OUR AMERICAN HOLIDAY

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I love American holidays.  With the exception of Easter, Passover,  and Christmas all of our holidays are so special if for no other reason than there is nothing supernatural about them.

Below is a rundown of what we  celebrate.

1.  It's Dr. King's holiday.  We celebrate justice and a powerful life that showed the world how to make it happen without bombs, guns and hate.

2.  Valentine' s Day celebrates love.

3.  Presidents' Day celebrates two great presidents and the rest.

4.  April Fools Day celebrates comedy.

5.  Easter celebrates freedom from slavery and death.

6.  Memorial Day remembers our honored dead.

7.  Mother 'a Day and Father's Day celebrates our mommies and daddies .

8.  July 4 celebrates the birth of our nation.

9.  Labor Day celebrates our workers and fair labor practices .

10.  Halloween celebrates things that go bump in the mind.

11.  Veterans Day celebrates the end of World War One and our living soldiers.

12.  Thanksgiving celebrates blessings and being grateful for them.

12.  Christmas celebrates our son of God who preached that God is love, peace, and justice.

13.  New Year's Day celebrates moving beyond the old and being the new.


Well,  two holidays are supernatural, but taken symbolically they are rich in meaning and as sublime as all the other holidays.

But this weekend is most special for it signifies that our nation can change when we are wrong.  It, like Christmas and Easter, celebrates a life and death.  May it ever be so.

Blessings.,.

LIVING A FAITH THAT LIVES

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  The Sabbath is over, or Shabbat as our Jewish family members call it.  Shabbat has ended since sun down. 

As you read this, please do not think that I disdain the church.  I love everyone, and all congregations are worthy of my admiration and respect.

I do, however, disdain stupid ideas and dead doctrines.  Much of what is called orthodoxy is based on a faulty view of the world.  It is based on an ancient view that Yahweh lives in the sky with his heavenly host.  This cosmology preaches that the earth is flat.  The sun and planets go around the earth.  Women are the reason why there is sin in the world.  God wants us to murder infidels.  The world will end with a sword fight on a small battlefield outside of Jerusalem.  

Since Yahweh is not so far away, he (and Yahweh is definitely a male deity) had no problem sending his son down to earth.  Jesus came to earth to symbolize the Jewish ritual of sacrifice. 

The earth, after all, was not too far away, so Yahweh did not have to travel very far to impregnate Mary.  In fact, heaven was so close that the residents who lived there got a little twitchy when humans tried to build a tower so they could live among them.

It could not be helped.  The writers of the Bible, after all, were Jewish people who lived in a flat cosmos.  They conceived of Jesus as being a lamb that had to be sacrificed so God could redeem the world.  It would have been more extraordinary if they had proposed a heliocentric solar system, millions of galaxies, and an infinite universe.  

According to the ancient view, Jesus came down to establish Old Testament piety as God’s will. 

But those of us who read the Bible know that Jesus preached something more beautiful, liberating, and loving than piety.  Jesus lived something more profound than human sacrifice.

He preached a new way of being kosher.  His way of being kosher was to live God’s love in our lives.  Being clean would be revealed in the loving and kind way we treat other people. Being defiled would be revealed in the way we hurt other people.

Mysticism is great.  Doctrine is interesting.  However, the love of our God of love is the ground of mysticism and it transcends doctrine. 

Men and women can believe the world is flat if they want, but they are not Christians unless they love.  Men and women can believe in the Trinity if they want, but they are not Christians unless they love.

We know now that our world orbits a star just as we know that faith orbits love.   The great truth that God is love can thrive for centuries past the time when people stop believing the Virgin Birth as an actual historical event and start appreciating it as a symbol of God's love in a human life.  

Only a world view that conceives of a universe powered by hate would be anti-Christ to God’s love.  This love is God and Jesus.  If a Muslim loves, then he or she is Christian without acknowledging it.  If an atheist loves, then he or she is a sacrament without knowing it.  It is time for Christians to return to the God who loves and hold onto that God as steadfastly as we have held on to strife and hate.  

