Prodigal Prophet

In the midst of the Paula Deen fiasco and the George Zimmerman trial, argument over what constitutes racism and sexism and “profiling” has risen to a fever pitch once again. “Everybody does it,” the standard argument of adolescents caught in an uncomfortable place, is one response. “Not me,” is the even more infantile defense. Denial of responsibility for one’s words and actions is increasingly the new standard—with no cognizance of the fact that it doesn’t really matter if one’s intentions were good. As the old adage says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Think you’re unaffected by what others say and do? That you never blindly accept as “true” or “right” that others do and say without question? Take this “test.”

There’s a story in the New Testament in which, in answer to a lawyer’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him what the Hebrew law says. He replies, among other things, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Reportedly to make sure he isn’t setting himself up for judgment, the lawyer then asks who his neighbor is. Jesus elaborates with a parable about a guy on a trip who is beaten and robbed and what three other guys who happen along the same road later do (or don’t). What is the name of the parable?

If your answer includes the word “Samaritan,” I applaud your awareness, at least, of this one story in the Bible. But if your answer includes the word “good,” you might be guilty of racism. Or, at best, an unwitting carrier of it.

A skilled English composition teacher or grammarian or writer knows that the insertion of any adjective modifies the noun which follows it, most often as an intentionally exclusionary device. To call a day “beautiful” excludes from the reader or listener’s imagination those days that are “not beautiful,” according to their definitions of beauty. (I submit that the rain in Asheville, NC that would cause me to describe today as a “not-so-beautiful” day would be the very feature that would cause those in the southwest to describe their day as “beautiful,” for instance.) To describe a stove as “hot” intentionally excludes “warm” or “cold” from the sensual experience.

Obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with adjectives or modifiers, or their use as exclusionary devices. Our problems begin when we use emotionally-tinged modifiers with nouns that serve to differentiate one human demographic from another.

Before I go too far afield from my original premise, however, I would invite you to grab your Bible, if you have one, or search for the passage online. If you like, click here. It’s Luke 10:25-37.

Did you notice?

If you read from a version into which some human translator has inserted a “heading,” I would mention that an English composition teacher or editor worth his or her “salt” would mark down the grade of the student whose paper included this header for the story if it were written today. This story isn’t a parable about a good Samaritan. It’s a parable about a good neighbor.

If you haven’t yet begun to see what I’m getting at, go back and read the passage (minus the header). Nowhere does Jesus ever refer to the man as anything but a Samaritan. Someone else along the way inserted the word “good.”

But without skipping a beat, there are those among us—unfortunately most of us, it seems—who accept the exclusionary premise that this Samaritan was different from other Samaritans. That by virtue of his being Samaritan, there was a need to differentiate him further, to include him in an “exclusive” group of “good” Samaritans, as opposed to the “usual” lot of “bad” Samaritans.

Jesus chose to use a Samaritan in the example for a reason. The lawyer, no doubt, had already decided, without justification, that Samaritans were despicable, immoral, inferior… because they were Samaritans.

Samaria no longer exists today as a geographic entity, so we have to use our imaginations. If he were here today, what demographic group do you think Jesus would choose to demonstrate his point about neighbors? Homosexuals? Heterosexuals? Blacks? Whites? Asians? Africans? Hispanics? Jews? Arabs? Republicans? Democrats? Men? Women? Liberals? Conservatives? Teachers? Firemen? Beer Drinkers? Union Members? Christians? Muslims? Buddhists? Mormons? Americans? Europeans? Koreans? Georgians? New Yorkers? Texans? Californians? The 1%? The 99%? The filthy rich? The filthy Occupy X demonstrators?

Okay. Who is my neighbor? A certain human (gender, religion, skin color, ethnicity, nationality unspecified) stopped for gas and was ripped off by a thief (gender, religion, skin color, ethnicity, nationality unspecified). A Christian Republican, a black Muslim, and a liberal woman all individually stop for gas at the same place…which one is the neighbor?

If, at any moment, you label, diminish, or judge another individual in a demographic group into which you were not born on the basis of their membership in that same group, wittingly or unwittingly, or stand by and allow it to happen, you’re a racist. And so, too, am I.

[And Jesus said:]

³⁶…which of these three do you think proved himself a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers? ³⁷ He answered, “The one who showed pity and mercy to him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Lord, have mercy.

For years I have struggled with a sense that there was something not quite right about the religion into which I was born. I’m not talking about the leader or “founder,” as he is sometimes called because common sense tells me that Jesus never set out to start a religion at all. It was something else but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

It would take two conversations a decade apart for clarity to come—one with an African-American man in my office in the weeks after 9/11 and another earlier this year, while I was editing a novel based on the true story of a Jewish immigrant to New York from Lithuania at the turn of the last century.

