we are told continually, and the price of that freedom is the blood of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who have gone to war on our behalf and made the ultimate sacrifice.

But for me, it's hard to separate the courage of our fighting forces from the idiotic uses to which they have been put. Take the Mexican-American War, fought from 1846 to 1848. This war was little more than an American land grab from a relatively weaker state to the south. The war started after manufactured outrage that "American blood had been spilled on American soil" by Mexican troops. Of course the American soil in question was contested land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers in Texas, itself just recently annexed (read "stolen") from Mexico. All told, the war resulted in 13,000 Americans dead and about 16,000 Mexicans. But, we ended up with clear title to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,Nevada, Utah, California and bits of other states. Quite a haul for the price!

But even in 1846, this war was hugely controversial. Former president John Quincy Adams opposed it. Abe Lincoln, in prescient echoes of future wars based on lies, wanted to be shown the precise spot on which American blood had been shed. Northerner abolitionists feared that slavery would spread into the new territories, tipping Congress toward the slave owning states and moving the eradication of their blighted practice into the unforeseeable future.

So when I celebrate Memorial Day, do I celebrate the bravery of the fighting forces of the Mexican American War? Aside from a gain of land, the conflict they took part in only exacerbated the fractiousness of a jittery nation -- tensions that would explode into civil war 13 years later.

Do I celebrate the War of 1812, an attempt to grab Canadian land? That war killed 2260 Americans and 1600 Brits, not to mention the 13,000 Americans and 3300 Brits who died from disease and other causes.

How about the Spanish-American War, started over unsubstantiated claims that the perfidious Spanish had sunk the battleship Maine? We ended up with Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and Guantanamo. The war killed 345 American soldiers and sailors in battle and another 2500 from disease. More than 60,000 Spanish were killed from combat or disease. Our reneging on giving self-rule to the recently liberated Filipinos resulted in another 6000 American deaths, up to 20,000 Filipino military dead and 200,000 dead Filipino civilians.

We could move into the modern era by celebrating the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, the 38,000 dead in Korea, and the 6000 killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But what do we celebrate? The often stupid wars that put our soldiers into harm's way? The soldier's own bravery and noble willingness to fight and to die? The strength and riches that came even from from wars launched on lies? Do we celebrate only the good parts (D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Midway) of the good wars while ignoring the ugly parts (Dresden, Hiroshima, Mai Lai)?

But as for freedom, it's hard to see which wars directly contributed to our freedom. The Revolutionary War? Sure, though you could make the argument that a little more civility by the British and a little less American paranoia might have achieved the same result with less bloodshed. The Civil War? Slaves received paper freedom, but would have to fight another 150 years -- up until and beyond the present day -- to gain a small portion of that promised equality. World War II? Finally, a war in which an insatiable world-dominating leader had to be pushed back. But we must conveniently forget the penalties assessed against Germany after World War I that set the stage for Hitler's rise.

Like I said, it's complicated.

Which leads me to thinking. Is it only soldiers who gave me my freedom? What about the many civilians who died to bring freedom to Americans? The freedom riders, preachers and agitators who faced angry mobs of their own people. How about William Lloyd Garrison, kicked out of his hometown of Newburyport for speaking against the locally-profitable slave trade? How about Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, who died in Mississippi to bring the vote the African Americans? How about James Meredith, who desegregated U Miss? Or the suffragists who made the first cracks in the glass ceiling that preventing capable women from expressing their natural talents? Or the strikers who agitated for fair wages, 8-hour work days and weekends off? Or the gay rights activists who stood up to millennia of abuse to demand that they be treated as equals? Or the progressive legislators and city organizers would fought for their constituents' dignity? Or the visionary politicians who saw that national parks, clean water and clean air were an indispensable part of the of the American birthright?

I honor those who stood up to their fears and chose to fight in our nation's wars. But they did not bring me freedom. In only one case did we have an enemy serious enough to seize our territory. Freedom has been fought over and fought for within our national  borders. We citizens are the ones who can grant or withhold freedom from one another. Our wars may gain territory and keep aggressors at bay. But freedom? That's something that you and I must fight for every day of our lives. And against our fellow citizens, whom we must meet on the battlefield of reason and civility and with weapons of wisdom, wit and patience.

Happy Memorial Day.

The Case for Death

The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes its position on the death penalty unequivocal:

2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

Yet, in my life's struggle to reason my way to the truth, I find this near-complete ban on the death penalty wanting.

My reasons, in the order that I came up with them.

1) That's what heaven is for
One of the rationales for sentencing criminals to life in prison rather than to execution is the possibility that they could be redeemed while incarcerated. Redemption is the reason that images of martyrs burned at the stake often show a lone monk holding a crucifix before the eyes of the condemned. Somehow, in their final torments, the image of Christ's suffering might cause a last-second conversion that would win them a reprieve from eternal damnation. Life imprisonment gives pious people a longer chance to win the same kind of conversion from condemned criminals. Abolishing death gives us a chance to win another soul for Christ.

