Children in Public

I don't know whether it is because of the growing DINK (double income no kids) phenomenon, or lingering Victorian ideas of kids being seen/not heard, but our society is pretty inhospitable to children in public.

As it relates to children the public sphere is intensely segregated. There are places specially set aside where kids are welcome - matinees of an animated movie, playgrounds, schools, family-friendly restaurants and fast-food joints. But step outside those boundaries and you will hear about it.

I have a pretty rebellious attitude and a thick skin and even I am constantly aware of the rolling-of-eyes, the impatient sighs, and the cruel looks that get shot my way when Curran decides to sing a song in the middle of dinner at a nice restaurant, or Avery turns to ask me a question about the plot during a movie or at a play. To sensitive parents like my wife the scorn is a palpable barrier to participation in adult life. Plenty of parents choose not to go where they know they aren't welcome.

In the short and the long run this attitude is very destructive. Being a parent is hard. No, being a parent is impossibly hard, and we have compounded that difficulty by isolating parents. While we approvingly quote generic proverbs like "it takes a village to raise a child", in fact, we have made children just another individual choice - a commodity. Some people "choose" to have children. Others don't. Since it is an individual choice the individual bears the cost. Why should the single, the childless, and the retired have to endure your parenting trials, the noise, the smells, the inconvenience with you?

I implore everyone to realize that however much the baby on the airplane is making you suffer, the parent is suffering 100x more. If you're conscious of a child making noise in a movie theater, the parent is completely consumed by it. Think it's hard to enjoy your dinner with the rugrats in the next booth bouncing around? Try being the parent.

The solution can't be segregation either. Some people want parents to keep their kids to "family-friendly" environments not just to avoid the awkwardness of having to put up with children, but also to protect the children. The result of this kind of thinking though is to consign parents and kids to ghettos where everything is primary colors and cheesy music all the time. It is bad for the parents, the kids, and society.

First, the parents. Having children doesn't mean we stopped liking music and wanting to go to concerts, or museums, or the theater or whatever activity you think is too adult for us to be bringing our kids to. For sanity's sake we need to continue to engage our interests and passions. Doing so makes us better people and better parents. Leaving the kids at home is not always an option and even if it was, one of the worst things a parent can do is exclude their kids from everything they like to do in life. Not everyone has the same ideas as you about what is "kid-appropriate" (an idea I think is flawed to begin with). Try being less judgmental about what a parent should or shouldn't be exposing their kid to - especially if you're not a parent yourself.

Next, the kids. Segregating kids from adult activities is bad for them. Kids learn to like and understand adult activities by being exposed to them. If you think it is an inappropriate environment for a child, instead of making a snide remark about bad parents, try doing your part to make the environment better. Talk to kids. Explain what is going on. Look out for them and help them, rather than ignoring them. You know what makes an environment unsafe for kids? Adults. But we could just as easily make things better rather than worse.

Finally, society. No matter what you think, raising the next generation is your responsibility as much as anyone else's. We are shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue to cut parents and children off from the elderly, the single, the young, the employed, and so on. We should be doing the opposite. We should have children in the workplace observing and apprenticing. Children should be present at every important meeting of government and business transaction, in every dance club, bar, theater, museum, warehouse, and factory. Far from us teaching them bad habits (which we already do quite well), they might actually teach us a bit of restraint and compassion. There might be less corruption, greed, lust, and hatred if we had to do it in front of innocent eyes.

Jesus said "let the children come to me." We say, "yes, let them go to Sunday School, or Day Care, or the playground or somewhere else away from me." Children are loud, and inconvenient. They don't follow the social rules. They interrupt our lives. They are inconsiderate. They get hurt and they cry. They find something funny and they laugh without regard for who else is listening. They are also people. Not someone else's responsibility. Not someone else's choice. Human beings. Who are especially in need of your care and attention. Quit rolling your eyes and say hello.

The Liquid Network

This is what we're talking about. This is why we want to launch TFF as something new and fecund:



We want to be a place where good ideas about theology come together to have sex.

Rumblings of Progress

For over two years now Doug Hagler, Nick Larson, and myself have been plotting to take over the internet. Going back even farther than that we have been friends who also happen to use computers. We are none of us cutting edge, though Nick has some actual know-how that is a few years out of date. So our conquest is inching along at a hard-to-see-it's-so-slow rate.

