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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A Small Herd Resists.

We will soon have priests reduced to the role of social workers and the message of faith reduced to political vision.  Everything will seem lost, but at the right time, at the most dramatic stage of the crisis, the Church will be reborn.  She will be smaller, poorer, almost catacombal, but also more holy.  Because it will no longer be the Church of those who seek to please the world, but the Church of the faithful to God and his eternal law.  Rebirth will be the work of a small rest, seemingly insignificant yet indomitable, passed through a process of purification.  Because that's how God works.  Against evil, a small herd resists.

—Joseph Ratzinger aka Pope Benedict XVI

I don’t actually like Ratzinger that much, generally.  But I strangely agree with what he says here, though from a completely (or mostly anyway) different perspective.    

In the Modern world, which as an article of “Enlightenment” (rationalist/materialist/individualist) philosophy denies any kind of transcendence and questions if not denies the reality of God, ministers of the gospel have no function that is not reduced to something secular, useful, and quantifiable.

Therefore, ministers in the Modern Age largely became merely informal, unofficial agents of the culture: their main job was promoting patriotism, social conformity, and dutiful participation in the capitalistic economy.  At most they tried to make Scripture and theology serve the establishment.  The cascading civilizational crises of the first half of the 20th century blew the cover off this role of religion for many.  The domesticated god they were preaching about, little more than a mascot and cheerleader for the Modern world, basically failed in every way possible.  Many ministers, who could not stomach the old role, went into other more practical professions, like psychology, social work, education, the arts, law, or politics.  This is what my dad’s generation went through.  (It is still happening as I understand that only a fraction of seminarians today are preparing for service in congregations.)  

The church has not gotten over this.  We still automatically reduce faith to something intelligible to secular Modernity, and very often that comes down to politics.  This happens on both right and left, obviously.  Now, politics is not unimportant.  There is no apolitical gospel; Jesus’ message and life had deeply and undeniably political and economic dimensions.  We live our our faith in our political actions, whether we admit it or not.  The problem occurs when the secular stuff is given priority and sets the tone.

But for the Church our politics and economics have to be derivative and secondary; they have to be based on and grow out of our spiritual life, our discipleship, rooted in contemplation.  I call this the “vertical” dimension, the “eternal” that intersects with our time, connecting us to God’s truth and life.  Without it we are just political activists, loyal to some ego-centric ideology, which is doomed to disintegration with whatever Empire it has projected and imposed on us.  Which makes it “evil,” as Ratzinger says.  When the Church allows itself to be pressed into the service of some secular political agenda, it becomes complicit in the reign of terror that faction inevitably produces when it takes power.

Rather, the Church’s true calling is to make disciples who then flavor and influence culture in the direction of God’s eternal truth, revealed in Jesus Christ as he is attested in Scripture.  This truth actually has a specific content, which I summarize as love and justice.  It is inclusion, forgiveness, welcome, and equality.  It is sharing, generosity, simplicity, and humility.  It is community and healing, and all the other qualities we see in Jesus.  It necessarily identifies with the marginalized, the broken, and the lost.  It cares for creation.  It is universal compassion.

These are all things we glean from the Scriptures about Jesus Christ and how he indicates we need to live.  I didn’t make them up.  They are not some “left agenda.”  Read the gospels for yourself and see.  Read the Sermon on the Mount.  Read Romans 12.  

So, the gospel must not be reduced to a political vision… but it has to be expressed in one.  The people who share that vision and express it will always be a “small herd,” a tiny flock, a seemingly insignificant minority, gathering to sing, pray, hear the Lord’s Word, and share in his Body and Blood.  As such we function as leaven, light, and salt, flavoring and influencing a larger world, coaxing it ever closer to the truth.

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