Jesus lived love beneath an atmosphere that is full of elements, not angels.  He lived without knowing that such an atmosphere existed.  

Jesus preached love to sentient organisms who had taken millions of years to evolve.  He preached without knowing that evolution worked in the world. 

Jesus showed love to these same organisms so that they might transcend their animal natures.  He showed this without knowing that all men and women are human primates.  

God's love is the gospel.  Everything else is conversation.

Blessings…

A SIMILITUDE OF UNLIKE CONGREGATIONS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I want to share a reflection I wrote some time ago.  I wrote it for fun. 

It’s about bar people and church people. 

Bar people are just like everyone else.  They want to have a good time.  They want to be respected.  They want others to consider what they have to say.  They want to vote…for the best shooter du jour… and get it for free.

Bar people share a common convivial essence of humanity.  Most of them are drunks.  I mean that in a nice way, and in a funny way, because the word “drunks” sounds funny, like the word “pickles.”

Drunks are individuals.  They are like Kinsey’s gall wasps.  Sit a million drunks around one bar the size of Atlanta, and you will not find two who are identical in any way, except that they are all are drunk.

We tend to think of drunks being the same in the way prunes are the same, yet rarely is sameness more interesting than uniqueness unless the sameness of one group is compared with the sameness of another.  Indeed, to really appreciate a jar of prunes, it helps to compare them to a bowl raisins and vice versa.  

I have been a bartender and a pastor, so naturally I see a similarity between these two unlike congregations. 

Both require donations to stay in business.  In bars, these donations are called tips or gratuities.  Do not kid yourself.  If there were no tips, there would be few bartenders, and bars would go the way of opium dens.

In churches a donation is called an offering, but it works itself out as some kind of gratuity.  A lot of customers support bars, and a lot of parishioners support churches.  Disappoint them severely enough, they will give their donations elsewhere.

I worked in a Georgia Tech sports bar in Atlanta called The Beer Mug from 1987 until 1993.  A brass spittoon served as our offering plate.  We did not pass this plate around.  Our customers brought their donations to us and left them on the bar or on a waitress’s table. 

If people were happy, if they had a good time, if they were seized by the spirits, then they were very generous.  Sometimes, if they had too much fun, they left jewelry and expensive jackets with matching gloves. 

Bars and churches depend on a consistent crowd.  Bars call them the regulars.  Churches call them the faithful.  A bar and a church must work to keep their regulars coming.  Often this means making them feel welcome. 

Bars and churches preach hell to their congregations.  Bars tell regulars they can run a tab, and it will be hell if they don’t pay it.  Churches tell the faithful that they, their relatives, and their friends are sinners going to hell and running will do them no good.  

A lot of people who go to bars love to keep their tabs paid as much as the faithful love to hear that other people are going to hell.

Thanks for reading.  Next time: other ways that drunks and church people are alike.

         

Blessings…

How a Myth Starts

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth. 

Welcome back. I would like to share the four extraordinary things I saw today that inspired me to write about how to write myths and legends.

To write a legend, you must have a worthy subject, that is, someone so remarkable that the legend transmits a transcendent meaning about them.

Someone like Jesus of Nazareth.

Conceivably, any one of us could write a parable about Jesus in the way the early anonymous Christians wrote about him when they composed the canonical and non-canonical gospels.

You would also need a concern in your heart or in your community that you would imagine Christ addressing in your story.

The imagery you put into your story would be something that you see on any given day.

For instance, today, I saw four remarkable sights (five if I count my wife who startles me every time she graces my eyes).

As I walked this morning, I saw a fire hydrant almost entirely buried underground. I thought I might snap off to one of my students, "You're as useless as an underground fire hydrant," if one of them cussed me out (again) after refusing to do their work (again).