The first conversation had to do with the fact that I’d noticed that most of my African-American friends and co-workers didn’t seem quite as overtly upset by the World Trade Center attack as the rest of us. Where for white people like me 9/11 and where we were and what we were doing when it happened was for weeks the prevailing topic of every non-work-related conversation, it was not so with most people of color.

I knew that my black friends weren’t immune to feelings about the tragedy, so it had to be something else. So I asked.

Duncan looked at me for a moment. “We’re not afraid of attacks by people we don’t know,” he said. “We’re more afraid of things like Oklahoma City.” He was, of course, referring to the 1993 bombing of the federal building there.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He paused before responding. “I guess you’ve never had a cross burned on your lawn.”

It was like a brick between the eyes. He was right—I’d been an adolescent in the Deep South during the 1960s. I had mourned the death of Martin and seen hooded KKK members and winced at early photos of dead humans hung from trees for no other reason than the color of their skin. But I had never once actually experienced the terror of waking in the night to bricks through windows and fires in my front yard.

For the next few years, I was haunted by that conversation. Its result was to remind me with a vengeance that there are some things we can never truly understand about what drives another’s behavior, another’s thoughts, another’s feelings—even if we, with compassion, try to imagine. The limitations of these skin-enclosed bodies and brains of ours make it impossible for us ever to understand absolutely what it is like to walk in another’s shoes. To try is both crucial and honorable, but to do so with the arrogance of assurance that we can ever know the “truth” of another’s experience is dangerous. Couple that narcissistic ignorance with a weapon and injustice hiding behind an imaginary need for self-defense too often prevails. Bring out the big guns. Create the reality of an adversary where there never had to be.

I’m afraid of violence for a number of reasons—most notably because it never solves anything, unless your full intent is to try to make someone else cower in your presence—which, frankly, says more about the powerlessness you feel than anything else. Violence begets violence in return— physical, emotional and spiritual—unless, of course you’re Jesus.

And that’s exactly the point. But I’m ahead of myself.

The second conversation, which took place largely in my head, came about when, after I watched a National Geographic special around Easter, I was reminded that when the state religion of Rome became Christianity, Constantine required that an X-shaped cross be painted on the shields of his soldiers. Could there have been more of a travesty than to turn the message of the man from Nazareth into a military one? Never mind the fact that the word “religio” in Latin literally means to conform, to be rebound by whatever ideas the temporary ruler has about God.

Mixed with reading to gain a historical perspective about what compelled many of the Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States, the pogroms against Jews in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—mobs often led by men carrying crosses like battle flags, I was reminded of that first conversation.

When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he wasn’t talking about guns or spears or bows or quartering or lynching or water torture…or crosses. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the “icon” for a religion whose members profess to follow the Prince of Peace is a weapon of torture?

It strikes me as odd. Blessed are the peacemakers, he said. Blessed are the meek, the bendable, those who mourn. Nowhere in that cobbled together “sermon on the mount” does it say, “Blessed are the violent.” To imply otherwise is to deny not self, but sanity.

So, in the end, I threw away my crosses for Lent…and, frankly, probably forever. If I must have a symbol of my belief that what the man Jesus reportedly said is indeed the way, the truth and the life, it will be a pearl or a mustard seed or a sunflower. Or maybe it will be a life lived non-violently.

I kept one of my crosses, though. As a reminder. Of man’s unceasing inhumanity to man. And that time after time, the most cruel acts of violence have lain powerless in the face of love.

A while back, I wrote a blog by the same title as this one, promising a second part. For what it’s worth, the time between Part I and Part II hasn’t been a function of distraction, though God knows there have been many. It’s been more of a time of observation and reflection, reading of others’ thoughts and opinions, and assimilating some of their ideas while discarding others.

My answer to the question in Part I was yes…and no, depending on which definition of “church” was in focus—the church as an institution, an organized structure of unchanging dogma and doctrine or the more loosely organized group of those worldwide who seek to apply the principles of Jesus, as they understand them, in a tangible form in their everyday lives.

For what it’s worth, my answer is still the same. And I think it both good and natural. Energy spent in service of maintaining rigid structures in the midst of constant change is generally wasted—as demonstrated by the failure of countless organizations whose management refused to adapt to changing conditions or the collapse of buildings constructed with no flexibility, no capacity for moving with as opposed to against the forces they will always encounter. I remember the first and only time I visited the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. I could feel that the skyscraper was bending every so slightly in the wind, and though it was a bit disconcerting to watch low-hanging clouds drift by the windows, I understood, at least, the reason the physics principle employed in determining which materials to use in construction were what they are.