But does this rationale really hold up anymore? It is currently being pounded into our heads (and I believe it) that God is merciful. Would a truly merciful God hold it against someone if they did not happen to be converted before their death -- even if conversion only meant a momentary deep and honest sorrow for the pain they had caused? If you take the most radical view of mercy, the answer would have to be no. God knows the limitations of human culture, pride, intelligence and empathy. You don't think that an all-powerful God can a way to keep working on sinners -- even after death?

Not to mention, who but the most spiteful of Christians sincerely and enthusiastically believes in hell anymore? What kind of a stone-cold deity "loves" his children into eternal punishment? If we don't really believe in hell, then why do we spend time trying to save people from it?

1) The bigger picture
As with abortion, the teaching about the death penalty works best if you severely limit the scope of your empathy. With abortion, as long as you draw your a moral circle around the fetus itself, it seems that tampering with its life is sacrilegious. But if you draw your circle around the fetus and the mother, or the fetus-mother and immediate family, the answer becomes less clear. It would be cruel to snuff out the life of a harmless fetus; but what if the fetus threatens the woman's physical health or the family's fiscal health? Does saving a fetus allow you to imperil the lives of the siblings? Families? Communities?

So it goes with the death penalty. If you draw your circle around a lonely, perhaps mad convict in a concrete cell, it seems heartless to back them into a corner and snatch away their life. But if you widen your vision a bit, things become more complex. What of the prison staff that must deal with the effects that life imprisonment has on a human being? Or do we expect our wardens and guards to become inhuman, having no fellow feeling for people sentenced to life in a box? What of the families of the victims, who must cope with the fact that their loved one's killer or maimer continues to live while their own loved one is dead, perhaps after suffering horribly, or struggles daily with injury, recovery and their own sense of lives brutally thrown of course?

The story of the Richard family in interesting. Their 8-year-old son Martin was killed by the bomb that Dzhokhar detonated. Yet they wanted to spare the killer the death penalty. But their reason was interesting. It wasn't because they opposed capital punishment. Or they did not say so publicly. They opposed death for Tsarnaev because they wanted the closure of knowing that they could move on with their own lives. They wanted Tsarnaev to disappear from the headlines and the courts. Anyone who argues for death has to account for the pain that families like the Richards will endure for the years or decades it takes to appeal the death sentence in the courts.

The bishops
Does anyone think that the church's bishops are to be believed when they say they oppose the death penalty? Until fairly recently, they were perfectly fine with it. In the Middle Ages, the Church happily sent heretics and other malefactors to the stake or the gallows.Our Church still sends priests to the battlefield. As recently as the Vietnam War in the 1960s, bishops like Cardinal Spellman were cheerleading for the war and the defeat of Communism, and collecting awards from the military for their efforts.

Far from being moral giants, the bishops seem more interested in echoing the Church's official positions than in speaking to the concerns of their consciences or their flocks. These same bishops can't figure out that the Church's teaching on contraception is ridiculous, or that its exclusion of women from the priesthood is vacuous and scripturally bankrupt. Both positions harm the Church's reputation for intellectual rigor and have been driving Catholics away from the Church for decades. The Church has just come off a years-long, pointless and punitive investigation of US nuns. There are more than a few stories of nuns being kicked out of their convents for questioning priestly prerogatives.

And yet we think these same prelates have the intellectual depth and consistency to take on an issues as complex and fraught as capital punishment? How many of these guys have ever visited a prison -- other than to bless the guards and their manacles? How many have ministered to a condemned inmate -- or spoken to anyone who has? No. The bishop's pronouncements against capital punishment have the same weight as their many others -- they speak out on topics that will earn the plaudits of their leaders, and ensure their own advancement through the ranks of the episcopacy.

Because...Jesus!
Seems to me that the Church's best argument against the death penalty is hanging in churches and school rooms all over the world: the image of the bloodied and crucified Christ. Christ was good, Christ was executed. Therefore, to prevent a repetition of his tragic death, we must abolish the death penalty. But is that what the crucifix tells us? At best, the image of the Crucified tells us that the state's power against the people can be misused. Powerful interests can conspire to torture, condemn and deprive people of life. But that's an argument against excessive and unchecked state power -- not against executions.

Because the Ten Commandments
For anyone who has read the Bible, the 5th Commandment -- though shalt not kill -- cannot apply to capital punishment. The Bible is replete with passages that apply death to various infractions: adultery, Sabbath breaking, cursing your parents, having sex with animals or being a witch.

Also, ask the Edomites, Ammonites and Jebusites whether the Bible condemned killing!

And ask the Lord himself, who reserved the right to kill those who molested widows or orphans.

Whatever the Fifth Commandment meant, it was not a proscription against capital punishment.