Recently though we have been gathering steam to attempt something pretty ambitious, which will be the next evolution of Two Friars and a Fool. The website, already in development, will be a virtual pub - a space for convivial debate and argument about things that matter. We hope to stimulate good conversation by hosting and creating high quality content. Articles, videos, and interviews by and with some great thinkers will be posted at regular intervals along with video responses from we three fools. We want you to get into the argument too by delving into the forums and engaging in direct debate with theologians, authors, speakers, and trolls from every corner of the internet.

We are still a few months away from this being a reality, but already we're laying the ground work. Building a Facebook Page to spread the word and provide updates. Starting a twitter feed for the "TwoFriars", which will give you the no-nonsense notifications of new content. A separate twitter feed "AndaFool" will let you in on our twisted sense of humor. News is slow coming at the moment, but you can be an early adopter and use the power of social media to feed us ideas about how we should assemble a casual, lively home for drunken theological debate online.

Christ the Non-Example

From John Howard Yoder's "The Politics of Jesus" (p. 95) on imitating Jesus:

... let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus' years as a village artisan. Even when the apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus' trade as a carpenter, his association with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have throughout Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament. It testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited believers there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some of those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more powerfully a demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject - but then consistently, universally - is Jesus our example: in his cross.

WWJD?

Confirmation Class 2010 Notes

These are my notes for the Confirmation class I'm teaching this year. I've never done it before. After a lot of thinking, I decided to make it about a dozen weeks (actually worked out to lucky 13). I was told anything from 12 weeks to an entire year for the length by the Church, and quickly realized it was just up to me. I also took a look at the official PCUSA Confirmation curriculum, and I took some ideas from it but went my own way. If nothing else, it's more interesting for me to do it myself.

The notes may not necessarily make sense to anyone but me - they're my guidelines, and while I'm going to give a copy of this to the kids in the class, I don't expect it to immediately make sense to them.

Though the class will obviously be my view, and my understanding of what "the basics" are, I've also gotten 6 different mentor-volunteers to work with the kids and help with the class however they see fit. My goal is for the mentors to disagree with me periodically, or have their own spin or viewpoint or priorities, and for the kids to see that it is ok for a church to be composed of people who disagree sometimes.

Yes - I am encouraging them to be little liberals.

6 sessions on the Bible, 2 sessions on history, and then 3 sessions on faith and practice, followed by a wrap-up where the kids also decide if they're ready to go before the Session and then be Confirmed.

After which we're certainly far from done, but we have a place to start. At least, that's the plan.

2010 Confirmation Class

Every Session
Candle Prayer
Lord’s Prayer

Session 1 (9/19/10)
Intro and getting started; how we’ll do it; question-writing; quiz

Session 2 (9/26/10)
Bible: the First Five

Session 3 (10/3/10)
Bible: Wisdom and Writings

Session 4 (10/10/10)
Bible: Prophets
Ten Commandments Day

(10/17/10)
Sunday Off! (Pastor Doug is out of town)

Session 5 (10/24/10)
Bible: the Gospels

Session 6 (10/31/10)
Bible: Letters and the Early Church

Session 7 (11/7/10)
BIble: Revelation and what came after

Session 8 (11/14/10)
History: Jewish history
“Hebiru” --> Holy Land --> David --> Exile --> Second Temple --> Diaspora

Session 9 (11/21/10)
History: Christian history
Jesus --> Disciples --> Apostles --> Early Church --> Rome --> World --> Reformation --> Us
Happy birthday

Session 10 (11/28/10)
Faith and Practice: Sacraments, Spiritual Gifts, Spiritual Practices

Session 11 (12/5/10)
Faith and Practice: the Christian Year and the Great Story Cycle

Session 12 (12/12/10)
Faith and Practice: Confessions, Theology

Session 13 (12/19/10)
Choice: Ready to go before the Session?  Talk through what you’ll have to affirm
Youth Sunday!

TBA: Go before the Session
Dun-dun-DUUUUN!

Confirmation Service
TBA

Continuing the Journey: Farther On and Deeper In
Confirmation isn’t where we end, it’s where we start

Nine Eleven

This is a blog written by Americans, and it is the 11th of September, and so I felt like there had to be a post.