Later in the day, as I drove home over the Wilmington Island Bridge I looked to my right and saw the sky on fire. Rarely, does a sunset imbue clouds with so much color. When my eyes dropped to see the Bull River, the water was truly as red as blood.

I thought how ancient prophets, who were actually poets, would have incorporated such a natural sight into their poetry. We are the dummies if we literally believe the water really turned to blood, not the prophets. We miss the loveliness and power transmitted to us from the prophet's sight through his words.

Okay, back on the bridge where, seconds later, I turned to my left and saw a sight I cannot recall ever having seen before. The moon shone in all its fullness behind such thin clouds that it appeared to be peering through blinds. How stunning.

So, taking all that and putting it into a story: give it a shake here, a stir there, and then let it marinate in its own dynamics and Voila! here’s a parable about Jesus:

There came a time when Jesus went to Wilmington Island to visit a friend.

His friend, named James, proclaimed the word of Jesus in a place where many other followers gathered on a Sunday. James, so it was said, had been hobbled recently by the gout.

James was happy to see Jesus. He welcomed him into his home. When his wife, Rachel, saw that it was Jesus visiting her home, she invited him into their kitchen and offered him some wine. As James and Rachel prepared dinner, Jesus asked James if the gout was very painful.

"Lord," James said, "You need not have bothered to come on my account. I have medicine."

Jesus said, "The medicine you received, you shall take comfort in it, and it shall serve you well. The medicine I bring cures much more than disease."

"Yes," James said. "Your medicine cures death."

Suddenly, Jesus looked very sad. "Alas, he said, "In these evil days the medicine I bring is like thinning the blood of a dead man with aspirin."

"No," James said, "Don't say that, Lord. You are the bringer of life and joy and peace."

"I tell you there can be no healing in a land where the wickedness of violent men defiles your rivers and marshes with such a great outpouring of blood. It spills out to defile your streets and splashes up to stain your skies. Behold, even the jittery moon peeks through cloudy blinds and fears to wander.”

“We need your kingdom, now, more than ever,” Rachel said. “How do we bring love and peace into the world?”

“How do you put out a conflagration with a fire hydrant drowning in dirt?” he replied.

Jesus tarried with them until the time for him to depart had come. 

After he went on his way, James and Rachel puzzled over the meaning of what he said for many days.

All right. That’s how it can be done. If I lived in the first century, I would have included images that my eyes would have seen back then.

I have this theory that we all know Jesus. We recognize him in Pope Francis, Dr. King, Gandhi, Jimmy Carter, and others. 

Even atheists admire Pope Francis.  Is it Jesus they admire?

I believe there is a longing in all of us for Jesus of Nazareth to be real and present. I wonder how many of us who do not believe nonetheless wish his stories were true.

For those of us who read stories about him, or write them, it will be ever so that we want to keep him alive.

Blessings…

The Gospel According to Jesus in Charles Dickens

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. 

I continue with my post-Christmas reflection.  I have been writing about “Christian” Christianity, and where it appears in writers like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. 

Christian Christianity?  Is there a “Non-Christian” Christianity?  Am I kidding me?

Of course, I am being silly, but these distinctions must be made when some believers recast Jesus as a hardcore American Tea Party conservative, and then re-crucify him on mammon's cross of gold.

We must hold steadfastly the Jesus we see in the gospels.  What the earliest gospel writers tell us: what he actually does and says. These are more important than the doctrinal noise that has swelled crescendo over the centuries.

Let us return to Charles Dickens.  In my last post I shared some background that lies beneath his fiction.

Recall how Charles Dickens despised the poverty he saw in London. I’ll let Dickens speak for himself in “A Christmas Carol.” 

As we read, do we not see the heart of Jesus in his words?

For example, after Scrooge tells Marley’s ghost that he was always a good man of business, he gets the following reply:

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again.  “Mankind was my business.  The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.  The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

When Marley’s Ghost departs Scrooge, he sees what he later calls one of many “wandering spirits” who is trying to help a, “wretched woman with an infant…” 

Then he goes on to explain a serious problem that existed in the immaterial world:

“The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”

The Ghost of Christmas Present sprinkled magic from his torch, often just to make merry those whose moods had suddenly become bad. 