Clean Hands

I have yet to write about this at any great length, but I have been  nursing a thought about the secret rational behind some of the Church's strangest teachings, which often come with unconditional bans. Contraception, abortion, divorce, capital punishment, assisted suicide, cohabitation and gay sexuality come under this heading, which I call the Clean Hands theory. The theory is not complicated, but comes down to this: the Church never wants to be implicated in any complex moral situations, and so hones its teachings to be absolutely against any activity that might leave it with blame. When it comes to divorce, the Church can wash its hands of the messy marriages that its children find themselves in. No divorce, it proclaims! So if they do divorce, the Church can say it was not involved. Abortion? By ruling all abortions immoral, the Church can absolve itself of involvement in the real-world crises that occur to families and pregnant women. If you get an abortion, it's your own doing, no matter how damaged the fetus was or how threatened the mother was or how devastated financially the family would be.

Capital punishment falls under Clean Hands as well. Rather than trying to wrestle with the topic and whether it might be right in one circumstance and wrong in another, the Church plays Pilate, washes its hands of the matter, and moves on in imagined innocence.

Some might call that a highly developed moral sense. I call it an abdication of moral responsibility. I am far more impressed with the nun in a Catholic hospital in New Mexico than in a thousands bishops thumping the pulpit against abortion. Sister Margaret McBride sat on her hospital's ethics committee. When faced with a pregnancy whose continuation would kill the mother, she gave the OK for doctors to abort the fetus. Of course, the bishops came down on her like a ton of bricks. She was excommunicated. But I admire her ability to see nuance, and to make an informed and compassionate moral decision. Too bad that the consequences attendant on her decision will deter others from making the same call.  

So where does that leave us?

The best argument against the death penalty is that it is arbitrary and political. The poor and people of color are disproportionately subject to arrest and are sentenced to death at higher rates than are whites for the same crimes. Whites have better access to good legal representation and can count on the sympathy of the majority white jury pool. There is also the problem that prosecutors and judges can be beholden to their privileged communities in ways that affect their judgments, whether consciously or not. Any judge or prosecutor who has to run for his or her office, or who has ambitions for higher public office will think twice about showing compassion to a criminal. You gain far more votes than you lose by being tough on crime. And ultimately, the conditions that breed crime -- poverty, lack of social mobility, racism and corporate greed -- come back to decisions that were made by the very prosecutors and jurors who are willing to impose death upon a member of an unlucky class of people.

It's these disparities and scrambled judgments that make justice so difficult to apply fairly. And we'll probably never get away from the possibility that defense attorneys can be inadequate or prosecutors corrupt and unwilling to share exculpatory evidence. Maybe the best reason to keep the condemned alive is on the off chance that exonerating evidence will emerge 5, 10 or 30 years in the future. There should be no lethal "Oops!" in our legal system.

I have not made a final decision as to whether I would have, as a juror, chosen death for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I did not see the most lurid evidence. But what I did see -- mangled limbs, an unperturbed post-bombing purchase of milk, an attempt to steal of slain officer's gun, a bomb-throwing shootout in Watertown --makes me open to thinking that death should definitely have been on the table for him.Whether the law would have allowed me to consider my objections is another matter. Once the bobsled of death has started its run, there's little that can divert it from its appointed conclusion. But luckily for my moral equilibrium, I have been spared that choice.

For the moment, my hands are clean too.

Dead to rights

Now that Dhokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death for his part in the Boston Marathon bombings, and we are bracing ourselves for years of appeals, it's time to take stock of the death penalty.

If you get the chance, listen to Finish Line, the podcast between David Boeri of WBUR and Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe. The two newsmen covered the Boston Bombing trial from jury selection in January to the sentencing last week, and provided nearly daily reactions to what they saw and heard. Today, they discussed how the death sentences surprised some folks. Partly, that's because the public was not exposed to the full impact of the testimony, which, in the absence of a live feed from the courtroom, was mediated through news articles and artists' sketches -- no one but the jury saw autopsy pictures or photos of the most gruesome wounds. But partly that's because the jury was not representative of the citizenry of Eastern Massachusetts, which mostly opposes the death penalty. Since this was a federal death penalty case that just happened to take place in anti-death penalty Massachusetts, any juror who was morally opposed to imposing the sentence of death--allowable by federal law--was instantly disqualified from serving on the jury. It's curious, then, that the jury system--which is supposed to try defendants before a jury of their peers--has been skewed so strikingly toward one variety of those peers.

It's been clear, from reading my posts, that I have no great love for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His actions in placing the second bomb in front of a crowded restaurant and behind the Richard family (he stood behind them for four full minutes before detonating his device) were deliberate, reprehensible and heinous. His activities were filmed and videotaped. There is no question that he did the deed, and his defense didn't even contest his guilt. In her opening statements, defense attorney Judy Clarke famously said, "It was him." During the sentencing phase of the trial, the defense was feeble, unable to bring up any truly mitigating factors. Was he remorseful? No evidence was provided except by a a nun who is active against capital punishment. Was he deranged? Though his family had big issues, he was a regular dude, said his friends. He had been a nice boy when he was 8 years old, said his Russian family members. Nothing was introduced that explained how this nice boy turned into a flint-faced monster.