One recollection of September 11, 2001:

My heart broke that morning, once the shock of waking up to "we're under attack" wore off.  It broke for the buildings destroyed, the innocent lives snuffed out in fire and collapse, the untold damage, the fear and panic in the country.

But what stuck with me, what took the pieces of my heart and pounded them to dust, was the absolute certainty that we, as a nation, would swiftly move to take revenge, that we would take the violence and the fear visited upon us, and we would visit them upon other people a hundredfold.  It was dread; it was certainty.

At the time I didn't know we would declare not one but two preemptive wars, one of which was planned in the 90s and was simply waiting for an excuse. I didn't know that we would also sacrifice any moral high ground we once had, that we would sacrifice our own civil liberties, our own self-respect and integrity as a nation on the altar of the almighty trinity of nationalism: Fear, Violence and the Illusion of Safety.  I didn't know we would torture people, or hold people in prison with no intention of ever giving them a trial of any kind.  I didn't know we would extradite people for the express purpose of being tortured, or that we would hire mercenaries and turn a blind eye to war crimes they commit. I didn't know any of these things.

But I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the fear and violence which had been visited upon us, we would visit upon others a hundredfold.  (Not because of any extraordinary viciousness, but because we had the power, paired with the disease of empire; because no one could stop us, least of all ourselves.)

And we have done, are doing, exactly that.

***

So I grieve the many losses of that day - including the 2,996 people we counted because they died on our soil, the 2,000+ who died in Afghanistan whom we counted, the 4,700+ who died in Iraq whom we counted, the tens of thousands of American and allied injuries that we are not supposed to count or talk about, and the hundreds of thousands we have not been counted, whom we are not allowed to attempt to count.

Got-No-Sensitive

What's Not Funny

Humor. We underestimate the importance of comedy at great peril. It's not just that we all need a therapeutic laugh from time to time (we do) it's that humor is a critical agent of social development. Humor helps us relieve the pressure of social conformity by taking taboo subjects and making us laugh about them. Humor is about the only power in the 'verse capable of making us look directly into our shadow side and not have a break down.

Humor can tear down a tyrant. Humor can destroy a deadly cultural meme. Humor prevents warfare, probably daily. Humor helps us see clearly, to know what is true, and to overcome stubborn internal prejudices.

Of course, that is to spin it positively. Humor can also hurt. In fact, most humor involves pain for someone. As the classic saying goes tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you cut yours. This safety relief valve of laughing at our pain and the pain of others is necessary and valuable, but is it always justifiable? Is there some humor which just goes too far?

Subjectively, each of us will have our own lines. Something I find offensive may still be funny to you, and vice versa, but are there certain lines which no one should cross? Are there certain jokes which should be unacceptable for anyone to tell or laugh at?

From an ideological standpoint I want to say no. Part of the point of comedy is that it is anarchic. It fundamentally refuses to recognize any boundary or authority as legitimate. Nothing is sacred. That is important to how comedy works and why it can fulfill the role it does in society. Because we are always going to want to censor something and usually not for legitimate reasons. By being ungovernable comedy saves us from our own impulse to control and dictate what is appropriate. That very impulse usually comes around to bite you in the back.

However, I know there are jokes I personally will never find appropriate and jokes I've told which I regret. Coming into contact with close friends and family members who have experienced rape, it is hard for me to find any humor in rape-jokes and I recognize strong arguments for why such jokes should be unacceptable. If the power of humor is to take taboo things and make them acceptable for public conversation are there not things which should always remain taboo? Do we ever want to be a society where the violent sexual assault of other human beings is treated lightly? It's tragic that we are in fact such a society right now.

I don't think there is a clear bright line. Even if we could find one and draw it I hope we would never be able to enforce it. Comedy is too essential to what it means to be human and too powerful a force for good to be allowed to be muzzled. Still, take care with what jokes you tell and what you choose to laugh at. Someone next to you may be silently reliving a personal nightmare. To them it may not be funny at all.

A Better Word

Hebrews 12:18-29

God, through this letter to the Hebrews, wants to share a little insight with you about Religion. About religiousness. About two contrasting ways of living your religion. Two opposing religions. Two religions which superficially seem very similar, but couldn’t be more different.

Both of these religions have a mountain. The one has a mountain of fear. The second a mountain of joy.

