Apocalyptic Heat

There’s no future in predicting the end of the world because only two things can happen, and both are bad: either the world will end, in which case nobody will care about your prediction, or it won’t, in which case you will become a joke. The world’s latest “drop dead” date, if you will excuse the expression, is one week from today, when the Mayan calendar either does or does not forecast the Apocalypse. I’m not predicting, but (full disclosure) I haven’t done my Christmas shopping.

According to a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, only 2% of Americans believe the Mayan story, which isn’t surprising since the Mayans couldn’t even predict their own demise. But a much larger number believe the end of the world is approaching, although they diverge sharply on the reasons for, the meaning of, and the correctives to such an event.

The evidence is in the weather, which most Americans now believe has grown more extreme of late. Specifically, 75% believe that the globe is warming – although a majority of the Republican Party faithful nevertheless continue to insist that “global warming” is a hoax.

Here’s where things get dicey. If you believe, as most Americans do, that “God is in control of everything that happens in the world,” you are likely to also be among those who believe that the Biblical “end times” are near. If you’re ready, this is very good news.

On the other hand, if our role is to ensure the future wellbeing of the earth, this is not the time to sit back and enjoy the Rapture.

Bumper Sticker Christians

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker:

Ordain Women

Or stop dressing like them

that was right up there with our old family favorite from the 1970s, when Phil Esposito was scoring at a goal-a-game clip for the Boston Bruins:

Jesus Saves

But Espo knocks it in on the rebound

I may well not be the person to critique religious doctrine and practices, since the church militant stopped speaking for me many years ago, and I had my quadrennial fill of fundamentalism during the last election cycle. But the spiritual side of my childhood faith resonates still, as I wonder: who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? And, increasingly, where are we going? I still love the music, the blended sound of organ and human voice. I love the beauty of the churches and the language of King James, and I can still recite much of the liturgy by heart.

But the doctrinal exclusiveness of many sects and their dogmatic definition of the good life turned me away. It is a complicated history. Churches have been both the essential drivers of civil and human rights and the great impediments to universal understanding. And the backlashes against women and gays, which are particularly strong in the three monotheistic religions, strike me as immoral. We express righteous outrage at the treatment of women in other societies but silently tolerate our own Taliban. In most cultures through most of history, women were essential members of the religious communion. As they should be.

Honk if you love Jesus

Of Human Life

It’s astonishing how far America’s social and cultural conversation has shifted to the right, almost without notice, because partisans have manipulated the language without changing the subject. Take contraception, which I believe most people think is a good thing, and one long settled in the public arena. It has been 44 years since Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical against birth control, Humanae Vitae, which even then seemed a last gasp to hold back the secular world. In 1968 both the women’s and environmental movements were stressing the perils of unwanted births, and soaring birth rates threatened the economies, environments and the liberation of women in the developing world.

Realizing that contraception was a settled matter, Republicans redefined the issue as “religious freedom” – just as they redefined the removal of the economic safety net as an issue of personal freedom. And so in 2012, when Barack Obama sought to require hospitals to provide patients the option of birth control, the backlash was so ferocious that even Democrats jumped ship in droves. Senator Mario Rubio introduced a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Rush Limbaugh, who only looks pregnant, called the law student who testified for birth control a slut; and Rick Santorum called contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

This is about freedom: freedom from them and their efforts to restrain the human spirit. On this issue, at least, Mullah Omar, the pope and the Republican Party have more in common with each other than they do with me.

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Basic Goodness

Like many people, I have long struggled with the conflict between individualism and community – between the quest to be a distinct, whole and individuated person and the desire to be an integral part of a group. I admire the person who stands up to the crowd, who sets off alone on the open road, who thinks for himself and speaks what he thinks. And yet I also get the need for community, not for companionship only but to be part of something larger than yourself. We suffocate in communities; we starve without them. In his New Year’s address to the Shambhala community in Halifax, NS, sent to me by my brother Walker, Sakyong Mipham talked about “basic goodness,” saying that it “is not just a personal experience, it is also a social experience.”