Read the following discussion and hear the heart of how Jesus lived beat within it.

“Is there a peculiar flavor in what you sprinkle from your torch?” asked Scrooge.

“There is.  My own.”

“Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?” asked Scrooge.

“To any kindly given.  To a poor one most.”

“Why to a poor one most?” asked Scrooge.

“Because it needs it most.”

One of my favorite exchanges occurred when Scrooge asked the Ghost of Christmas Present about poor people being turned away from dining.

“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge.  “Wouldn’t you?”

          “I!” cried the Spirit.

          “You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?” said Scrooge.  “And it comes to the same thing.”

          “I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.

          “Forgive me if I am wrong.  It has been done in your name, or at least in the name of your family.”

          The following reply from the Ghost of Christmas Present is priceless:

          “There are some upon this earth of yours, returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.  Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

Indeed, there are so many of our brothers and sisters who, woefully misguided, continue to attend church, sing hymns, propound their doctrines of self righteousness, and despise Pope Francis for being a socialist. 

They are blind to how our government’s war on poverty has triumphed in ways that early Christians could only dream. They lived in an unjust society that exploited workers by making them slaves and destroyed dissenters by making them lion meat.

Our government had fed more poor people than churches can individually.  Our government has clothed more poor people, given more medical aid to poor people, and through legislation increased minimum wages.

The only reason the war on poverty is deemed a failure is because it never ends.  There will never be a day, a year, or a decade when this war will not be fought.  Let us not quit it ever. 

The ability and will to mount that kind of justice exists as a dream buried in the stories and preaching of all the churches in the world.

          How can we be more Christian than that?

Blessings…

What Lies Beneath: Ghosts of Christmas

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

In "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens there are so many statements that run counter to today's conservative fad, and yet run side by side with the love we seek to emulate.

First, we must contrast that love with the disregard for humanity that hearts mired in mammon manifest everlastingly.  We must peer where hard waters flow down and down and down.

I give you Ebenezer Scrooge, the man from Mammontown.

He ridicules his nephew for wishing him a merry Christmas.  I suspect if his nephew had said, "Happy Holidays!" Scrooge would not have been less rude.

We all know how he mistreats his lone employee.  He's a pure capitalist, a man of business, this coveting old sinner Scrooge who sees Bob Cratchit as a number. 

And what is the number of this beast of burden?  It is the lowest amount he must pay to avoid being accused of being a slaver.  

That amount is recorded in his accounting ledger under "labor expense."

However, it is when Scrooge tells two solicitors asking for a contribution to help the poor that we see where his politics lie.  He says he supports prisons, union workhouses, the Treadmill, and the Poor Law.

We Americans love to put poor people into prison and think nothing of the expense.  But give a man a food stamp, well, that's breaking a law of the god mammon.

All that sound we hear of squalling children is not the sound of want and ignorance ringing in our ears,  but the sound that Lord Mammon hears, that ripping sound of the very Kleenex of society shredding itself when the "undeserving" get fed from taxes that all of us good, hard working people pay.

In all fairness, Scrooge preferred a conservative solution to poverty.  He supported those institutions mentioned above.  It was not compassionate conservatism, but when has it ever been?

Indeed, prisons we know, but the Treadmill we know not today.  

That was a device whereby prisoners could generate power for mills by climbing onto a large paddle wheel.  While holding a bar, they stepped onto the blades and turned the wheel.    

Oscar Wilde wrote of it when he was imprisoned for being a homosexual in 1895 (the good old days for a lot of people in 2013...one of my hometowns celebrates a 1890s Day...imagine that...I never went).  

This is from Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol."