The mountain of fear is a place where the people of God gather at the base in terror. Lightning flashes and a cloud roils at the peak of the mountain. Anything which touches this mountain – even an animal, must be stoned to death. The mountain is a place of blood and sacrifice. Only one person, a select person specially prepared can go up this mountain and come back safely to bring the word of God. And when that word comes back it is a heavy word. A crushing word of law. An impossible burden demanding obedience and when failure occurs, as it always must, atonement must be sought on this mountain with sacrifice. The mountain must be continually appeased with blood offerings.

The mountain of joy is a place of assembly as well, but here the people of God come to find thousands of angels singing songs of praise and triumph. They find everyone together climbing the mountain in safety to the top where there is no cloud at all, but bright clear sunshine and God in our midst. The word which is spoken from this mountain is a better word, heard by all and not by one representative. This word is that sacrifice is ended. There will be no more atonement, and all who come here will be welcomed and fed.

These mountains are not a Jewish and a Christian mountain. People of all faiths, and of no faith at all can come to the mountain of joy. And people of every faith, including Christians, often choose to worship at the mountain of fear. These are not exclusive clubs. The mountain of fear will accept sacrifices from anyone, and the mountain of joy will host the feast for anyone.

If anyone dared to show up at the mountain of joy, that is. Because through human history we have preferred the mountain of fear. Perhaps because we feared it so, we often told ourselves and others that it was the only mountain. Or groveling and hiding our sorrow, we even convinced ourselves that these mountains were one and the same. That gaining access to joy meant paying obeisance to fear.

It is evident in our history as a species. Anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have been making it plain for the past two centuries that the roots of human religiousness are in sacrifice. On every continent, in every climate, every place that humans went our religious rituals followed us. We sacrificed to spirits, and gods, and forces of nature. We sacrificed to idols, and to secure good fortune in war, or at harvest, or fertility for our wives and daughters. We cut the lives out of animals, goats, chickens, cows, horses, pigs… yes. But we also cut the lives out of human beings. The Aztecs were not uniquely barbarous in taking beating hearts out of human chests. Human sacrifice has played a part in human religion all over the world for tens of thousands of years. It is even recorded in our own scriptures. Fathers killing their daughters to give thanks to a monster God. People going to war and raping, pillaging, and razing, at the behest of this God. Our own Christian history is splattered with the gore of crusades, and inquisitions, of burnings, hangings and tortures… of people sacrificed on the mountain of fear.

Nor have we done away with these darker aspects of our religious selves. These are not mere relics of the past. Simply because we do not have a pyramid to toss the bodies off of, does not mean that we are not sacrificing people to the mountain of fear, perpetually atoning for weakness and failure to an unforgiving cosmos. Wherever the mountain of fear is worshipped, sacrifice follows.

The mountain of fear is where the cowards who flew planes into buildings nine years ago worshipped. They believed that their sacrifice, their holy death, and the deaths of the passengers on those planes, and the deaths of the thousands in those buildings would please God. They believed that the blood would soak into the mountainside and make it sacred. They believed that they would earn approval for themselves and their loved ones with such a sacrifice.

How tragic, then, that we have too often legitimated their depraved beliefs by worshipping at the self-same mountain. By declaring the ground of those attacks sacred because of the blood spilt there as if spilling blood were what made something sacred. By which logic Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Dachau and Auschwitz are some of the holiest sites on earth. Or the nearby sand-creek massacre – who believes that is sacred ground? We spilled enough innocent blood there! We have worshipped at the mountain of fear whenever we treated those deaths as a religious act, as anything other than senseless waste. When we worship and pray and argue and fight as a culture over the proper treatment of “sacred” Ground Zero – we are paying homage to the mountain of fear.

We have always done this. We commemorate our massacres. We venerate those who we have piled on the altar – and we justify new sacrifices because we can’t allow those who have already been killed to have died in vain. Our cemeteries at Gettysburg, and Arlington are holy sites where we go on pilgrimage to remind ourselves why we have to continue every day to put new bodies on the altar. Our soldiers who die because we sent them to war are robbed of their humanity. When they are brought back they are not allowed to just be people who died to senseless violence like millions before them. They are heros, and mini-saviors. We use the same words to describe them that we normally reserve for Christ – they gave their life for others.