“It is not just about me,” he continued; “it is about humanity . . . this notion of human nature is the most important global issue. What we do to our planet, what we do to ourselves, how we relate to our own minds, how we make decisions, and how we relate to the world is all coming from this notion of basic goodness. It is up to us.”

Basic goodness, as I understand it, does not require us to submerge our hard-won egos into the group, but it does ask us to see our interconnectedness with all living beings in a world filled with violence and anger – and to note that the path to building a peaceful world begins with being at peace with yourself.

Calliope

I am the co-minder of our granddaughter, Calliope, while her parents are in Alaska. The original Calliope was the Greek muse of epic poetry, She was Homer’s muse almost 3000 years ago when he composed the first enduring works of Western literature. The current Calliope is almost 2. Sometimes when I am with our granddaughter, I think of the future and wonder about the world she will inherit from us. This morning I think of the long arc of history between the first Calliope and ours, and how, through all the immense upheavals and changes in that history, our urge to tell stories and pass them on, to try to make sense of the world and our role in it, of war and peace, of love and death, has persisted. It is our culture, our guide for understanding our past and for charting our future.

Every politician who has ever run for office has talked about making the world a better place for the generations to come. But their conception of the future is too often how much of it they can sacrifice to protect their next election. Long term? It took Odysseus 12 years to get home – the equivalent of six terms in the House.

The promise of Barack Obama, at least for me, was that we could have a longer and a larger view – one that bridged the old divides that threatened to destroy us: race, wealth and poverty, religion, environmental destruction. I believe we can get there. For Calliope’s sake, I know that we must.

The Other Priest

Michael Doyle came to Camden, New Jersey, in 1968, sentenced to serve in one of America’s poorest parishes because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. He was 33 and arrived with all his worldly belongings in the back seat of his Chevrolet. He has been the priest at Sacred Heart ever since, and has watched Camden go from destitute to desolate. After 9/11 a young parishioner told him that he felt safe in the city . . . because anyone flying above it would think the terrorists had hit it already. Father Doyle is a man of deep faith, who has chosen to serve his God by devoting his life to serving Camden’s poor, accepting as a given his own life of poverty. He writes monthly letters to church supporters that are filled with compassion, and also with sadness, with anger, and occasionally with despair, as he bears witness to what he calls a national crime: the urban neighborhoods where America has discarded its poorest people and delivered its most toxic wastes. Among Camden’s abandoned buildings and violent crime, New Jersey has sited a sewage treatment plant, a trash incinerator and a dump.

“The threat to the future of this nation is not in Iraq,” he wrote a few years ago, “but in the inner core of our deadly cities. If only we had a national guard with hammers and saws and marines who did nothing but plumbing.”

Michael Doyle’s letters are the basis of a documentary, “Poet of Poverty.”

The Butler Did It

We were what you might call an Easter Christian family. On the one Sunday of the year when we made it to church, the congregation was overflowing and, because we were late, we were usually ushered to a pew in the front. When the minister announced, “There are a lot of new faces here today, we welcome you, and we hope we will see you before next year,” I felt he was looking directly at me. And I knew enough theology to understand that this was not a good start on the road to the afterlife. Even so, we were brought up to honor clergy as (in those days) men who had given up the pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasures to dedicate their lives to seeking spiritual truths. They had, we were taught, an extra magnitude of goodness. We counted among our family friends a future Episcopal Bishop of New York and a Trappist monk . . . and while few wanted to emulate the monk, all treated his decision with reverence.

So the continuing revelations of “the biggest scandal to rock the Vatican in decades” stun me. And they continue to take their toll. Last week, the president of the Vatican bank was forced out. Yesterday the Pope’s butler was arrested. The pope's butler?

Of all the “Vatileaks” revelations, the one for which I was least prepared is not the allegation of nasty internal power struggles, institutional corruption, money laundering or even mob connections. It is that the pope has a butler.