We banged the tins and bawled the hymns

And sweated on the mill

But in the heart of every man

Terror was lying still

The Poor Law was devised by a prime minister, who was himself a rather cold hearted tea named Earl Grey.  It stated:

(a) no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse;

(b) conditions in workhouses were to be made very harsh to discourage people from wanting to receive help;

(c) workhouses were to be built in every parish or, if parishes were too small, in unions of parishes;

(d) ratepayers in each parish or union had to elect a Board of Guardians to supervise the workhouse, to collect the Poor Rate and to send reports to the Central Poor Law Commission;

(e) the three man Central Poor Law Commission would be appointed by the government and would be responsible for supervising the Amendment Act throughout the country.

This is the antipode of welfare as we know it.  Food stamps would be decades away in our nation.

Next time, ghosts more humane than humans.

Blessings...

Bishop Bienvenu and Jean ValJean

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Since I am a school teacher, I tend to take school teacher breaks. I am ready for a new year of writing.

I spent a lot of my break reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and enjoying my annual reading of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Writers do not write like Hugo and Dickens, today. Most writers, whom are considered the best of our time, emulate the lean prose of Hemmingway.

Hugo and Dickens write wonderfully long sentences. They also commit a big no-no in their writings. They insert their own opinions or observations into their stories.

However, for my purposes here, I would like to share a little of what both Hugo and Dickens write about God.

Without being explicitly evangelical, in the sense of trying to convert their readers, and without being explicitly Christian, in the sense of writing about Christ, both writers represent well our God of love.

For example, if you go to the movies and watch a cinematic version of Les Miserables, you would miss the more extensive treatment of the bishop, Monsieur Bienvenu.

The movies show us Jean Valjean stealing the church silverware and running away with it. The gendarmes, French police, capture him and drag him back to the bishop who tells Jean Valjean that he forgot the silver candlesticks that he had given him with the silverware.

It’s quite the scene in the movies when Bishop Bienvenu gives Jean Valjean those candlesticks while the befuddled police watch.

Jean Valjean is set free from more than just incarceration. The bishop tells him that his soul has been purchased from evil with that silver, and he must henceforth live a good life.

You can’t show what God’s love looks like much better than that.

That’s the movies. In the book, the first 83 pages tell the story of Bishop Bienvenu.

Of him, Hugo says, “He did not try to study God. He was dazzled by Him.”

There are many places in the novel where Hugo could be describing Pope Francis. Below is one:

“We feel obliged to note that…beyond his faith, the bishop had an excess of love….What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence, going beyond humans, as we have already indicated, and, on occasion, extending to inanimate things. He lived without disdain.”

I, however, am eaten up with disdain. When a certain political party votes to take away food stamps from hungry children, my mind becomes a conflagration burning with scorn.

When members of that same party invoke God while they speak of budget cuts, guns, abortion, and gay folks, the words that form in my heart about them are derisive.

I was thinking this morning how nice it would be to live a monastic life. Bishop Bienvenu found it easy to give up the church silver that Jean Valjean stole because he was not possessed by it.

I wonder how easy it was for him to give up disdain.

Most of us live in the world. We neither desire nor value a monastic existence beyond the occasional retreat.

We often find ourselves being possessed so much by what we possess that the idea of theft weighs heavily upon us. It would be nearly impossible for us to think of Jean Valjean as someone taking what God intended him to have since it did not belong to us in the first place.

I imagine a certain political party believes tax dollars belong to them and should not go to poor people, not even to working poor people.

To them, it’s stealing to give money to poor people (especially, I suspect, black poor people) even when they often work for companies too possessed by the profit motive to pay their workers enough to live well.

It’s not stealing in our society if companies pilfer labor, right? But it is stealing if we do not give those companies huge tax breaks. It’s downright embezzlement if our government cuts into their vast profits and redistributes all those riches in order to alleviate poverty.

I wonder what Bishop Bienvenu would think about food stamps. I know Pope Francis descries the mammon infested, profit motivated society we live in today.

By the way, when I took French in high school, our textbook’s title was Bienvenu. It means “Welcome.”

Blessings…