Dzhokhar's stony, impassive demeanor throughout the trial betrayed no sign that he felt bad about his actions or had been coerced by his older brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan. His political motivations were left unexplored. His mental health is solid. As far as anyone knows, he is unrepentant. If anyone deserved to be deprived of life, it is Dzokhar Tsarnaev.

Curiously, the defense put forth the argument that sentencing Dzkar to life in prison was a far worse punishment than death. Though it snows there only four days a year, they showed Siberia-like photos of the Super Max prison in Colorado where Tsarnaev would likely be held. He would live in a tiny cell for 23 hours of each day, being allowed out of his cell for one hour out of every 24. He would have few visitors - fewer than normal, since his family is in Russia. His mail would be severely limited. He would be granted no interviews with the media. He would, in effect, disappear. It's a fate that has driven some prisoners to madness and self-mutilation.

But I found the argument curious. If death was such a bad option -- partly because it amounts to little more than vengeance against the accused, then why sell life in prison as even more punishing than death? If it's morally wrong to get revenge on a murderer by killing him, why is it more palatable morally to get even more vengeance by keeping him alive? Aren't we sinning more in an attempt to avoid sinning?

I have to admit that the one time I felt empathy for Tsarnaev was in imagining a life deprived of human contact and intellectual stimulation. If anything would drive me mad, it would be he alternative of television 23 hours a day or dead silence. Even a life filled with nothing but reading books would hardly merit my attention. Why read books when I can't contribute to society or even discus them? Surely, the deepest parts of hell are co-located in the lonely cells of our "correctional" system.

I wonder whether depriving someone like Dzhokhar of life might be the merciful solution. BEfore you answer, take a look at the graphic for this story and imagine living alone in such a prison for the rest of your life. Then tell me that the death penalty is immoral.

Pride and prejudice

My large, old-school insurance company came out last week as a primary sponsor of the Boston Gay Pride parade. Mind you, this is the kind of place that eliminated its suits-and-ties dress requirement this year! My son and I were discussing the amazing strides that gays have made over the last half-century. Fifty years ago, gays were widely subject to physical, emotional and spiritual abuse as a matter of course. The Stonewall riots, the seminal event that kicked off refusal of gays to put up with police harassment, happened just 45 years ago. The AIDS epidemic stated not quite 35 years ago, bringing the plight of gays into the media forefront. Today, 34 states have extended the right to marry to homosexual couples -- whose weddings were attended by ecstatic family and friends - gay and straight.

My son and I were trying to understand why gay rights had come so far when civil rights for people of color had stagnated, if not retreated since the early 1960s.

Comes down to this: Every family has a gay kid. But not every family has a black kid.

Until every family understands the pain of those systematically oppressed by our culture's institutions, we aren't likely to move farther along in our struggle against racism. The realities of genetics finally took care of the entrenched homophobia. What will it take to root out racism?

Bare, ruined choirs

A ton of articles this week on a new Pew poll that shows a dramatic drop in the number of people self-identifying as Christian. From 78.4% to 70.6% between 2007 and 2014. Catholics have lost 3 million people since 2007, in spite of an influx of immigrants from Catholic countries.



But the drop in religious affiliation in the young is especially worrisome:

Younger adults have been particularly likely to join the unaffiliated in recent years. In 2007, 25 percent of 18-to-26-year-olds were unaffiliated; now 34 percent of the same cohort is unaffiliated.

One in three young people have joined the "nones" -- those who profess no religion.



As the dad of two young men, it's not hard to imagine why people would shun the church. It's a place that worships ugliness -- dismissal of women and exclusion of gays being high on the list. It is clueless about human sexuality, offering little more than ancient and bizarre nostrums that don't tally with the lived experience of young people -- or older ones, for that matter. To be against birth control, when the alternative is a house full of kids living in poverty, seems downright perverse. To continue issuing blanket condemnations of abortion -- even when women die as a result -- seems monstrous. To condemn entire nations and ethnic groups because of the God they believe in goes against the grain of tolerance and friendship that millennials have with people of different colors, beliefs, genders and sexualities.



Then again, the kids are following the church's teachings to their logical conclusions. If God is a loving Father, not a raging monster who throws his children into eternal flames, what's the need to placate him with worship and prayer? And then there is the ever-expanding reach and influence of science and technology. If it is the modern health care system -- with its stents, vaccines, transplants and bypasses -- that heals bodies and minds, what is the need for intercessory prayer to the saints? And what of Church as the primary teacher of morality? The kids might say "If even unreligious people are experienced as moral, what's the need for Sunday school and its blatherings about sin and the need for salvation?"



The Pew study should be another in a long series of wake-up calls. Religion, if it is to survive, needs to be more than about scaring people into goodness. This is the time for us to focus on the community, support and love that come from religious affiliation. Not on kicking people out of heaven.

