Metaphors and Analogies Galore

Tags

American Exceptionalism, GOP insanity, love of country

My friend Mimi asked an important question that inevitably got me to thinkin’.

Rudy 9/11 Giuliani opens his gums and spouts off as to how this President, really doesn’t love America as we do. Rude then goes on to explain that Obama was raised “diff-rent” from you and me, and none of that stuff is racist cuz ya know he had a white mama.

Rather than pick apart the blatherings of a has-been irrelevant hack, let’s look at the whole concept of what it means to “love one’s country.”

I’m not sure exactly what it means myself. I have no idea what it means to love a thing like that. I mean the concept is quite foreign to me, and I suspect it is to most people of they were pushed to tell exactly what they meant by it. Most people work from metaphor, taking it to mean that they support what the country was framed to stand for, and they think voting is a requirement of good citizenship.

I am not a boundary person you see. I look at maps and say, “oh dear, that makes no sense. Why is that line there?” Most of that stuff arose from long ago times and most dealt with wars. A bit of it is due to natural features of the land. Most of the lines throughout the Middle East are arbitrary and stem from meddling from the West, and truth be told, it’s why things are in such turmoil there today.

I do love humanity, which I think is quite natural being a part of it. I figure I’m one of the lucky ones, and I figure I’m no more entitled than anybody else. The accident of birth landed me in a land that allows me to pretty much do as I wish and do it fairly pleasantly. Someone’s being born in Bangladesh should entitle them to no less. So I’m all for making things a lot more equal. I’ll happily give up some if I can improve the lives of people who have almost nothing.

I recognize everyone doesn’t believe like I do, because they have been raised by parents, governments, businesses, and media to “want it all” with fine phrases like “work ethic” and “bootstraps” and “survival of the fittest”, to name but a few. They deserve more because they work harder and they judge their value and others by what’s in the garage of life.

If ever a metaphor was made for the GOP it’s the black hole. The GOP is on the event horizon. That’s the spot on the edge of a black hole from which there is no return. Destruction is inevitable since the gravitational pull is stronger than any known counter force to pull out. Yet to the observer, the person or thing poised on the event horizon seems to remain there forever. It’s basic astrophysics.

Or one can use the analogy of catch 22. Either works fine.

You see the GOP is always damned either way at this point. It is all of their own making, so there is no desire to rescue them. They are caught in the black hole of the tea imbibing community of dunces. They must feed the tiger lest the tiger eat them alive which of course it inevitably will since one must go mad under that sort of pressure eventually, and thus falter and succumb to the fangs.

The GOP cannot get away from the tea crazies. So they invariably make remarks such as Rudy did. And the Walkers of the party will continue to be non-committal in rejecting such tripe. One cannot poke the tiger, after all. Meanwhile, they remain mired in place at the event horizon while in reality, bit by bit they are eaten alive.

There is no meaning to “loving my country” any more than there is to “supporting our troops”, wearing flag pins or saying loudly that America is Exceptional! Similarly, the idea that one must confess one’s Christianity in order to be viable is without merit. The latter particularly is egregious, since there is a no religious test clause in the very constitution that these flag wavers so profess to be willing to die for.

In reality, constitution protectors don’t really mean it at all. They mean the constitution as they interpret it, and with the parts left out that they don’t like.

Do you love your country or only the ideal of it? Do you love it in spite of its true history or do you doctor that up to meet some standard you have erected to satisfy your personal needs and wants? I read where one woman in talking to her right-wing relatives learned that they opposed the current state of teaching American history because it “just wasn’t necessary to rehash all that old stuff. Sure slavery was bad, but we ended it. We should concentrate on what makes America great.”

Does anybody have a clue where that sort of nonsense leads? Well, not to  go into that of course, but it does, you have to admit, lead to all sorts of entitlements based on “we’re just so damned superior” and “you can’t manage without our guidance.” Anyone smell the odor of Arian purity and world domination in there?

President Obama has less than two years left to serve, and the Republican day care school replacement brigade still can’t talk of much else. Meanwhile it would appear that Jebbie  hasn’t read a newspaper in six-plus years, since a big chunk of his foreign policy team is made up of his brother’s fine collection of idiots that led us into the morasses of both Afghanistan and Iraq.  He doesn’t know that Wolfowitz was one of the architects of the Iraq policy with his pre-emptive strike crap? He doesn’t know that along with Cheney and others, the Iraq foray was something these fools had wanted to do for a decade or so and found 9/11 a good excuse for? They are liars and arguably war criminals if we collectively had the stomach to clean up our own shit behind us.