As a lifelong student of human emotion and behavior in a variety of settings, I depend, too, on core principles I’ve learned through the years when I think about the church. Having faced the challenges of leading a membership-based organization (Georgia Writers Association) and of developing and executing a strategic marketing plan for a charitable nonprofit, I often employ what I learned back in college and on the job, as a marketing director for a corporate firm and my own small businesses. (I can feel the pushback already from those Christians who think of marketing as advertising and consider the whole idea of “marketing” the church abhorrent at best, but stay with me for a moment.)

Here’s the deal. It is much easier to keep customers than to win them back. In many ways, it’s admittedly more complex and therefore somewhat harder on the church and nonprofit side of things, because most of the time on the for-profit side, the “buyer” is also the direct beneficiary of the service or product, and it’s usually tangible, at least in a dollar and cents way. (You buy the cereal—and usually you’re the one who eats it, so you also have a front-row seat in evaluating the effectiveness of the product in achieving what it says it does.) That’s not necessarily so for churches, whose focus (hopefully) is quality of one’s spiritual life, a most intangible thing. Hard to measure.

At the same time, when we give money to our local churches and parishes, it is much easier to see the result – the improvements in the parish hall, the PowerPoint presentation of the J2A trip to England, etc. And that’s where the loyalty lies.

But that’s just the back end issue. The problem in the church today, across denominations, is that the average age of a church member is aging and that “customer” isn’t being replaced. It’s the new members we’re failing to attract. When you look at it through the lens of a marketing professional, the evidence seems to suggest that what we’re offering isn’t something people—especially younger ones—want and certainly not what they need. The noise of anti-this and anti-that coming from the mouths of many so-called “Christian” leaders certainly isn’t it. I don’t recall Christ ever holding a town-hall meeting to talk about how to depose Roman rule.

I often think, “What was it about Jesus that made grown men stop doing what they’d done perhaps all their lives – fishing, carpentry, tax collecting – and go with him? How was it that he made them feel that was so irresistible? What need, what hole, what craving did Jesus fulfill? What would be so compelling that I would drop everything and follow this guy?” And the answer I come to is always the same. If I know that you love me, you will have my loyalty forever. If I know that no matter what I may have done, you will never reject me, you will have my loyalty forever. (I don’t mean accept and condone my behavior, by the way.) If I know that we can differ in our opinions and get into heated arguments about everything else in the world but never lose sight of the fact that if God loves me and God loves you NO MATTER WHAT, then who are WE to draw lines?

If we care for each other, respect the boundaries of each other (including the boundaries protecting our individual relationships with God), celebrate the successes of each other without jealousy or rancor or fear…you will have my loyalty forever.

How can we offer what Jesus offered those so long ago? Isn’t that why the church was established in the first place? That’s the question the institutional church needs to ask and answer for itself, the “message” it needs to return to—the only one that has any relevance at all.

But it can’t stop there. A marketing “message” has short shelf-life if it isn’t true—cereal promoted as cholesterol lowering stops being exciting if your blood work doesn’t reflect that yours has gone down. When we as Christians figure out that we are all in obvious pain, that all the things we are trying to fill the voids in our lives obviously don’t work, that no man-made solution to any problem will ever be forever, then differentiating the message of Christ from all of the noise will be easy. But the marketing person in me is pretty darn sure that until we “get” that and live up to it, nothing we “advertise” about the church will make any difference.

I was with friends at a collegiate basketball game Thursday night when a woman came up to visit. The friend who had invited us introduced us to the woman, who sat down and stayed with us for a while. The normal social chatter continued until my friend asked the woman, “How are you?”

She paused for a moment, revealing to the others of us who didn’t know her that she’d recently been through a rough time. And then she smiled.

“I’m great,” she said. “I still have some things to work out, but I’m great.” It didn’t stop there. Beaming, she talked about how she’d been reading a series of books written by a Buddhist nun and how it had changed her life, how her perspective on things had changed and how she had realized just how much she’d lived focused only on the future and how she was working on being present with people she met and how excited she was about the next phase of her life, whatever that materialized to be.

This went on for several more minutes until someone called to her and she excused herself, going back to whatever it was she’d been doing before she’d stopped by.

Later that night, as I was lying in bed, I was thinking about the woman and I realized there was something bothering me. Her visit had left me unsettled, rather than inspired, as I might have expected. I knew it wasn’t a discomfort with Buddhism. I have read quite a bit about different facets of the Buddhist philosophy and I simply adore the Dalai Lama. His smile is so infectious and he never engages in the culture wars. His spirituality goes much deeper—when he’s invariably asked about the political and cultural “wars” of our time, he is thoughtful and respectful, but his message is always the same. Love. Kindness. Peace. All answers to the conflicts that plague us.

