Making the World a Better Place.

One thing Jesus doesn’t do is send his disciples out “to make the world a better place.”  They are to follow him and keep his commandments.  That will make the world a better place.  But making the world a better place is secondary and derivative; it is a result and consequence of discipleship, not its motivation.

Sadly, almost everyone who sets out to make the world a better place doesn’t.  Usually they end up making the world a far worse place.

Most of the atrocities of history were committed by people trying to make the world a better place.  Nazis, for heaven’s sake, were trying to make the world a better place.  So were the Communists who managed the Gulags.  And Capitalists.  Read the writings of American slave-owners; they convinced themselves that slavery was a good thing for all concerned.  We used atomic weapons against the Japanese to make the world a better place.  Those doing the waterboarding of prisoners in Guantanamo?  It was to make the world a better place.  Israelis stealing Palestinian land?  The Chinese putting the Uighurs in concentration camps?  Petrochemical companies fracking the landscape?  All to make the world a better place.

The people who set up the Indian Schools in the 19th century thought they were making the world a better place.  Forcing Indian children to adapt to advanced, progressive white American culture was considered the most humane and liberal option at the time.  (Conservatives wanted to simply exterminate them.  To make the world a better place.)     

Human consciousness is so shot through with self-interest that we can convince ourselves that anything, literally anything from death camps to nuclear annihilation, can be rationalized as “making the world a better place” if it means a better place for us.  For we easily reason that if it were a better place for us, then surely it would be a better place for everyone.

All we need to do is get rid of those “bad people.”  That would really make the world a better place.  Then only us good people would be left, and we could live together in peace and prosperity.  Wouldn’t that be great?  Every Reign of Terror and Holocaust we have endured has been an attempt to get rid of the “bad people.”  It hasn’t worked.  Because to do that is to become bad people ourselves.

The problem with making the world a better place is that we are trying to do it before making ourselves into better people.  Bad people can’t make the world a better place.  They will try to make the world a better place for themselves, and do immeasurable harm to others — and eventually to themselves, usually — in the process.  When someone tells me they are trying to make the world a better place, it usually doesn’t take much effort to locate the ones paying the cost and bearing the consequences of that effort.  

I think we try to make the world a better place because that is easier and more immediately gratifying than what is really important, which is making ourselves into better people.  Making ourselves into better people is extremely difficult and painful.  It involves change so profound that most people who have embarked on this task say it is analogous to dying.  

That’s what Jesus says, for instance.  He says we have to give up our life, “take up a cross,” and follow him instead of our own egocentric self-interest.  

Who does that?  It is way more satisfying to force someone else to change than to change ourselves.

But until we realize that we are the ones that have to change, and that this change is a kind of death, we will continue to try to make the world a better place and in fact continue to make the world much worse until we kill the planet.

And we are running out of time because we are well on our way to doing that.  

Here’s the thing:

WE CANNOT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE!

God already made the world and declared it very good.  It’s already very good.  Everything is.  It doesn’t need to be made better.

We do.  

Maybe if we stop trying to make the world a better place and instead focus on making ourselves better people, we will stop destroying the world and others, and allow the world’s created goodness, and ours, to emerge.

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Politics.

Actually, my politics are very simple.  

I am against cruelty, 

and I favor kindness.

That’s it.

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This is basically how I read the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus lifts up those who renounce, or who are the victims of, violence.  When I say that the life of the world depends on people following Jesus, this is what I mean: people coming to curtail their own cruelty.  People cultivating kindness.    

In any relationship at any moment there is usually some power discrepancy.  When the one with power uses it against the one without, or with less, it easily becomes cruelty.  Indeed, any projection of personal power which harms another is cruelty.

There are cases where cruelty may be justified in terms of the greater good.  But it really has to be for a greater good and not just a satisfaction of my anger, greed, fear, or just plain sadism.  A surgeon has to be cruel in cutting out a tumor or removing an infected appendix.  It is certainly felt as cruel when an addict is deprived of narcotics, but it is to save their life.  Almost any kind of self-discipline may involve cruelty, as in “no pain, no gain.”  This is how we learn.  Parents also find themselves administering doses of cruelty — groundings, time-outs, restrictions, etc.   But these must always be for the child’s protection.  