Yet this is where we live today. In a world steeped it seems in a party which is caught between the tiger which is devouring it, and reality which it can only spit niceties  at as it throws yet another bone in the other direction.  Stop being the party of stupid, Bobby Jindal said, while being stupid. We welcome everyone, except not Log Cabin Republicans to CPAC. I’ll take a pass on that evolution question if you don’t mind, I’m not a scientist.

We live in a world where David and Charles Koch, family owners of Koch Industries, owners of subsidiary ALEC, writes the legislation word for word of the bill their CEO Scott Walker of their other subsidiary Wisconsin, signs into law regarding “right to work” (which is really nothing but right to work for next to nothing), causing  even old timer Republicans who still have some shred of decency left in them, to say, “this is just fucking wrong.”

Is this love of country? They would surely say yes, the country they want to have, wherein all decisions are filtered through the prism of “is this good for the bottom line?”

Love my country?

Only an insane person would love this. Place that constitution, the preamble will do, against the fabric of stupid today and see how well that fits. A person could stand on a stump and recite non-stop this bundle of crazy for weeks without end. Today, we will pass a law that says sex education must never allude to the possibility of enjoyment but only procreative elements that are of course abstained from by good little girls, and winked at by bad little boys. Today we will ban yoga pants, cuz damn I wanna do what’s right for Merika. Today I’ll suggest that good education money is wasted on them blacks who just collect welfare anyway. Today, I’ll work hard to make sure only “our sort of folk” can vote. Today, I’ll cash that check from Exxon-Mobile and vote to let them drill baby drill in your fucking front yard.

Love my country?

Are you serious?

 

 

 

 

Where to Go From Here

Tags

Arizona, editorial, Gabrielle Giffords, political rhetoric, United States House of Representatives

I have nothing new to add to all the countless reports and analysis given by so many. I am shocked, sickened, and deeply grieved, for all who were personally touched by this senseless tragedy.

I worked out most of it in a post at Walking in the Shadows. Although couched in “religious” language, I think the thoughts are universal to the human condition. Read it if you care to.

WORDS MATTER DAMMIT

History Will Not Be Kind

Tags

GOP, Ground Zero, hatred, History, Muslims, Newt Gingrich, Obama, racism, religious intolerance, religious right, right wingnuts, Sarah Palin, teabaggers

Hatred and bigotry have had an illustrious career in America. It  did not originate here of course, earliest man soon found an angry god to blame for snow storms and drought.

But American has certainly refined the concept better than most places in the world, if only because we have been oh so willing to transfer our aggressive fears and hatreds to so many different groups.

Religious hatred is not new. In fact, it prompted today’s religious right’s most reviled amendment–the first, which mandates a clear non-involvement of government with religious practices. At it’s inception the new United States of America was a collection of states each, for the most part, with their laws and practices that excluded (and often road out of town and sometimes executed) such groups as Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and Anabaptists.

What those who champion “our Christian origins”  forget, is that the Pilgrims didn’t come to these shores to establish a community of religious tolerance, but rather to establish a  practice of their version of Christianity without interference from other “papist” types.

We soon moved on from religion however, and took up the banner of “non-humanity.” By that I mean, peoples who were not white anglophiles were soon relegated to non-human status. This included native peoples, and then Africans, but came to include Italians, Irish, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans, and Latinos from anywhere. 

All of these groups, to one degree or another, found the going tough in America where they were shunned, segregated, consigned to the lowest jobs and least pay. White American strutted as superior in every way. (Certainly we were not alone in this. Britain and much of Western Europe also played this game.)

Class, in America at least, has been down played, but there is little doubt that the upper echelons of our society have felt “entitled” to their privilege largely due to their superior breeding and determination. Ask any nouveau-rich just how long it takes to break into the blue blood of our major eastern cities. (Boston would be a key case in point.) No, it has been largely the working and working poor who continually have declared that we are a country of equality of opportunity.