Rattling around in my head too was something a close friend of mine who is no longer with us said years ago in the midst of a dinner party I’d arranged—a group of women, all of whom I knew had different perspectives on religion and spirituality. If I remember right, there was a woman for whom I can find no real descriptive label, a free spirit for whom nature is affirming, a Jewish New Yorker turned New Thought, a Unitarian, a Roman Catholic nun who’d left the convent long before and become a teacher of the Course in Miracles before Marianne Williamson hit the scene, and my friend Alleyne, a Christian lay leader. At the time, I could only be described as a Christian agnostic—I hadn’t set foot in a church in years, though I’d been very involved in my early life.

There had been a raucous discussion over dinner, one I tried to record, but as one might imagine, no individual voices were particularly distinguishable. The cacophony had quieted down a bit and Alleyne, who’d been respectfully watching and listening the whole time, finally spoke. “I have to say I don’t disagree with anything I’ve heard here tonight,” she said. “But I’ve heard nothing new. I’ve found every truth you’ve described in what Jesus said.”

I slept fitfully, waking up once or twice to find myself still thinking about the woman, but went about the stuff of my day come Friday morning—After driving Jan to work, I headed on foot to the shop where my Jeep was being worked on, drove to the bank to take care of a little business and then came back home to start on the various projects I have at the moment. The woman was long out of my mind.

Until this morning, when I realized what it was that had left me somber.

I absolutely agree with my friend Alleyne. The New Testament, especially the Gospels, are chock full of stories about what Jesus said and did, stories that demonstrate virtually everything the women talked about that night. I could quote parables and sermons and conversations Jesus reportedly had that say to me exactly what the Dalai Lama also says. What’s going on in the world is an illusion. Only our attitudes need to change. The answer is focusing on…Love. Kindness. Peace.

So what’s the problem?

When was the last time you were at a basketball game and a regular person, not a priest or preacher, spontaneously started talking, with sparkling eyes, about how they’d been reading what Jesus said and it had changed their lives?

Not clergy and not in some church activity. At a basketball game. Spontaneously. With sparkling eyes.

Yeah, I thought so.

Lord, have mercy.

I think it’s because trust was obliterated for my older sister and me when we were very young, when our father betrayed his daughters, abandoning us and ultimately dying before either of us ever saw him again, but if I had to choose the one thing that can set me off, it’s discovering that I, or anyone I perceive to be vulnerable or naïve has been “duped.” Nothing can evoke my contempt and sometimes my full-fledged anger more quickly than what I perceive as the intentional manipulation of one person’s trust by another with no regard for the truth or the wellbeing of the person whose trust he betrays.

When I read in the New Testament of Jesus’ storming into the temple, upsetting the tables of the money-changers, I see a similar frustration. Given what I’ve observed, that those who publicly protest against the thievery of trust usually end up dead, I suspect that episode in the temple is when Jesus tripped the lever in the minds of the power-hungry Pharisees and Sadducees. That’s when Jesus truly showed his hand—up to that point, he’d made them a wee bit nervous with his suggestions that their puny laws about washing hands and who it was okay to eat with and who not completely missed the point, but he hadn’t been quite so aggressive about challenging their perversity until then. In short, it was then they knew they had to get him out of the way.

So they cooked up a story, putting forth circumstantial evidence to convince those really in power that Jesus was up to no good. He was, after all, out to shake up the status quo, which inconveniently for them included their unchallenged riches, power and influence. It was okay for them to parade their gaudy wealth around—that was evidence of their righteousness. If one was poor, he was poor because of his own inadequacy, they said, and he needed to pray and present a sacrifice before god—providing a new opportunity to take his money by offering him the “service” of convenience in purchasing something he didn’t need. I can hear the carnival call: “Step right up, buy your forgiveness here!”

God, Jesus said, didn’t want their sacrifices but their love (and for the record, a bunch of other prophets, even in the Old Testament said so, too). He invited them to trust his Abba, his beloved, also their beloved, revealing for those who were paying attention that the religious leaders, the establishment of the time, had successfully manipulated them into believing that love, importance, influence, even life, was a commodity to be purchased—as if the value of a single human being were subject to the laws of supply and demand. The good people of Judea had been duped, and so, I’m afraid, have we.

Winston Churchill is reported as saying, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He also said, for the record, in defense of capitalism over socialism, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” (Note that he compares socialism to capitalism, and not democracy. One can be both a democrat and a socialist, as demonstrated by our neighbors to the north.)

Don’t get me wrong. As I think Churchill was also, based on those two quotes taken completely out of the context of the speeches in which he spoke them, I am, for the most part, a democrat and a capitalist. I believe that I am entitled by citizenship in this country to equal opportunity to pursue my happiness, and that includes receiving remuneration for services performed. I like business, I like financial statements, I like marketing. No matter which of the different jobs I’ve had during my career—and they have been varied, at least from the outside, I’ve most enjoyed the tasks of marketing associated with each. But I’m not talking about what mostly passes as marketing and advertising today. I’m talking about solving the puzzle of how the product or service I have fulfills a real and honorable need on the part of the person on the other end of the transaction, and figuring out how best to let that person know my product or service is available and how it is truly superior to a similar product.