These sacrifices are wrapped in ritual and symbolism. There are flags, and songs, and prayers… and then more sacrifices. Perpetually. Because the mountain of fear can never be appeased. Our sins are too deep to ever be sufficiently atoned for.

Perceive then how radical a departure it is for us to claim that Jesus Christ has called us into a new form of worship. To worship at a mountain of Joy – where the symbols of division and exclusion (nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, age) have all been completely wiped away. Here everyone assembles openly in the presence of God and a multitude of angels, saints, martyrs, sinners, victims, workers, lovers, and children. Here the worship is not about appeasement or atonement. Here there are no sacrifices.

What we place at the heart of our sanctuary is not an altar, but a table. Here we come not to make a sacrifice, but to celebrate a feast. If this were an altar there would be blood gutters at the sides and a place for a fire in the center. The gas grill we have on our porch is closer to an altar than this table is. At this table nothing dies – but everything receives new life.

We never believe nor claim on this mountain that God demands, desires, or accepts one drop of blood spilled in his name or in any other name. There is here only one kind of blood that is spilled – the blood of the grape. Christ’s blood and Christ’s body which we share at this table, which are the constant proof of our unity and absolute end of any division.

Here where we worship there should be only one thing which reminds us of that other mountain and its consequences – the cross. That in seeking forgiveness and safety, and freedom and every other good thing that we have prayed for from God while laying another sacrificial goat on the altar we ended up killing our very hope. The very sign of God’s love. The very proof of God’s forgiveness. The very guarantee of God’s protection. And the very essence of freedom.

So forever let us swear off all idols, and symbols, and prayers and rituals which tell us that blood makes things holy, that sacred things are about sacrifices. That salvation requires violence.

Here is our hope. Here is our salvation. Here is our joy. This is the mountain we have been called to worship upon.

Remember the Real One

Not cynical fear-mongering, not knowingly spreading ignorance, not vapid scribblings on a chalk-board, not comparing everyone to a Nazi, not hypocrisy married to self-righteousness, not infantile partisan one-upmanship, not snarling jingoist xenophobia. Masterful rhetoric from a heart moved by love even for those who would destroy him, telling us who we are called to be.

Glenn Beck could grow wings and a shining halo and walk across the surface of the Reflecting Pool and never even come close.

Pray For Me

As a pastor I am asked to pray for people all the time. Even more frequently situations come up in which the socially appropriate, expected response is "I'll pray for you." When those situations come up, more often than not, other people around me are uttering the familiar phrase and I am looking befuddled like "why did you say that?"

I have been working and working to understand this impulse, but something deep in me strongly resists uttering the words. Oh I've said them. Usually when the external pressure was so intense there seemed to be no polite way to avoid it, as when every other person in the room has made their pledges of prayer and then turned to look at me patiently, but expectantly. Or when I felt completely helpless or lost for other possible responses to a situation... but it is precisely in those situations that I feel most convicted that it is the wrong thing to say and the moment the words have left my mouth I regret it.

Partly I resist the words because they make me into a hypocrite. Yes I actually do pray for other people, but not as often as I have promised I will. Far too often my pledge of prayer has been worthless. I promise myself every day I will get better about keeping lists and remembering everything I am told, and I will be more disciplined about when and where I say my prayers etc... etc... but until I am a better person than I am right now I will keep breaking promises to myself and to you.

I also do not like promising to pray for people because it is too easy. It is something I can say if I don't want to commit to something more difficult. It is easy to avoid the work of compassion, attention, and presence and still maintain my veneer of empathy by promising my prayers. Sometimes I just don't have time for your problems. You know that too, but neither of us want to admit it. So we are both given a little guilt-reprieve by me promising to pray for you.

It also glosses over times and places when there really is nothing I can do. Rather than live with the discomfort of admitting my helplessness I can promise to pray and instantly banish awkward feelings. It is a subtle and effective barrier between me and some very ugly feelings. Oh, your cancer is inoperable? That makes me feel very sad because I love you and don't want to lose you. Promising to pray for you helps keep me in denial. Your situation makes me feel frightened because it reminds me of my own mortality? Promising to pray for you keeps me distracted. Your situatiom makes me feel guilty because I want to be able to help? Promising to pray for you satisfies my need to be helpful.