Joe, Bob and Me

“We have all these huge issues, and we’re bogged down in whether Joe can marry Bob.” Gay marriage has gone from an abomination to a diversion.

The charge is not new. Democrats have long accused Republicans of exploiting “social issues” to play to their evangelical base – and so giving the party’s real powers the cover to dismantle the welfare state. Indeed, I have done that myself. Republicans, by contrast, now assail Democrats for playing the gay card to deflect attention from the economy.

But gay marriage is not a tangential matter. It is a defining issue of today’s politics. It is part of the ongoing struggle for America’s soul.

As a country we are at our best when we expand the rights of people. Those efforts have never come without fierce opposition – from the mid-19^th century when a tiny group of abolitionists were dismissed as fanatics to the mockery of suffragettes to the murder of civil rights activists. And marriage has long been a focal point. When I was a child, it was a mortal sin for a Catholic to enter a Protestant church, let alone get married in one, and it was not until 1967 that a unanimous Supreme Court declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

When I ran for Congress in 1996, my position on gay marriage was “evolving.” I knew the right answer. I was just too chicken to give it. It’s a lot easier to stand up now, but it is not too late.

Easter Morning

Yesterday was as beautiful a day as I have ever seen. The sky was blue and cloudless, the grass a regenerative green. The morning sun warmed the earth, while a northwest breeze took the humidity from the air. I sat with a cup of coffee, trying to take it all in. I was by myself but not alone, for dozens of birds – robins and finches, redwing blackbirds and a northern cardinal, crows and blue jays – flew among the trees and sang from the branches to each other and to me. I felt completely at peace. Early spring. Easter morning. A season of rebirth. A day of resurrection. It might have been on a day like this that Francis of Assisi stopped in the Spoleto Valley to preach to the birds. It is a day that reminds me that religion is not just about transcending our mortality; it is about connecting to life. There is the one we now hear so much about – the one in which Jesus will return to judge us as saints or sinners for eternity. This is the Christianity that tells us the earth is ours to subdue, nature exists for us. This is the gospel of division, exploitation and fear.

I prefer another one – the one in which, as Lynn White wrote 45 years ago, “Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God's creatures.” But, White continued, that heresy was quickly stamped out.

I wouldn’t bet the farm just yet. I’m pretty sure I experienced it yesterday morning.

What is happening to us?

Sometimes, if I take the news seriously, I wonder if we will bomb ourselves back to the 12^th century or just elect a president from the 12^th century. I take the news seriously

I have no particular light to shed on the escalating saber rattling by all sides over Iran, except to think that a proxy attack by Israel does not seem like the lesson we should have taken from Iraq and Afghanistan – and that a political campaign already filled with vitriol is not a good venue for conducting foreign policy.

The Crusades mentality has penetrated to the core of the presidential debate, as religion has become its latest – and perhaps most dangerous – flashpoint.  In the last few days, Newt Gingrich has blasted the Obama administration’s “war against religion;” Rick Santorum has railed against Obama’s “phony theology” (although he said he was talking about the president’s environmental policies, not his personal faith); and Mitt Romney has accused the president’s team of having “fought against religion.”

Some of you wrote to compare Martin Luther King’s praise of extremism in the last post with the extremism we are witnessing today. It is worth noting that King went on to write: “Will we be extremists for hate or for love . . . for the preservation of injustice or the extension of justice?” And then he invoked the same god that has been turned into a political battering ram: “Jesus Christ,” he wrote, “was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness.”

“My feets is tired . . .

. . . but my soul is rested.' So said Mother Pollard, a 72-year-old elder in Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, after several weeks of participating in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. King quotes her in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I reread in honor of Black History month. Written in 1963, the letter is addressed to white clergymen who were supporters of civil rights but put off by King’s tactics of non-violent direct action, civil disobedience and willingness to break what he believed “unjust laws” – for which he was fully prepared to go to jail.