So, I am not surprised nor shocked at the ugly and vicious attacks upon  the Muslim community in this country. The rabble have been assured that it is always okay to blame someone other than themselves for their perceived woes.

Yet, the rhetoric coming from our so-called educated leadership is most troubling. Words and arguments drip from their jaws that one would have thought more likely to be from the minds of the KKK and other white-rights militia groups. We are used to that kind of ugliness and we have learned to turn a deaf ear as the best defense. Shun and ignore has been our winning motto.

Today, however, we find those whom we would not expect saying simply awful things. People like Newt Gingrich spew hatred with abandon against Muslims. Ditto Sarah (that woman is an idiot) Palin, though she can be forgiven to a degree since she is so ill-educated in public affairs.

But, and here is the irony, these are the same folks who rant and rail day in and day out that Obama and company are “destroying our freedoms.” One of those freedoms, they declare  that is on the brink of destruction, is their ability to practice their religion.

Clearly, they do not offer this right to others. In reality they are really saying that Obama is not George Bush, who at least mouthed his preference for Christian rights as the best. Obama, following the Constitution, refuses to support efforts to raise Christianity above other faiths, and in fact has made it most clear in his remarks about the Islamic Center proposed in NYC, that government has no business voicing any “advice” about where a religious building is erected.

And that is perhaps the key point to be realized here. The extreme religious right, and it’s congressional and pundit minions, are not really about our freedoms at all. They are about instituting a “Christian” government in the US as they define it. They are about shredding the US Constitution whenever it becomes necessary to accomplish that goal. They are about revising history to “prove” their point of view.

People like Gingrich and Palin, have no real intent to alter the the Constitution, I suspect. They have a strong intention to use the mob mentality of the religious right and all the  tea bagger unfocused anger to gain power for themselves. That in some sense is all the more egregious. As one of Gingrich’s ex-wives noted in a link we gave you last week, Newt gave up on principles when he decided he wanted fame and fortune and power more.

Palin, of course, is a study in opportunistic ranting. She neither knows nor cares about truth. She plays to anger and fear and desperation. She creates it when necessary, all in her pursuit to “be somebody.” We have John Sidney McCain to thank for that one.

The Becks, Limbaughs, Hannitys, they are just pure feeders upon the human flesh. They are the vultures and hyenas, fangs dripping with our blood, returning to their lairs with bloated stomachs, laughing and reeking of their own evil.

I can but smile when I think, that history will not be kind. Gingrich, Kyl, Palin, King (Peter and Steven), Bachmann, McCain, Graham, DeMint, (oh the list is interminable indeed),  will be remembered for a very long time. But not as great states-persons. No not a one. But they will be remembered.

Wallace blocking school desegregation

They will be remembered.

McCarthy & House UnAmerican Activities Hearings

They will be remembered.

Beware: Your Mind is Out to Mislead

Tags

brain research, character, experiences, psychology, sociology, thinking

Brain researchers tell us that we are much the product of our experiences. While genetics play its role, most of our opinions, beliefs, and framework for examining information comes from a hidden and unrealized drama that plays out inside our heads, quite unbeknownst to our consciousness.

Every new experience is compared and contrasted with everything we have already experienced, and catalogued and filed accordingly. Experts tell us that it is mighty darn hard to undo these conclusions that we hold, even though we are largely unaware of it. Hundreds of tests prove this conclusively, and I’ve written about some it on these pages over the last couple of years.

Yet it still amazes me how old prejudices die slowly or not at all. I refer you to the ideas we have about small town people and fancy city folk. Having been both, I’m in some position to know, yet I am as much a victim of my preconceived notions as the next gal.

As some of you know, I’ve been reconnecting, slowly with some folks I went to school with. I don’t mean a couple of years of commonality, but kids I went to school with from K-12. And it has been an amazingly strange experience. It is happening by fits and starts, and there are no real “trends” but only hints of trends. But still, it’s a pondering oasis.

Those I expected to go to college, didn’t. Those who I didn’t think would, did. Those who stayed near to “home” were largely not the ones I would have expected. Sure, here and there, people turned out as I thought, but mostly they didn’t. I realized that as to each and every one, some I had known well, and some I knew not well at all, I had never had a “serious” conversation with, on a matter of substance. I mean substance like racism, or religion, or anything of the kind.