When the idea of buying and selling first started, and that was long before Columbus was a gleam in his mother’s eye, if you were in the business of selling and your product either wasn’t durable or didn’t do what you said it did or simply wasn’t needed as much as another, your business failed. And if your product did what it said it did and fulfilled a real need (and not a “manufactured” one), your customer was so delighted that he or she couldn’t help but tell others about it, and your business thrived. Your business success and failure hinged largely on your ability and effort to create and market a product that others would willingly part with their money to obtain.

That, to me, is the definition of a “free” market—one where the job of the marketer is to inform that group of people with the need that could be fulfilled by it that the product existed, where it could be obtained and how much (or how little) it cost. In a “free” market, neither supply nor demand is manipulated by those with the power or opportunity to do it. One’s success, which was necessarily measured in part by the amount of currency acquired, was largely dependent on the accuracy of his assessment of the perceived value of the product to those to whom he sought to sell it. But when the honorable professions of marketing and selling morphed into activities aimed at coaxing potential customers into believing an untruth about their need, that their lives would be better or easier, or that their own value or importance or opportunities for growth would be increased by the use of a product or service or the election of a particular candidate, the “free” market ceased to exist. Instead, the “free for all” market came into being and with it, the mob-like behavior we’ve come to associate with that phrase.

Just for the record, in an economic sense, if such a thing existed, I’d be all for letting the “free” market rule. I like honorable competition—where ingenuity and intelligence and good judgment and talent prevail. I like coming in first in a race as much as the next person, if I achieved it on my own steam. But the “free” market doesn’t exist, except in the minds of those who, when they say it, mean a market in which they’re free of regulation—regulation that wouldn’t be necessary if their past actions hadn’t already made it clear, to those who are looking, that they can’t be trusted to tell the truth about what they’re “selling.” Like the moneychangers in the temple, who duped widows and orphans into believing that if they would just buy their doves, their sins would be forgiven, when all along, forgiveness was already theirs.

And there we are. Back at trust. Funny, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. And that comes from the little girl in me who had to learn the hard way that she was still worth just as much as the girl whose father hung around.

In God we trust, says our money, of all things.

Wonder what Jesus thinks about that.

And then again, I think I can guess.

Quite a few years ago now, I was taking my niece and nephew, now 37 and 34, respectively, to Six Flags Over Georgia, when an argument ensued in the backseat of the car—of a sort many parents deal with regularly. After several attempts to stop the brouhaha, I heard one of them call the other stupid, and though I was on I-285, I whipped over to the emergency lane and stopped the car. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “Either this stops now and we go on to Six Flags where we can all have fun, or it doesn’t and we all go home. It’s your choice.”

I wasn’t surprised at my niece and nephew, nor was I concerned about their maturity—they were about 12 and 9 years old at the time. Learning to control yourself, to compromise, to take responsibility for your contribution to conflict and make decisions to give up something for something else that in the end benefits everyone—long before the trains of narrow-minded bravado threaten to collide—is a developmental task for adolescents, and as their aunt, it was, I thought, part of my responsibility as an adult who loved them to contribute to that learning. They were, after all, adolescents and I had no doubts that the fights were time-limited, that they would grow up and into their lives as adults with respect for each other.

Since 1976, I’ve voted for people I didn’t agree with 100%, but I always assumed they were adults who’d achieved that developmental milestone—adults who demonstrated a capacity for self-control; an ability to look at a problem from all sides and debate the pros and cons of various courses of action; the maturity to admit when they’d made a mistake, ask forgiveness and offer the same grace in return; the decency to show respect for another’s opinion and make a genuine effort to understand his or her concerns; and the awareness that to earn respect you have to show it, another one of those things we learn in the safe microcosm of our families. I assumed I was voting for people capable of suspending their judgment until they’d listened, grownups who’d long since figured out that we aren’t blessed with the ability to define another’s motives and that character is what one does when nobody’s looking and you won’t get “caught”—revealed by adversity, not born of it. But at the moment, I’m not very confident in my assumptions about any of the people we’ve voted for.

But I’m not terribly worried. Just frustrated. And disappointed. There will be other elections—and one way or another, we will live through whatever reality we create for ourselves, the level of taxes we pay, whether the deficit is reduced in 10 years, 15 years or never. The good news is that there will be breakthroughs to new and wonderful inventions born of necessity, a truth Ben Franklin once said though he could not have imagined the necessities or inventions we know today, just as you and I cannot imagine the amazing solutions those who follow us baby boomers will come up with.