Pledges of prayer don't make sense theologically to me. First of all, my primary understanding of the purpose of prayer is that it is a discipline of sanctification. It is a process we go through for the transformation of our own hearts and minds into the heart and mind of Christ. We open ourselves to the inspiration of the Spirit and hope that prayer changes something - ourselves. So when I pray for someone else I do so primarily to teach myself compassion. This discipline is undermined by the words "I'll pray for you." It is undermined because compassion which seeks attention to itself is insufficiently humble. It is undermined because every time I promise to pray, but then do not, I strengthen my vice of respectability. I substitute the public appearance of empathy for true compassion. Like eating junk food in place of real food I slowly poison myself.

Secondly, even if you believe that intercessory prayer is meant to effect miracles in the world beyond inward transformation, what does pledging to pray accomplish? These are separate actions. Praying for miracles is one thing. Pledging to pray for miracles is another. If you care about that person and can perform miracles what difference does it make if they know you intend to do so? Is it so that you can get credit if or when the miracle occurs? So they won't be caught by surprise when their cancer suddenly goes into remission? Does the pledge make the prayer more powerful somehow?

Ultimately, as best as I am able to discern, people promise to pray for each other because it is a nice thing to say. It is the common Christian way to express concern and let people know you are attempting to sympathize with them. It is the equivalent of a get well card or a thank you note, but requiring less effort. I try to see it in the best possible light when people promise to pray for me (though it gives me no comfort). I realize they are just trying to express their support.

Still, as I am standing in conversations at fellowship hour, or scanning my twitter feed, or reading updates on facebook, I constantly bump into this phrase, "I'll pray for you." And part of me wonders, "why did you say that?"

Yes, A White Person Can Understand What It Is Like to Be Black...

...or asian, or hispanic, etc.  And yes, a man can understand what it is like to be a woman.  A straight person can understand what it is like to be gay.

Did I get your attention?  Cool.

I've seen this question in the race conversation a lot - everybody has - and I think the answer is clearly "yes".  The important part of the question, though, is that race has nothing to do with it.

The real question is "Can one human being understand what it is like to be another human being."  Race is just one variable in our experience as human beings.  Gender is another.  Dis/ability is another, as are age and economic class and culture and religion and anything else you can think of that describes a person.  The question is, can we understand each other?  The answer is yes - it has to be yes for any of our communication or relationships to be meaningful at all.  If the answer is no, then apoia'giajds;aio hgdag;ieha.

Now, if the question is "Can one human being experience the experiences of another human being", the answer is obviously no across the board.  We can't live another person's life - we can't be them.  But we have more than just experience to help us understand other people.

We have limbic resonance.  Your mammalian brain broadcasts how you feel through subtle clues many times per second, thousands of times in a given conversation, entirely outside of your control.  Outside of my control, my mammalian brain picks up on these cues.  Happiness, sadness, anger, even things like obesity, are actually contagious in this way.  Our mammalian brains are always striving to understand and communicate with each other, and this process is not impeded in the slightest by something constructed like race or ethnicity.

We have empathy.  We have the capacity (with the exception of sociopaths or perhaps severely autistic persons) to feel what other people are feeling.  When we see a sad face, we feel a pang of sadness.  When we see an angry face, our pulse rate goes up a few beats or more.  Reveling in empathy isn't very helpful, but it is there.  We know from the research of people like Charles Darwin all the way to Paul Ekman that emotional facial expressions are universal regardless of culture.  If you haven't read Paul Ekman's books, I highly recommend them.  He has demonstrated through decades of research and facial analysis that the facial expressions that accompany emotions are universally human and entirely cross-cultural.  Culture teaches us different ways of managing those emotional reactions, but the reactions go deeper than culture or ethnicity, all the way to biology.  We are 'wired' to communicate emotional experiences and emotional states, whether we are New Guinean stone-age hunter-gatherers or Japanese executives.

We have sympathy.  This is the imaginative capacity to understand, from a slight remove, what it is like to be another person.  We can find experiences in our lives that are similar to experiences in other lives.  We can listen to their stories and imagine ourselves in those stories.  We can ask them what it is like to be in their skin and the words they tell us have meaning.  We have to be careful that we're not just projecting our own experience and biases onto the other person - but that's what listening is for!