The problem is when we extend this thinking and use it to justify the application of pain to another purely for our own benefit.  We call it consequences, or punishment, or deterrence.  We even call it justice.  But if it is merely to preserve and protect what we have — our status, our fear, our greed, our anger, our nostalgia, our desire — it is simply cruelty.  

I have been reading Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson.  It is the story of African Americans in this country, relegated to the lowest status in society, and the actions implemented by white people to keep them there.  I can only read a few pages at a time, the stories of lynchings and arbitrary exclusions and humiliations are so sickening to me that I have to stop.  Some haunt my consciousness for weeks.

In our current condition, humans are depraved and permeated with self-interest.  We are going to be cruel.  We are going to say and do cruel things to each other, especially in our closest relationships.  The key to this as to everything is repentance.  That is, replacing self-justifying thinking with remorse, sorrow, grief, humility, and asking for forgiveness.  Such an attitude is transforming.

If we were completely aware of the cruelties we have committed, directly and especially the atrocities done indirectly in our name that we refuse to know about, we would not stop crying in bitter guilt and grief.  Which is why we keep ourselves in denial about such things, or, when that fails, we build elaborate, smug, self-righteous rationalizations for them.

But for people claiming to be followers of Jesus Christ to look at, say, (as we saw the other day) the running down of Haitian refugees by armed men on horseback, with approval?  Seriously?  That is to have a heart so calcified as to make Pharaoh look like a sentimental sap.  It is to give Jesus the finger with a vindictive sneer, because Jesus is with the refugees. 

“Christians” used to have their pictures taken at lynchings and even proudly mail them as postcards to their friends.  That’s like having a selfie taken at Jesus’ crucifixion and bragging about getting rid of this troublemaker.

The Modern world, and the whole regime of Empire that has dominated civilization for millennia in various forms, is a massive, systemic application of extreme cruelty.  It requires over-the-top violence to be sustained because it is all about forcing the weak to serve the strong and exploiting the poor for the benefit of the rich.

The Jesus movement exploded into the world as a resistance and alternative to this cruelty.  Jesus had endured the worst Rome could apply to someone in its mania for control and order.  And he bounced back to life, a life beyond Rome’s grip.  That is the good news right there.  He defeats cruelty.  He shows that it doesn’t have to be this way.  Any world that demands the wall-to-wall infliction of cruelty to sustain itself is evil and false.  It will not last.  God calls us into communities of kindness and forgiveness, communities of truth and kindness.  God becomes human for the sake of reconciliation.

So as I look at the political landscape and make decisions about what I will support and participate in?  My main metric is cruelty.  I vote for the party and the candidate that is less cruel and more kind.  Are you for cutting off people’s health care, kicking hungry people off food stamps, keeping working peoples’ wages low, maintaining the high incarceration rate, funding war, protecting gun rights, excluding and oppressing Gay and transgendered people, making rich people richer, rejecting refugees and asylum seekers, separating immigrants’ families, banning Muslims, justifying police violence, feeding the climate crises and other environmental depredations, and generally using lies to stoke people’s fear and anger?  Are you against vaccines and refuse to wear a mask in a global pandemic?  Is your “freedom” more important than others’ life and health?  

These are all instances of cruelty.  They inflict suffering on others, apparently to enforce the nostalgia and placate the paranoia, of a few.  Some of this is just plain irrational vindictiveness.  You will not get my vote or anything but my sadness.      

I will go with kindness, thanks.  As much as I can.

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Witness to the Resurrection.

For years I prayed for my son daily.  I prayed that, like the Lost Son in Jesus’ parable, he would “come to himself.”  Among many other things.  But that was the main thing I prayed for.

A few weeks ago, that happened.  Unfortunately, it did not happen in the way I had fervently hoped.  I wanted him to put his life together, receive the help he needs, get off drugs, keep a good job, maybe go to school.  I wanted him to finally find something that made his heart sing, a calling, a set of goals and achievements, a contribution he could make to the common good.  I wanted him to find a loving partner and maybe raise children.  I cherished this vision of someday sitting with him and his family at a warm and happy Thanksgiving dinner.

That is not to be.  He did finally come to himself… but it was on the other side.  For my son was found dead in his apartment on August 17, 2021.  He was 27.  His name was Daniel.