The minor trend I see, is that those who went on to higher education, those who moved about the country, and such, generally have broader prospectives on the world. Those that stayed close to their lives as children, were more narrow minded. Plenty of folks would say, “No chit, shylock!”

That is after all, the presumption. The small town hickish type versus the urbane sophisticate. Yet my own experience in small town American and big city America don’t bear this out. The trend , as I said, is minor, just a wispy smoke of a notion. Yet, the conclusion, obviously ingrained at an early age, remains.

This against dozens of Hollywood movies telling the opposite. I don’t have to name names, the plot is universal. Kids graduate. One goes off to college and a big city career, the other remains in town, becoming the insurance agent, librarian, or hardware store owner. A death in the family brings the big city type home, and he/she reconnects. Eventually, the “smart” city slicker learns a lesson of life from the “small town” hick.

Yet, still the perception persists. And thus, I’ve been just blown away by the outcomes to some I went to school with. Airheads (I thought) are deep socially conscious thinkers, and bright lights (I thought) have reconstructed safe but weird worlds which they inhabit only with other fairly brain deprived humans.

And I ask myself. What is the problem with my (our) ability to discern character? It is clear that spending eight months at six or so hours a day, for thirteen years didn’t give me much of a clue. So I wonder, am I any better today? I would dearly like to think so.

So what was going wrong all those years ago? As I said, I cannot think of a single serious conversation I ever had with any of them, “closest” friend or barely knew. Is this the key to discerning? Could I have predicted who would be liberal/conservative/religious/socially conscience/self absorbed, if only I had asked the right questions? I don’t know.

Are all kids just too caught up in dating, clothes, music and entertainment? Are we not filled with sufficient “experiences” to make judgments possible at that age?

Being a seriously mature adult now, I have to wonder–are the quality of my friendships more genuine now? Is it a product of having the “right” kind of conversations or just a matter of living long enough to meet enough people to cue the right conclusions?

I don’t pretend to know of course. I never do usually. I raise the question and ask for input.

It seems important to know. I need to spend time, which means learn, from people whose character is sound, knowing that that is surely a subjective idea in the first place. In a world growing exponentially more complicated, it’s damned important to keep one’s bearings.

Perhaps it’s a element of aging. I have less and less time to spend with stupid backward people. They pull me down into a spiral of despair, and they offer me no help in how to make the world a better place.

For those of you who are beginning to think I have too much time on my hands, well, I can only say, come live in the meadow and you will find reason to spend a lot of time in your own head. I’ve grown rather comfortable there. I will sit upon my hill come spring, letting the warm breeze play across my upturned face, and I will pass my judgments upon Earth.  No one will much hear me, no one will much care, but I will feel better for the doing of it.

Who Do You Really Know?

Tags

friends, human stories, knowing someone, psychology, relationships, sociology

It takes me forty minutes give or take to get to church on Sunday. I don’t listen to music. I think. I figure, hey I got this brain, might as well use it.

Today, I continued a think on the subject of reconnecting with old high school classmates and what I was learning from the experience. I try to learn from things, I helps in not making the same mistakes again and again.

Actually, I was working up a blog post, this one in fact. To anyone following me, they probably assume I’m talking to a midget or on a cell phone. I talk out loud and I can be animated. I was maybe 2/3 of the way in when the Eureka moment occurred. That is when I stop dancing around a subject and figure out the “angle.”

The angle is the reason for the post, it’s theme if you will. I had thought it might be about how we probably choose our “friends” in high school by rather limited and stupid means, and we miss the true gems who are there because they don’t somehow fit the mold of the proper “classmate/friend.” No doubt that is true, but it’s really not the point.

Okay, tired of being in suspense? What do you mean when you say that you know someone? It can mean an awful lot of things can’t it? It can mean you’ve met the person, at the minimum. It can mean you know the insides of this person, how they think, at the maximum.

But I’m talking about the in between assumptions we make about those we claim to know. Case in point. I grew up in a school district that was decidedly working class. Moreover, it was fairly small by most people’s standards. I would hazard that nearly half of the kids I started kindergarten with, I ended up graduating high school with. We had a graduating class of 103 as I recall, not big at all. So for thirteen years, I spend nine months of each, and then some summer with these folks.