I know that it’s true because, on a day long ago, though for a brief moment we came to a screeching halt on the side of I-285…

We went to Six Flags.

Vally

Perhaps you know the Cliff’s Notes version of the story, but if you’ve never read the book, seen the stage musical or ventured out yet to see the movie version starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Ann Hathaway, among others, stop here. I don’t want to play the spoiler nor do I want to influence your impressions going in.

I saw Les Misérables Sunday morning. Yes, I skipped “church.” Depending on the movie, sometimes, unfortunately, I have to admit that I’m more “convicted” or inspired by the message of art in one of its many forms than I am in most contemporary services and this is one that does it every time.

Of course, I knew the story—I attempted to read the book once and I saw the musical in London almost 15 years ago. This time my thoughts took a slightly different turn.

I thought about Rick Santorum. I know that may seem strange, but stay with me.

I can’t tell you where or when he said it, but I remember seeing a video clip back during the Republican primaries when somebody asked him what he thought about the fact that other Christians disagreed with one of his religiously-underpinned political stances. His response was that there are different “stripes” of Christianity.

At the time, I remember being slightly offended. The principles of the Christ I know are not made up of a blending of democratic principles that can be symbolized like different colonies or states by distinct stripes on a flag, and I thought he’d confused his spiritual life with his patriotism. At least for me, they are two very different things. “My kingdom is not of this world” pretty well sums that concept, suggesting to me that we each have to learn to manage the paradox, finding a way to live as “one catholic and apostolic church” and simultaneously participate as American citizens, recognizing that any given “stripe” doesn’t have all the answers, unlike Jesus. Find a human conflict today and I can find a statement or parable that applies.

But watching Les Misérables yesterday, I decided that though Rick was referring, I think, to the differing beliefs of various denominations with respect to the issue at hand, he had stumbled onto something. There are, I think, at least two stripes, and the demarcation line has to do with the same issues Les Misérables examines. English professors might say that the issues are those of law and grace, but—in the vernacular of Christians—I would describe them as justice vs. mercy. Not justice and mercy, which I believe Jesus taught, but justice versus mercy. And that’s where our biggest differences lie. If we focus on either without the other, we are lost, just like our current Congressional Republicans and Democrats over how we should approach the fiscal issues we face.

My contention is overly simplified, of course, but I’ve decided that which “stripe” we are depends on whether we identify more with Javert (Russell Crowe) or Bishop Myriel, who sets Jean Valjean on a path of redemption by not only not claiming an entitlement to vengeance over silver, but, in front of the policemen who brought Valjean back to face him, tells Valjean that he’d “forgotten” two candlesticks when he’d slipped away in the night.

Yes, the prophet Micah said we are required by God to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.” But we don’t “do” justice well. We can’t. Justice is in the eye of the beholder, and only One is omniscient, only One knows all. Too often, the meaning of justice is narrowed to mean to “vengeance” and not equity, which is closer in our current language to what Micah probably said. Today, someone is necessarily in the “wrong,” and it is seldom “us.” I’ve written before that I don’t think Jesus would have so prominently included in “The Lord’s Prayer” the line about forgiving others their offences as we have been forgiven for ours if we weren’t prone to err in sticking our noses into business that isn’t ours.

But Javert couldn’t live with himself. He didn’t know what to do with mercy.

I’ve decided, for now, that which stripe we most identify with depends on experience—specifically whether or not we’ve ever been shown mercy and if we have been, if we realized it. What I mean by that is whether or not we’ve ever been caught dead to rights (that’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it?), flat out guilty, knowing that we have committed a crime toward another and are deserving of punishment, and yet have been shown mercy. Cause if you have, you know it, and it changes you. It changed me.

It changed a man named Saul, too, who’d stood by watching as Stephen was stoned to death, changed his name, and spent the rest of his life telling people about it. He even died because of it. Come to think of it, I’ll bet it changed the woman caught in adultery, too—the one Jesus stepped in to save from stoning. I’ll bet she never slept around again and never tired of telling the story of the strange man who stepped in to save her from certain death from the justice of her peers.

It changed Javert and, in the end, he couldn’t reconcile it with his version of justice. For Valjean it was different. It changed Jean Valjean, too, so much that he spent the rest of his free life offering justice and recompense to Fantine by becoming father to her child, and looking, as the song says, “into the face of God.”

He couldn’t help himself—it was two for one. He “did” justice by loving mercy. And in the end, he found out that reconciling the two was easy. As with most paradoxes, the solution lies in the knowledge that they are simply two sides of the very same “stripe.” So, I disagree with Rick.

There may still be an either/or here, though. Either you do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God, or you don’t.

Those who know me know I’m what I call an “anniversary girl.” It derives itself from the fact that I have, good and bad, a propensity for recalling dates. Even innocuous ones. A friend of mine once described himself as “a repository of useless information.” To other friends, I could easily share that moniker myself.