Attention deficit

As a New Englander, I'm fascinated by the controversy swirling around whether Tom Brady and his team deliberately deflated footballs to make them easier to grasp and throw. After the recent Wells report claimed the Pats had cheated and Tom lied about it, the Patriots fan base came out swinging. There were close analyses of the science behind the allegations. When is the last time your heard a football fan discuss the Ideal Gas Law? And close scrutiny of whether the testimony (or lack of it) backed up the conclusions reached in the summary. Worthy of world class defense attorneys! Not to mention the unrelenting focus on whether the sanctions are in line with past decisions and are proportional to the offense. Laudable!

But as a Christian, I just had to wonder why the same level of fascination with a game -- albeit a very expensive and high-stakes game -- is not applied to other pressing problems? Can you imagine if we all paid this much attention to police violence? Or pervasive racism? Or poverty? Or wealth disparity? To tackle those problems, we create a subset of  special class of people -- scientists and lawyers. We subject them to every pressure imaginable -- we bully them as youth, ridicule them as adults, underfund them, place restrictions on their speech and mock them in the media. Those who survive this gauntlet -- such as innovative scientists and committed civil rights attorneys -- are the ones we send out to fight against the greatest evils humankind has ever known. Actually, we don't even send them; they send themselves.

The irony, as we  are seeing with Deflate-gate, is that ordinary football fans are perfectly capable of parsing the minutest details of complex problems. No fancy degrees or years of unrewarding toil required. But only, evidently, if the problems are in the form of a spheroid, the rules spelled out and the scope of action confined to a 100-yard patch of grass.

If only we could package racism and global poverty as a team sports...

Of monsters and virgins

When famed death penalty opponent Sister Helen Préjean testified at the Boston Marathon bombing trial yesterday, she revealed that she had met five times with Dhokhar Tsarnaev while he was imprisoned for his part in the bombing. She told jurors that Tsarnaev told her that "no one deserved to suffer" like the people he had killed, maimed and injured.

A few thoughts.

I found it curious that Sister Helen associated herself so much with this high profile case. Is she doing this purely out of a desire to minister to a despised criminal? Or is there a certain amount of self-interest -- furthering her "brand" -- by her association? I say this all the while admiring Sister Helen's literal application of Matthew 25's standard of "When I was in prison, you visited me." I might admire it more if she had kept her visits private, and didn't allow herself to use the case to further her own advocacy.

Second, I was curious about Tsarnaev's comment that his victims did not deserve tio suffer that way they did. After all, he did deliberately place a bomb in the middle of a busy, crowded sidewalk, intending that it harm as many people as possible. He has been eerily apathetic at the trial. Yet now we are to believe that he feels bad? I wonder whether he said more than what Sister Helen tells us he said. Was it all the lines of "These people didn't deserve to suffer, any more than my people deserve to suffer at the hands of the US government." That would at least fit better with his lack of affect during the trial and his jihadi sentiments written in the boat in Watertown.

I would hate to think that Sister Helen--a prophetic voice who (unlike our noble bishops) does more than just mouth the Church's teachings--would be marketing herself or would be trying to save Tsarnaev's life by lying (by omission) about important aspects of his thinking. But I don't credit her with perfection, in spite of her many good works. She has a product to sell, and what better way than to save the life of America's most hated man?

Shank a Nun

The Facebook posts are coming out for Thank a Nun Day on May 5th. Or make that May 9th for other posters. I'm not sure whether the day is some kind of book tie-in (note the shameless plug for "Five Year in Heaven, in the illustration) or a grassroots effort to show gratitude for all that the good Sisters have done for us.

But while I am in love with the new style of nun that has emerged over the last 30 years -- the kindly, feisty advocate for the poor and marginalized -- I have memories of a darker sort.

Growing up in the mill town of Manchester, NH, I was heir to a tradition that contained many mixed agendas. In grade school, we were taught by Les Soeurs de la Sainte Croix, the Holy Cross sisters, who were an outfit started in France and exported to Canada, where my ancestors lived. When masses of Canadians emigrated to the US around the turn of the 20th century, the sisters followed, setting up schools and teaching the immigrant kids. They also served as church sextons, washing linens, training altar boys (only boys in those days), swapping out burnt votive candles for new, and generally being the working arm of Catholic liturgical life. If there was a May Day procession to honor the Virgin Mary, the nuns who organized it. Getting the kids to wear white outfits on First Communion? Nuns. Giving piano lessons, putting on plays and playing the organ at Mass? Nuns, again.

The women were driven, ubiquitous and dedicated. They did so much work around church that there was precious little for priests to do but say Mass once a day and bask in their own self-importance. Which many did.