We have imagination.  We can imagine, and understand to a degree, what it is to be a big blue alien on Pandora, or an Elf, or a cyborg, or an artificially intelligent robot, or a killer whale, or Jesus, or our parents, or our ancestors.  We started developing this capacity when we were toddlers.  We can use it to manipulate others or to help them, to build up or to destroy, but we have it.  We can walk in each other's shoes just like we can walk on Mars or the bottom of the ocean.  More information and broader experience sharpens this capacity, as does wisdom, but we have it almost from the beginning.

What we cannot do is to have the same experiences as another person.  We can't mind meld or download their experiences into our brains.  So, while I am not black, not a woman, not gay, not hispanic, etc., can I understand what it is like to be those things?  It takes some effort and imagination, but yes.   Can I have the experiences of those other categories of people?  Can I embody them?  Can I be just like them and live their lives?  Not at all - of course not!  No more than they can embody me or have my experiences or live my life.

So, the bad news is, we're just going to have to listen to each other, and actually use our capacities for understanding.

I'm A Color-Less Child Who Don't Know Right From Wrong...

Race came up a number of times in the past couple of weeks, in conversation with my mother and her partner Sandy as well as, for example, on Bruce Reyes-Chow's recent Facebook comment.  These conversations about race have all been with primarily white people, all middle-class-seeming from what I can tell.  I found myself trying to make the same point about whiteness.

When whiteness is part of a race discussion, it is the backdrop.  Whiteness is the blank, forgettable paper upon which the beautiful rainbow of diversity can be painted.  "Ethnic" means anything but white.  "People of color" is the same.

This is not some kind of "reverse racism" rant - that being said, the invisibility of whiteness is the problem.  When whiteness becomes just another ethnicity, we will have dealt a powerful blow to racism everywhere.  It is no longer a game of measurement against one ethnicity which is treated like it is the assumed position, but rather a game of comparing ethnicities subjectively and relativistically - this one is unlike this other one, but similar to this other one, etc.  With any luck, we eventually stop playing the game altogether.

When whiteness is the backdrop; when white is not just another ethnicity, it becomes the default.  It becomes the assumed basis on which we discuss race - race exists as a comparison to whiteness.

It isn't as if white is not a distinctive ethnicity, just like any other ethnicity (granted that all ethnicity is invented and constructed).  You just have to listen to...any standup comedian for any length of time, or read Stuff White People Like, to get the idea of what white ethnicity means, insofar as any ethnicity means anything.

We need to get the point where we are all people of color - only one of those colors is "pale".

Here are a couple of my longer comments from BRC's Facebook page:

 "

I think that the idea that white people are somehow "not ethnic" or have no color just perpetuates racism, and I see a lot of that in this conversation, as I do in most conversations about race. Whiteness is treated, even by most of the commenters here, as the "default" position, as if there was nothing distinctive about whiteness. It is the blank page upon which the beautiful rainbow of diversity is painted, it seems.

This is deeply unfortunate on every level. Until "white" is just another color, just another ethnicity, racism will rule the day. As long as we divide everything along lines of white vs. "ethnic" or white vs "color", we're still defining everything in light of whiteness. Isn't that what so many people have struggled and suffered so much to avoid?

As for BRC's comment - cool. I don't really understand what he means. When I'm in a group of all white people (which happens all the time as a Presbyterian) we don't even notice - again, because we're not "ethnic" , we don't have "color", we're just white people. Blank. Monochromatic. The cultural and phenotypic default setting.

And this language of white vs. color allows us to continue in that illusion, even though it is harmful to non-white people."

And to clarify:

"I think that's actually what I said - or what I intended to say. Race is an artificial construct, even if you change the terminology to "ethnicity". As long as whiteness is the artificial construct that is made the backdrop for all others, the unjust system will be propped up. If whiteness is just another ethnicity, then I believe that is a concrete move toward equality. Part of the power of whiteness is it's cultural invisibility - many act and speak as if white isn't particular, as if only "color" is particular. This is worse than acknowledging white as a particular construct, in my view, because it is all tacitly based on the assumption that white is standard and everything else is a deviation, when in truth, ethnicities are all constructs."