For that reason, I guess, though I am Christian by tradition and certainly appreciate December 25 and all the symbolism we attach to the time of the winter equinox, it’s New Year’s Eve that elicits more of an emotional response in me. Maybe it’s because the man-made concept of time is a convenient way to contain and process the passage of our lives, a way to put a wrapper around a section and put it aside—not too far in case we need something but out of our constant view—a way to encapsulate and catalogue our experiences, both joyful and painful.

New Year’s Eve has always been filled with anticipation for me—an anticipation for things to be better in the coming year than they were in the last, no matter how “awe full” or awful I’ve perceived the events and experiences of the year before to have been. This one is particularly interesting to me. New Year’s Eve 2012 is the 10^th day of the 13^th baktun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, expressed thusly: 13.0.0.0.10. Today, December 29, 2012, is 13.0.0.0.8. (It’s actually the 14^th baktun, but to enter into that discussion is to re-open the argument of whether the last century ended in 1999 or 2000, or whether babies are actually 0 years old until that first birthday rolls around. Which, in turn, brings up a more pertinent question for me: “If you wear a Size 0, does that mean you’re invisible?”)

A baktun is a cycle of 144,000 of our 24-hour solar-revolution days, which means that to be alive at the end (or beginning) of a cycle is serendipitously amazing. The executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI), said, “For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.” I much prefer that idea over the recently suggested (and fortunately inaccurate) one that the world itself would end on December 21, and I would give a nod to her since she knows a helluva lot more about the Mayan civilization than I do.

I prefer it not because the world didn’t explode, but because it simultaneously gives me a sense of personal hope for the future and a reminder of my relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Given that we can’t imagine what the humans of 2407 will be like, the originators of the long count calendar back in 3114 BC (BCE) had no idea I was coming, either. The fact that I’ve apparently made it through 2012 has, therefore, been no world-changing accomplishment to anyone except me. And, hopefully, the few other organic grains of sand I’ve had the pleasure to encounter in my 20,217 days thus far.

Yet, I believe, too, as Jesus and the Psalmist suggested, that we are each known by something far greater than any of us can conceive of or name, and that is enough. After all, think of it! I was here at the beginning of a century, and now I’ve seen the turn of a baktun. What more could I ask for?

May 2013 be all you create it to be…and then some.

Vally

The message was subtle, just one line in the book and the movie Jurassic Park, but it hit me right between the eyes. Jeff Goldblum’s character said it (Dr. Ian Malcolm). If you sit back for a moment and think of all of Crichton’s books, you realize it is such an important truism that it was the only thing he wrote about. “Yeah,” says Malcolm to John Hammond (played by Lord Richard Attenborough, who interestingly also played Kris Kringle in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34^th Street) but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I thought of the line as soon as the whole gun control debate sprang up after the egregious events in Connecticut a week ago, along with another quote spoken by Albert Einstein about his contribution to the development of the atomic bomb in the aftermath of its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” He would later elaborate, “I made one great mistake in my life—when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made…”

Consider the two thoughts together, and what floats to the top for me is clear: Our “way of thinking” must be adapted so that the question “Should we?” instantly follows “Can we?” and is based squarely in the “heart of mankind.”

The creation legends of Genesis (yes, plural, because there are at least two streams of thought mashed together) point to it too, in my “way of thinking.” It was not the tree of good and evil, after all, that God told Adam and Eve to stay away from. It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don’t think it was knowledge that God was trying to protect them from. It wasn’t the knowledge of good and evil so much as the arrogant illusion that any one of us has the capacity to differentiate between the two. It was the fact that we are prone to make ourselves gods, addressed in the very first commandment (of both versions, and yes, there are two of those, also), the fact that once unleashed, the idea that “my” way, my definition, is the “only” way is both viral…and deadly. Once we’ve decided something or someone is evil, we determine to destroy it, and do so with the pump of a fist or a rifle, with no inkling of doubt about our omniscience. My way is right, your way is wrong, and anything goes in the battle to not only squash your influence, but annihilate you in the process.

Thank you very much, says Smith and Wesson, but my right to make and sell a gun to whomever I can sell it trumps your right to life. Hey, I know, just run out and get a gun, two, three, twenty of your own. Kill yourself for all we care. You’ve already given me your money, and that’s all that matters. And, by the way, that guy over there is evil. He wants to take the guns you already have away from you. Maybe you should upgrade and go out in a virtual blaze of glory. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says Wal*Mart, but keeping our profits around $25 billion is more important than paying a reasonable wage for those who peddle our cheap goods from Asian sweatshops. So, we’ll let you dumb slobs flocking to buy those same cheap goods foot the bill for healthcare in your state. The deal YOU get at the cash register is the only thing that’s important. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says the big union boss, but we long since quit caring if the company makes a decent profit. We don’t care if the whole place goes down. Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

Thank you very much, says the representative, but I sold my soul to the devil. Keeping my promise to Grover Norquist is more important than keeping my promise to you. (Oh, yeah, we know Grover’s on the board of the NRA.) Why do we do it? Because we can.