But the sisters' volcanic output of activity came at a price. As teachers of immigrants, they played a enormous role in maintaining the immigrant culture. Children were taught in French half the day, and English the other, a reluctant nod to the predominant English-speaking culture in the US. School included a large dose of Catholic teaching, naturally. The books were old, with black-and-white woodcuts of children walking through dark, overgrown forests, books that seemed ancient even by the standards of the 1960s. Kids sat at desks all day, in silence, with all activity directed by the nun. There was no place for discussion, only answering after being called -- often at random by being picked from a stack of cards with each kid's name on it. Science, when we had it, consisted of copying an outline from a nun who dictated from the front of the room: "I. Rocks. Indent and write a. Igneous. Next line, b. Sedimentary." What math there was culminated, in 8th grade, with the task of adding up long columns of long numbers -- a task more suited to the needs of 1920's shopkeepers than to the children of the Space Age. When one adventuresome (and maybe exasperated) young sister tried to introduce her 8th grade class to the concept of "X," we were totally flummoxed, having no previous clues about x, y or any other algebraic concept.

And the terror.

For me, it started early. One day, when I was 7, we were lined up outside of class to go outside -- whether for recess or to go home I don't recall. We first-graders were lined up in a vestibule -- a small area to hang our coats -- that adjoined the class. I guess I must have said something to my "girlfriend" Charlotte because suddenly, Sister Adrien glared, fished out a pair of scissors hung at her belt beneath her robes, and said sternly (in French) "Would you like me to cut off a piece of your tongue?" That got my attention, and I shut up. Other nuns were said to have struck kids so hard they flew across rooms. Others were humiliated for the most minor of "offenses" (like folding a handkerchief on your desk) by having to kneel in front of the class.

But the emotional terror was probably more scarring. Apart from buttressing our French Canadian heritage (we learned O Canada in French long before the Star Spangled Banner) the sisters were the main source for our religious teaching. But it wasn't all about memorizing the Baltimore Catechism and coloring out pictures of angels, though there was enough of that. By 5th grade, we were getting slide shows on the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to three shepherd children in Fatima. And no show about Fatima would be complete without dramatic images of the children's visions of Hell. Holy Week brought out lurid descriptions of the suffering of Christ, including claims that one of the thorns  that crowned Christ's head had gone through the back of his skull and come out his eye! That's a pretty unforgettable image for an 11-year-old, let me tell you.

So, thank a nun? Maybe some people had examples of kindly, dedicated sisters who encouraged them to strive and to grow. Mine were a passel of medieval harpies who scared the bejesus out of me while providing me with a third-rate education. I am thankful that Vatican II dragged the sisters out of the cloister and into the wider world. More than any other Catholic group, the sisters heard Saint Pope John XXIII's call to a new openness to the world. They got educated. They devoted themselves to the poor. They dropped the cruelty and terror tactics. I am thankful for that. But I will never forget what they were for me as a small, frightened boy who only wanted to be good and was treated as little more than an incipient criminal.

White noise

An observation: when white folks want to defend white cops accused of assaulting or murdering blacks, they are pretty chatty. They come all with all kinds of reasons why it's OK  -- the black person was resisting, or had a long arrest record, or was carrying a gun, or could have been carrying a gun, or had actually hurt himself. The list of excuses and justifications is impressively creative.

But when it starts to look like the cops were actually in the wrong, as it did today when six Baltimore cops were charged with causing Freddy Gray's death, the chattering dies out completely. No apologies, no retractions. Just silence, until their next outbreak of outrage.

Makes you wonder whether the attitude of many whites is about defending the law or just defending folks that look like them.

Prejudice -- to pre-judge based on little or no evidence -- cuts both ways. It prematurely exonerates whites while rushing to judgment on blacks.

Welcome to post-post-racial America.

Back breaking news

It didn't take long for the haters to latch on to the Baltimore riots. Latest exciting "news": Freddie Gray, the man whose spine was 80% cut after an arrest, tried to sever his own spine! Supposedly, according to a statement from an *unnamed* prisoner riding with Freddy to an "unnamed* police officer, Gray was trying to injure himself while shackled and handcuffed. Another rumor: Freddy had spinal surgery a week before the attack -- that's why his spine was severed -- he did it to himself!.

Unbelievable.

While it's unclear exactly how Freddy's spine was damaged, could we stop insulted people's intelligence by claiming he was responsible for his own maiming?

Geez.

Sister Act

I am thrilled that the Vatican investigation into the supposed wrongdoings of the LCWR -- Leadership Conference of Women Religious -- nuns, to you and me -- has been brought to a conclusion two years early. This witch hunt, started under Pope Benedict XVI, has been a disaster for the Church's image.Who  is more aligned with the gospels and the Church's mission than the selfless women ministering to the poor, teaching kids and healing the sick? But because of a couple of challenging speakers at a conference a few years ago, they were interrogated and given a man to oversee their affairs. No more clear sign could be had of the Church's continued need to subordinate its women and harassment its most ardent supporters.

It was troublesome that Pope Francis, elected two years ago, did not bring the matter immediately to a halt. No doubt he had to get the lay of the land and figure out the power structure before he made a move. But this scandal -- the persecution of devoted, intelligent and articulate women -- had to be dealt with eventually. Now it has been.