You’d say I knew them. I’d say I knew them. And I guess I did. I knew how they dressed, how relatively smart they were, who they palled around with, how good they were or not at sports, how comfortable they were in front of the class. A whole plethora of pieces of information that added up to “knowing” a human being on planet earth as opposed to someone I passed by in the street whom I could make but the most superficial judgments about.

I knew some of them well enough to make a few “educated” guesses about what they might do in the future. I might guess that J would marry L, or that P might become a music teacher. I might be right or wrong, but my guess was based on some “experience” with the person that gave me a better chance of prediction that a stranger would have.

Flash forward from graduation night to forty plus years later. Discover one of your “classmates,” one that you knew in this fashion, but never were “friends” with in the “hanging out” kinda way.

Ask them the simple question, what have you been up to? Tell me your life’s story in 100 words or less. I guarantee you will hear things that you would NEVER have imagined in a million years. And that won’t be the exception, it will be the rule.

Yet to each of those surprising-you people, their lives unfolded in ways that seemed, at least at the time, to flow rather obviously and logically from point to point. It fit their personality, their talents, their weaknesses rather well. But it shocked the bejesus out of you, because, well, .  . . you didn’t really KNOW them at all.

And that’s both sad and exciting at the same time. Sad that we can spend so much time with people over so many years and yet barely know who they are. Exciting because we realize that every single person has a fascinating and totally unique story to tell, their own way of living out their humanity, often so very different from our own.

Take it down a notch. Fifty-nine years ago, give or take a month here and there, a bunch of babies mewled and sucked on bottles, oohed and ahhed over by family and friends. The world in all its splendor, spread before them. They were all in the same relative economic situation, most with both parents, all living in the same kind of houses, and later taught by the same teachers. Yet look at what happened to them?

Life happened, with its unbelievable array of choice and forks in the road. And the most unlikely people became this and the most unlikely of people became that. And the road they traveled resembles those cartoons where there is the kid who travels his neighborhood, up and over fences, down the sidewalk, in the front, out the back, and so on. That is us, all of us seemingly moving along routes that seemed oh so normal and usual for us at the time.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but it suggests to me that there is a gold mine out there in missed opportunities. In our wildly different ways of working out life’s challenges, we can find answers and we can find the place of relating. We find our sameness in our very different ways of expressing this opportunity of being human.

 Don’t miss the next opportunity to really “know” someone better. Listen more, talk less. You’ll be wiser for it, and when you do talk, you may have something a bit more important to say.

Fertile Minds

Tags

Art, evolution, fertility goddesses, God, God Gene, Human Biology, theology

Venus of Willendorf circa 13,000-18,000 BCE

I got to thinking about fertility gods the other day. Goddesses to be specific, for most, as you might expect are female representations.

I recall a couple of years ago, the Contrarian and I became quite engrossed in a public television series on art. The documentarian started with the most primitive of art, often found on cave walls in Europe, and moved through to more modern pieces. It was a real eye opener, and helped me in many ways to understand art better. As some of you may recall, I’m reading a coffee table tome on art history, and I recalled the IPT (Iowa Public TV) show, while reading of the prehistoric era.

To the point, I learned that when it came to fertility goddesses, they were pretty much the same worldwide. That means that if you found one in South America, it might look amazingly similar to one found on the Russian Steppes. That idea initially floored me. It still does, but I’ve had some time to let it sit and ferment as it were.

My analysis is as follows. Man and woman, as they contemplate their lives, recognize the importance of procreation. Children, early on, and up to fairly recent times, were not only blessings in and of themselves, but were also quite coldly, economic commodities. Boys and girls were essential to the family. They assisted in all manner of tasks, tasks that could not be accomplished simply by two adults.

Some where, early on, humanity determined that there were mystical beings, called gods, who directed human affairs, and a good deal of the natural forces we are forced to contend with. Rain, and snow, cold and heat were deemed the gifts of gods or their punishment. We began to offer worship to them to gain what we wished and to avoid that which we did not wish.

So, man and woman thought about how to improve their likelihood of having children. The began to envision a goddess of pregnancy and fertility. How would she look? As you can see from the photograph, a rather bulbous body was thought to denote perhaps a well fed woman? Huge breasts stood for the ability to suckle children successfully? The face was of little consequence, nor were the other limbs. Healthy fat women with big breasts seem to be everybody’s determination of what a fertility goddess should look like.