The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

“Why did you do it? Why did you even let the thing with Monica Lewinsky happen?” an interviewer asked Bill Clinton on his tour for the thousand-page tome, My Life. “Because I could,” he said.

Maybe, just maybe it’s time to ask, “Should we?”

But I’m not sure we can.

God, I miss Michael Crichton.

Are we mutating as a species away from the capacity to suspend judgment long enough to consider what the world looks like through another’s eyes? Is it a matter of narcissism or ignorance or just lack of practice? Is our imagination so limited to a view that accounts only for our own experience of reality, the rest of the world be damned?

It used to be that we considered those of us who believe ourselves to be at the “center of the universe” to be impaired in some way—emotionally wounded so that their very survival required that their full attention be focused only on their own feelings and perspectives, to the exclusion of others. Parents know that’s perfectly natural when we’re two-year-olds. Sometimes Mom needs a break, but the fact that I’m scared, I’m hungry, I’m soiled, I’m wanting to play with this or that is the only thing of importance—her only role is meeting my needs and desires. Our brains haven’t been around long enough, our experiences too limited to develop the awareness that other people exist—other people whose needs co-exist and sometimes compete with ours—requiring evaluation of the relative order in which those needs must be met for a civilized and mostly democratic society to exist.

We give in to two-year-olds because we know that, in time, as their brains mature, they’ll grow out of it, hopefully having learned that living with others requires that they consider, truthfully, the boundaries of their kingdoms, and yield when another’s needs supersedes their desires without throwing a tantrum. By the time they’ve reached the “age of majority,” we assume they are capable of negotiating that terrain successfully. But lately, I’m not so sure it’s a given anymore.

One of the tasks of civilized society—especially in a so-called “democracy”—is the give and take, the hem and haw, the yin and yang required to reach the best solutions for the most people. More than a few among us act as if we’re playing a game or involved in an all-too-common modern-day business negotiation where the “winner” takes all, instead of a compact between equals to ensure that the solutions leave the inalienable rights of all unmolested.

In a country of 350 million, of countless ethnicities and experiences, that takes more than a little effort, and a measure of wisdom, which includes awareness of the concept that there are some things no single individual can know. For instance, I am a 55-year-old white female born and raised in the southern United States. If I live 1000 years, I will never know absolutely what it feels like to be 30 in 2012, or male, or the nuances of life and memory of those born even in New York, much less Japan or Pakistan or Iraq or Libya.

To have any conceptual understanding at all of how the world looks through the eyes of another, I have to separate the things I share with him from the things I don’t, balancing those things common to all humans, like what it feels like to be hungry and disappointed and afraid, against the knowledge and experiences and conclusions that are uniquely his.

Recognizing my limitations with respect to the latter, I must learn as much as I can about those unique events, what he thinks, what affects his perspective about a given subject, by listening to him, searching my memory for unique experiences of my own which may compare so that I might broaden my perspective and the accuracy of my empathy the next time. In doing so, it is my hope that when it is my turn, he will listen to me with the same attention and respect.

Listening with the intent to better understand is not synonymous with agreeing. And disagreement isn’t synonymous with disrespect. Self-confident, informed, reasoning adults know that because you allow someone to express his views doesn’t mean you have to submit to believing its content. Buddha was reported as saying, “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” I absolutely agree, as one who never studied from other people’s notes, even in school. But if I’m honest, I have to say that I remember no time that I truly listened to another’s perspective on something that really mattered to both of us without chewing on a point I would never have even thought of otherwise.

We owe it to ourselves to explore every option, every view, every idea to its fullest extent, no matter where it comes from, examining it for its potential for positive impact and, of course, its flaws. No matter who’s talking, there will always be flaws in our reasoning—none of us is omniscient. But the exploration itself cannot even begin if we’re misguided enough to think that we already know what another is thinking and dismiss it without even a hearing. I mourn all the possibilities that have never seen light, the wounds to hope sustained in battles that should never have been fought. We must do better. And we can.

Maybe I’m nuts, but it seems to me that reclaiming our empathy—not just the emotional capacity to experience what another is feeling, which should result in the exercise of self-restraint, but the mental capacity to embrace that the universe in which even the closest to us lives is not the same as ours, do our imperfect best to consider what it feels like to walk in another’s shoes, and start listening to each other—is the only path to peace and progress for the good of humankind.

But if any of you have other ideas…

VMS