A long time ago I learned that God always heals us.  When I prayed over a sick person, I did so in this sure knowledge.  God’s will in Jesus is for our healing and wholeness, our integration and communion in creation.  And God’s will never fails, in the end.  It’s just that God heals some of us to a degree on this side; and God heals all of us completely on the other side.  

We all come to ourselves, in the end.  For all of us get liberated from bondage to our ego-centric mortal, temporal existence, infused as it is with the lies we tell ourselves.  All of us are delivered to wholeness and safety, passing through the waters, singing with joy in the unimagined daylight.

In the days that followed, as I struggled to make sense of his death, I read again Miriam’s hymn in Exodus 15:21.  The entire Bible and the faiths based on it are arguably commentary on that single, brief verse. 

Miriam, Moses’ sister, sings in exultation on the shore of the sea, after God had, by means of a series of comprehensive ecological disasters, demolished the Egyptian slave-economy and delivered the people from bondage, finally drowning in the returning waters the pursuing Egyptian cavalry.  “I will sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider he has thrown into the sea!”

That is what it means to come to ourselves.  We find that we are no longer subject to Pharaoh’s chariots, the principalities and powers that dominate our world, the desires and fears that motivate and dominate us so thoroughly in our mortal existence, the habits and addictions that cripple and control us.  We awaken on the other side of that turbulent sea, surprised, safe, new, and free. 

Behind us we see only death and the wreckage of our pursuers, who would drag us back in chains to an existence of pain and servitude.  We emerge on the other side with an experience of freedom unimaginable to us in our former existence.  

My son’s funeral was planned together by his Parental Team, comprising his four birth- and adoptive-parents.  We had the usual discussions about “what Daniel would want.”  Much of the time we would share would focus on our memories of him, as a celebration of his life. 

More important though is the recognition that he has let all that go.  We cherish what he left behind both in artifact and memory.  But he is elsewhere in the sense of having been released to the far shore, having left even time behind and with it the fear, desires, feelings, regrets, plans, and thinking that are the framework of mortality.  

We are still in Egypt; Daniel is not.  He has, as Dumbledore says in the Harry Potter books that Daniel loved, “gone on.”   

Which means that if we overly focus on and extend anything, especially the negative things, that he said, did, thought, or felt in his mortal existence, it is an implicit denial of where he is now.  It disregards the forgiveness and liberation he now knows.  

I have for years added to the funeral liturgy a not-very-Presbyterian piece which is a declaration of forgiveness of the deceased.  It comes from the Orthodox tradition, and is an act of the Church in the name of God’s saving grace.  It consigns to oblivion “all those things which proceeded from his mortal existence,” affirming that Daniel is on the other side of the sea now and none of that stuff matters anymore.

That’s what it means to be a witness to the resurrection, which is the name we Presbyterians give to the funeral service.  The good memories are good; but he is in a better place than even the best memories we can retrieve.  

We are like quadriplegics whose dysfunctional flesh falls away to reveal a shining and able body that had always waited within us.  We emerge from the tight bell of time into the expansive now of everywhere, “the glorious company of the saints in light,” “where there is neither sorrow nor sighing but life everlasting.”       

At the end of the movie, Harold and Maude, Harold, a rich young man distraught with grief, appears to madly drive his Ferrari, modified to look like a hearse, off a cliff where it splats upside-down on the beach.  We might assume he has killed himself….  Then the camera pans back up to the top of the stony cliff where we find him standing on the grass, with his banjo.  In the final scene, he turns away from the precipice and starts dancing and playing as Cat Stevens sings, “If you want to sing out, sing out; if you want to be free, be free….”

Similar to Miriam, Harold on the seashore has abandoned his slavery to death, symbolized by the expensive car, and stepped out into a new life.  We too may let go and emerge into a space where our desires synch with our being.  What we want is who we truly are, rather than who we think we are or want to be or wish we were or regret not being….  

We who remain in the meantime require reminding about this.  We are beings of light imprisoned in shadowy lies of our own invention, the product of fear and desire distorted by ego.  The good news is that we can live now in the glow of the truth we see in resurrection.  We can anticipate the expansiveness and communion of life.  We can approximate the freedom Miriam sang about by living in love, hope, joy, compassion, and thanksgiving now.  We can put the wreckage behind us and dance away from the edge, singing our song into a new land. 

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