This suggests that worldwide the human race is pretty much genetically predisposed to view the world in the same manner. Or so I have concluded.  We deduce conclusions from facts in the same manner. I don’t know quite how to reconcile that with the fact that we seem to be at odds with each other on so many issues these days.

One would assume that the mind that can visualize a fertility goddess the same as another living very far away in entirely different circumstances, would mean that we were genetically predisposed to empathize with each other. Yet, it seems we are not. Palestinians seem unable to empathize with Israelis or vice versa. I am told that the animosities between Turkish people and Armenian folks have gone on for some centuries with little abatement.

I can only conclude that such loss of empathy has been a culturalization event. We have grown apart in our humanity by events and by folks who have chosen to interpret those events in ways that divide. It seems we have taken the division caused by competition for limited resources and never let go.

That of course begs the question of what limited resources. One would have thought that another herd of bison or woolly mammoth would be just around the corner. Yet compete we did, and somewhere in that, we lost our ability to empathize. It seems it must be taught again.

I can understand the fertility goddess thing as a result of evolution. No doubt it is useful to humans to view the world with rationality, and that leads to an increase in survival chances. We view the world with the same tools and come to rational conclusions about it. That makes sense.

But another issue doesn’t. There are those in the medical and biology field who now tell us that they have uncovered a “God gene.” The chief proponent of this work is one Dean H. Hamer, author of “The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes.” While many disagree and criticize his work, it positively sets the evangelical right on a path of apoplectic denial. God forbid that we are inclined to believe!

But that is not the point of Hamer’s work at all. What he says that several genes seem to be at play when Buddhists meditate or when nuns pray. There is a genetic predisposition to “transcendence.” This is not the same as God, but it does cause us to look outward, away from ourselves, to find meaning to the world around us.

That transcendence can cause us to empathize I would think with others, but of course, also to conclude that some greater force is at work defining our world, and controlling what happens in our lives. The first part makes sense to me from a evolutionary frame. Anything that causes us to empathize with others and to cooperate seems a good survival technique.

But I am constrained to figure out how belief in a superior deity is helpful to survival, or was deemed useful such that it was perpetuated in the gene pool as a valuable addition to our human condition. Perhaps there is just something I fail to understand about evolution.

Unlike the wingnuttery religious right, I don’t see Hamer’s and other’s work as some danger to religion. Of course, that is crazy anyway, since truth should always be our goal, not simply results that support our pet theories of the world.

Since, I don’t see the “God gene” as an evolutionary necessity or even a help, I can easily conclude that the God gene, is indeed that Spirit of God placed within all humans (whether it extends to all life is another question. I personally think it does, but that isn’t the issue before us.). I see the research as just as much supportive of that as it supports the notions of so-called atheists that it’s all a figment of our genetic soup.

I find the God gene, a comfort in fact. It suggests to me at least that we are all on a path to our Creator, though some of us know it not. We are all journeying,  however consciously or unconsciously that is occurring.

I’m sure there is more wrong with my analysis that right. I’m neither a geneticist nor an evolutionary biologist. I barely skim the surface of those disciplines in terms of knowledge. Yet, I am comforted, as I said.

Isn’t this more interesting to contemplate than to continue to argue about what the “real presence” means? Are we to be forever bogged down in issues of apostolic succession and women’s ordination, celibacy, homosexuality, and all this? Why oh why aren’t we celebrating our, should I dare say, God given ability, to share a world view of God’s presence? Should we not celebrate our ability to both see a mountain in the distance  or a stream jumping with salmon? Are not these the hallmarks of our unity?

Let us have the spirited discussions about all these sundry other matters, yet, on Sunday, let’s go to church and worship, setting aside all our utterly unimportant differences. On one thing we all agree, we are called to transcend our limited selves, we are drawn to that. Let us transcend and begin the process of healing.

May you dream of peace and understanding, unity and compassion, empathy and cooperation in this season of the Epiphany.

It’s just what I was thinking about yesterday.

Is Ecumenism Really a Good Thing?