An America article praised both sides for having engaged in prayerful, spirit-led dialogue that led to mutual understanding. But I see this as a fig leaf that gives the Vatican some cover for its former neo-patriarchal approach to solving the "problem" of the nuns. The LCWR has moved on, at least publicly. But there has to be lingering resentment of the shabby way they were treated. And they must wonder whether their victory has come at a cost. Will they be as willing in the future to invite viewpoints that challenge the verities of the male-dominated hierarchy? Has the Vatican "won" by showing that it is capable of slapping down its most loyal members (pleasing the conservatives) while also showing "mercy" (placating the progressives)? As with all cases of domestic abuse, l'affaire LCWR must leave psychological scars on the sisters, and a lingering fear of the abuser who says he's so sorry and won't do it again.

Yellow is the new black

For anyone hoping for the lighthearted source of the recent TV series, look elsewhere. Eddie Huang's "Fresh off the Boat" is the often harrowing story of a young Taiwanese immigrant trying to fit into American culture. Turned off by the standard way Asian immigrants make it in the US -- work hard, get good grades, do what your parents tell you -- Eddie dives headlong into street culture. He absorbs everything he can about hip hop, including its lingo and fashions. You can't read the book without having Urban Dictionary close to hand. Words and phrases like "shawties" (girls), "whip" (car), "for a minute" (for years) and "smash" (to have sex with) pepper every page. Though Huang is close to thirty, he writes like a rebellious fourteen-year-old street hustler.

Don't get me wrong. The book is super well-written and crazy exciting. The anecdotes-- violent, drug-addled and often misogynistic--are rich and layered. Huang's sketch of the angry dynamics of his newly-arrived family are perfect and memorable. As is his grasp of the tensions tearing at someone of a different race trying to fit in. But meseems that Huang protesteth too much. He is too anxious to sell himself as the only "real" person in a vast sea of sellouts. I felt at times that this was as much about selling seats in his restaurant as it was to exposing his life's story. Huang seems trapped by his street persona in much the same way he might have been trapped by the vapid, upwardly mobile Asians he mocks.

There is a great deal that I abhor about Huang's attitude -- his never-ending rebellion against propriety (with MFs too numerous to count) and his celebration of drugs (pot is one thing, but freebasing? Really?) -- to make his book an easy recommendation. But it gave insight into the way that at least some immigrants react to the stultifying pressures of American culture, and the desire to succeed on one's own terms.

Plane Crazy?

The Australian and Malaysian governments, having already spent 94 million dollars searching for lost flight MH370, are planning to spend another $39 million if the plane isn't found by May.With all respect and sympathy to those who lost loved ones, why is it so easy to spend money on the dead but not on the living? Why do matters of pride (national honor, a business's need to get its assets off the sea floor, the need to solve a mystery) so often trump matters of heart (feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant and building infrastructure)?

The small print of the Third Reich

Micro-history uses the close study of a tiny slice of events to shed light on larger themes. "Hitler's First Victims" takes us to the years just before WWII to study the establishment and running of Dachau, a camp outside of Munich used to concentrate, control and punish political dissidents.

It was a time when the rule of law, as practiced by the book's hero, Bavarian prosecutor Josef Hartinger, was almost perfectly balanced with the ruthless, lawless "justice" (i.e., brutality, arbitrariness and terror) that was the Nazi's stock in trade. It was a time when a concentration camp "suicide" might actually be investigated by local authorities, and perpetrators at least threatened credibly with punishment. Watching the defenders of the old systems be outmaneuvered by the likes of Josef Himmler (then in charge of police in Munich) or slowly knuckle under to the vicious new realities was to see ordinary people silently assenting, via opting for the own survival, with the Nazi's murder machine.

"Hitler's First Victims" gives a glimpse into the machinations of Hitler as he attempted to wrest total power from president Hindenburg. The road to the Third Reich was made of such grand scheming as well as the petty and seemingly insignificant murder of a few local dissidents in the grip of an barbarous prion commandant.

A story brilliantly researched and quite clearly told.

Popcorn tales: a lost ending to Mark's gospel?

I made a batch of microwave popcorn tonight. After it had all popped, I was busy writing, so I let the microwave bing every minute to remind me to remove it from the mike. Eventually, I went to the mike to remove the bag. But the oven was empty! Of course, I forgot that I had removed it earlier, but my initial sense of wonder and perplexity was little taste of what the first Easter was like -- 'whaddaya mean, the tomb is empty'?

The end of Mark's gospel leaves us with a mystery: Based on textual evidence, the guy who wrote everything up until chapter 16 verse 8 is not the same guy who finished the gospel through 16:20. The problem is that Mark leaves us with no appearances of the Risen Christ, ju st the mystifying discovery of an empty tomb and some unverified claims made by a young man in a white robe. Here's Chapter 16, up to the eighth verse, where the scholars say (based on terrific evidence, which I don't doubt) that the first gospel ended:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. Very early when the sun had risen, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb. They were saying to one another, “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back; it was very large. On entering the tomb they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe, and they were utterly amazed. He said to them, “Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’” Then they went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

That's it. The women find the empty tomb, then run away and don't tell anyone. The rest of the story from the gospel -- the Risen Lord's encounters with Mary Magdalene, the two disciples and the Eleven is evidently written by other hands.