The Protestant Disease

Yesterday during my sermon, I spoke in part about what I called "the Protestant disease" - the common delusion that we are community, as people of God, because we agree with each other.  It's the reason we have between 20,000 and 30,000 Protestant denominations in the U.S., as well as untold numbers of nondenominational churches

If the delusion is that we must agree in order to be a community, then every disagreement demands fighting, coercion of some kind, and if that fails, schism.  The only determination to make, in fact, is whether a disagreement is minor enough to let us just tough it out, gritting out teeth and getting along, or whether it's time to leave and found a brand new church or denomination where we can all agree again.

Until the next time we disagree about something.

I call this "the Protestant disease" because it is an affliction of the spirit.  It is a failure of trust and of any semblance of genuine Christian community.  It is a malfunction - an incredibly common one.

You can see it all over our culture right now.  The disease raises pustular boils on the body politic who are given jobs on 24-hour news channels so that people can waste their lives away watching them spew.  We hear again and again - those who disagree with us are our enemy.

Now, if the Church had not almost entirely abrogated it's calling, we would know how to treat our enemies, even if we persist in the delusions we are being fed.  We would know to pray for them and to love them, to overcome what we see as their evil with our own good.  We would know that in the pursuit of truth, resorting to weaponry of any kind is the same as surrender.  We, as the Church, could be the start of the healing of this disease of spirit.

We have, after all, the antidote - the germ of a loving community, an adopted family, in which we do not come together because we agree.  We come together because we are called, because we experience this ineffable grace, and we just have to find out what (or Who) is behind it.

But, instead, we have the Protestant disease.

American Cowardice 1

Driving home tonight I witnessed two police cruisers pulling over a man in a sedan. They shined their spotlights on him, and approached from both sides. I drove past without seeing what happened next, but I imagined the following unrealistic conversation.

Drunk Guy: Man those lights are bright could you turn them down.

Officer: It's normal procedure. For our protection. So we can see what you're doing.

Drunk Guy: For your protection? What do you need protecting from?

Officer: Well you see, we don't know if you are some PCP-head or gang-banger and might go crazy on us. You could be anyone. We can't be too careful.

Drunk Guy: But you're wearing body armor and have a gun, and 3 other guys with body armor and guns, and a radio to call for help to get a bunch more guys with body armor and guns. Plus you've been trained in hand-to-hand combat and all that stuff...

Officer: Well yes, but you could be a really belligerent alcoholic...

Drunk Guy: But you have pepper spray and a taser and handcuffs, and there is a shotgun in your car. And even if I drive away you have much faster cars with bullet proof glass, and that radio again with which to call helicopters and tire spikes and, paramedics if one of you gets hurt...

Officer: Of course, but we can't be too careful...

The point of my rambling imagination is not that cops don't face real dangers, but that perhaps we've gotten our ideas of danger out of perspective. When I get pulled over for a speeding ticket I sweat. Why? Because a guy (or girl) with a gun is about to give me a lecture. Police officers certainly do get injured and die in the line of duty, but far more criminals and bystanders are shot by cops than the other way around. This is because the cops are better armed, better trained, better prepared, and usually outnumber their opponents. In other words, however dangerous it may be to be a cop, it is more dangerous for everyone else.

This is not an anti law-enforcement post. This is just what got my mind started down this train of thought. My broader point is this:

We have become a society of cowards. We have institutionalized cowardice.

Look at that chart to the right. We spend as much money on our military as the almost the entire rest of the world. Our military is the best equipped, best trained, most advanced everything. In the past century we have inflicted millions of casualties on the rest of the world while we have suffered less than 1% of the deaths we have caused.

Yet, despite our utter dominance, we live in fear.

After those police officers have got the talkative drunk guy out of his car he decides he does feel slightly belligerent. He cracks some jokes at the cops and doesn't exactly follow instructions. They push him up against the car and try to cuff him. He gets defensive.

Drunk Guy: Hey why are you pushing me!

He shoves back. The police both grab him and force him face first to the ground. He squirms, while one officer gets out his cuffs and the other pulls his taser out.

Officer: Hold still or I will taze you.

He doesn't hold still. The cop cuffing him, being bigger, stronger, in better shape, trained for this sort of thing and sober is, at most, in danger of inhaling some intense halitosis. The drunk guy keeps squirming. They taze him. Twice. For their own safety. Everyone agrees this is perfectly reasonable.