It is interesting to read the letter now, in light of current upheavals around the world, particularly the uprisings in the Middle East almost all of which began as peaceful protests and ended with horrendous violence precipitated by the state. Many of us have forgotten the repressive violence from threatened governments that confronted our own civil rights movement two generations ago. The demands for freedom and justice seem little different in Libya than they were in Little Rock; and the worries about whether long-repressed Arab peoples are ready for self-government seem a lot like those voiced by the well-meaning white moderates who prefer, wrote King, “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

And in a time when the word extremist is hurled about willy-nilly, it is worth remembering King’s response: “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

Anger and Hope

In the fall of 2008 I, and a lot of other people, volunteered for the Obama campaign. I spent many evenings in Philadelphia going door to door in both white neighborhoods and black (for in Philadelphia, as in every city in America, those distinctions still define most neighborhoods). In the latter, some of which I would have feared to enter in other times, I was welcomed with jubilation; in the former, there was less joy but the work seemed more important – for after seven years of a needless and failed war, the collapse of the housing and financial markets, and the worst recession in 70 years, what was driving this campaign was hope – people joining together across racial, ethnic, economic and political boundaries to rebuild America. But there remains a lot of anger in this country – much of it legitimate – and the politics of anger has too often proved stronger than the politics of hope. It enabled the Know Nothing party to take every state office in Massachusetts in 1854; it was the foundation of Nixon’s southern strategy in 1972; and it delivered South Carolina to Newt Gingrich last week. There is a great deal of pressure on Barack Obama to play to that anger, but to do so would betray those he brought together four years ago. Hope is not a sign of weakness, nor anger a sign of strength, and no one can play the anger card like the current group in Congress. If this election is about anger, they win. If it is about hope, we do.

The Bet

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and the next time I’m in one perhaps I’ll convert. In the meantime, though, I do wonder about these proselytizing efforts that are based on Pascal’s Wager. Since we can’t know if God exists, Pascal wrote, we have to bet one way or the other . . . but you can make that bet a sure thing: if God doesn’t exist and you bet on Him, you lose nothing; if He does and you bet against Him, you will be paying for a long, long time. “Wager, then, without hesitation that He is” . . . whether you really believe it or not. Heads you win, tails you don’t lose. I’m betting that if God exists, he can see through that. But I also know that eternity lasts forever, which is a frightening thought. Still, as I look at a world in which God does not seem to be paying much attention or perhaps he just doesn’t care, I don’t want to be diverted by what may happen next. All I know is that I am here, now, and I want to make some small contribution.

We are all seeking something . . .a god that will shed meaning not just on our own lives, but on life itself. The god I am looking for is one who would make a world in which the only beings living in foxholes are foxes. I think the only god that can do that is us.

Correction: Yesterday’s entry inadvertently turned ex-candidate Huntsman into a four-letter word. His first name is Jon. The h is absent, not silent. I apologize for the error.

Her Whole Life

Today is the 33^rd birthday of our second child, known as little Joanie. She was born more than three months prematurely and weighed under a pound. She lived almost three days, finally giving up her fight for life on January 5^th. She lies now in London Grove cemetery, next to her grandparents and her cousin, Dallas, who died of SIDS in 1974. Joanie’s gravestone reads simply: “Joan Blaine, January 3-5, 1979, “God’s own, the earth’s and ours.” It is not our custom to bear our sadnesses in public, but I think it is also important to acknowledge a life that was lived to its fullest, however curtailed it was. Joanie never got out of an incubator, never drew a breath on her own, never probably knew where she was and why she was here. But she lived, and we rooted for her to live longer, although the odds were always prohibitive. When a child lives such a short time, it sometimes seems self-indulgent to talk as if the grief at her loss could compare with those who lose a child they have known far better and loved far longer. And so the tendency is to say nothing, to say, I have four children, knowing that I have five. In this I think the pro-life people have a point. Life is precious, and no one can judge when another’s life begins. But to make that belief a litmus test of political ideology is as shameful as to fail to recognize the sacredness of life – all life – itself.