This puzzles me. If a gospel is a teaching story about the Son of God, then how can it end on such as an unsatisfactory note? If you want to attract people to the person of Jesus and his role as Messiah and Savior, you can't just leave them hanging like this. And yet that's what I hear from those who discuss the abrupt ending of Mark's gospel -- that it deliberately left the story dangling at the edge of a literary and evangelical precipice.

Here are the possibilities:

1) Mark died before he could write the ending
As in the scene in the Cave of Caerbannog at the end of Monty Python's "The Search for the Holy Grail," Mark wrote the equivalent of "They said nothing to anyone because they were aaarrrrghhhh." This is an unlikely scenario. Mark is not writing about his own experience, but that of others (the Eleven, Mary M, etc.) who may well have been alive in the late 60s, as were people who had heard the story, and who could have completed the manuscript after Mark's inopportune demise.

2) Mark wrote a better ending, but it got lost.
Is this likely? Again, witnesses to the Resurrection were alive at least into the 60s CE -- Peter has likely martyred in 64 not long before Mark wrote circa 70. Even if all the eyewitnesses had died, the people they had taught would have remembered enough of the story to have fleshed out a decent ending.

3) The explosive personal account
So, what if the written portion of the gospel actually ended at 16:8, but the ending (when related to seekers after the faith) was told by people who had seen the Risen Jesus, or who knew those who had. Talk about a powerful punch line to a great story! The Messiah was condemned, beaten, crucified and buried. But on the third day, his tomb was empty. AND THEN WE SAW HIM ALIVE!!!!

Was this done for emotional impact? Did the apostles seek to give their listeners a taste of what it was like to encounter the Resurrected Lord -- not as as story on a page, but as an experience  handed down? Frankly, this seems a little too intellectual and abstract for the group that was attracted to Christianity at its outset. But there is something to be said for seeing resurrection as more than a dead body popping out of a tomb. Resurrection is a relationship with the God-man. Would this have been enough to attract followers?

4) The original ending was replaced with one that was "useful"
In this scenario, Mark wrote beyond 16:8, completing his gospel with his own brand of original material. Later, his original ending was scrapped and replaced with another ending. That would explain the strange abrupt ending. And you wouldn't have to assume that the ending would be supplied by early catechists.

The present ending has some issues -- it seems to crib material from the other gospels. Jesus appears to Mary, much as he does in John's gospel. And he appears to two disciples in the country, much as he does in Acts, Luke's continuation of his own gospel. Naive readers might assume that these similarities provide internal consistency between the gospels, showing that they tell versions of the same story. But what if a later writer, let's call him pseudo-Mark, created these scenes? Craftily, he might have made them see like early, fragmentary versions of stories that were fleshed out by later gospel writers.

There is an awkward issue of timing to contend with. Mark wrote around 70, while Matthew and Luke wrote around 85 and John wrote around 90-100. Pseudo-Mark would have had to wait until at least 85 to get a sense of what Luke was going to write and until the end of the first century to get an inkling of John's Easter narrative. This is a problem, since Matthew and Luke based their Easter narrative on Mark. Mark can't at the same time be the source of the other gospels and their heir. So maybe pseudo-Mark wrote something like what we see in 16:9-16:20.

If pseudo-Mark did add a new ending to Mark's account, what might it have looked like? Surely, it would not have contradicted Mark's message that Christ was the Son of God and Messiah. Perhaps it suggested something heretical, like that Jesus was not resurrected in the body, but in the spirit. Perhaps Mark's Jesus made a prediction or claim that was demonstrably untrue -- like that the Temple would be replaced or that the Son of Man would return in glory at a particular time and place. Perhaps it reported that Jesus was never heard from or seen again, but that his life now existed in the membership of the ecclesia-- the prototypical Church. Perhaps this was too tenuous a scenario for the early church to find useful in making converts. In other words, it was a sales pitch that fail to close the sale.

Something like one of these scenarios must be close to the truth. If the original ending of Mark existed, and it was enough to being people to faith in Jesus Christ, then why change it or add to it? Something about the ending was wrong. It had to be brought into accord with the needs of the early Church. And those needs required a walking walking risen Lord. Nothing else would do.

For all my theorizing, not one alternative version of Mark 16 seems to exist For my hypothesis to be correct, every vestige of Mark's original ending would have to be destroyed. The existence of a single copy of an alternative Marcan resurrection story would prove the thesis. But as yet, none has been found. For now, my thesis remains only a tantalizing possibility, but one that raises a provocative question: what was Mark's resurrection story? Or did he really just end his gospel, his most important worldly achievement, in midair, leaving every tantalizing questions unanswered? Or (conspiracies be damned) was the resurrection scene tacked onto Mark's gospel just a better worded version of the tale that Mark originally wrote? That's the scenario I would like to believe.