Tags

ecumenism, Interfaith, religion

There are some things that we tend to take for granted. We think they are statements so true that we never question them, never analyze, never contemplate alternatives. Such I think is the issue of ecumenism, the formal organized efforts to re-unite all Christian faiths, or more broadly, unite all dispirit faiths throughout the world into one.

Ask anyone, and most will agree, that God wishes such a thing. After all, there is but one God, or so most of us believe, however we may define that. And so therefore, it seems to be that there must be one perfect understanding of God which is embodied in some one faith, or so most believe. Of course, the rub is that all to many different faith traditions all claim to have the most perfect understanding.

Efforts to achieve such a union have been worked on for years by any number of organizations. The World Council of Churches is but one. But even from it’s inception, there have been those who have refused to join. Mostly it seems because there is always a requirement by some that certain basic principles of belief must be agreed upon. And that never happens, and so efforts are always stymied. The situation only becomes worse, when we move beyond Christianity into the numerous faith traditions of the world. How can there be a basic principles agreement? Other than “do unto others” most everything else is too different in concept to be the basis for agreement.

As a former Catholic, I of course was taught the necessity of at least a return to unity among Christians. If you haven’t guessed, Martin Luther is roundly criticized for tearing the Church asunder. The Eastern Church is given less culpability, though I am not sure that is deserved. In any event, what Luther began, clearly had no end. The numbers of new Christian groups multiplies at the rate of nearly 3,000 per year, and is now in the vicinity of some 35,000.

Catholics, at least those of a traditional orthodox persuasion see this as a horror, and await the “return” of the flock to the Mother Church. Of course, the awaited “returnees” have a rather different take on the issue. Not only are they, for the most part, uninterested in “returning” to Mother Church, but they await Mother Church to recognize that indeed it should be coming to them, as the true Church.

You see this all gets ugly very quickly. Nothing much gets accomplished when participants begin arguing about who is the “original” church, is there an original church at all, and what was the original teaching and doctrinal truths of that church. Having witnessed some of these “discussions” I can tell you they are brutal. Take a swing by Catholic Answers forum some time and be prepared to be insulted if you are non-Roman Catholic. You will soon learn that your faith, whatever it might be is polluted and silly, never apostolic, and is but one of those things warned of by Paul and others. Non-Catholics are, whatever their denomination, led by false prophets. Only return to the Mother Church with complete obedience to her word is sufficient to return to grace.

If you wish to approach from another way, try some of those fundamentalist evangelicals. They consider the Roman church that which is spoken of in Revelation. Not Rome, as in the emperor, but the very same Roman Catholic church. They of course aren’t returning anywhere, and they are sure there can be no unity until everyone agrees that scripture is literalistically true in every word. Welcome to creationism folks.

So, those of us who would wish for more unity, and less division, know that nothing like that is possible in any future we can so far see. And what’s more, we find it hard to see how that could ever happen. For goodness sakes, many of us can testify that whatever our faith tradition is, we are internally often badly split on serious issues. The Roman Catholic church certainly is, with any number of groups that run the gamut from strict and almost backward looking practices and dogma to those who are highly liberal and progressive in their outlook. There is sadly, badly veiled contempt held by both sides in this.

The Anglican church itself is clearly at odds within itself over issues of homosexuality and women. It would not surprise me to learn that there are other divisions as well. From what I have learned in my brief time as an Episcopalian, some of this is sadly vicious as well, with both sides taking increasingly hard lines.

The same is true of Baptists and other evangelicals, between those who are hardliner and those who favor a more moderate and progressive view. It is no doubt true that differences exist in probably every defined denomination. Those new “sects” have to appear for some reason, and the reason is, one assumes, that someone decided that their church had strayed from the “true” teaching and after futile attempts to get it back on track, some or many left and started their own church.

That is the state we find ourselves in unfortunately. It is not something I thought much about, except to think that those who were engaged in the attempt to forge bonds of agreements must be true saints to do such work. It was not anything I thought about until a few weeks ago.

Last week, many of you know, I was received into the Episcopal faith. Prior to that, I met with one of the priests of my parish to discuss things. The purpose was two fold. First, it was for them to answer questions I might have about the Church, but secondly it was about them getting an idea of where I was coming from theologically in order to determine whether the Church would be a good fit for me. Additionally, I’m sure they wished to get a handle on what ministries I might fit with, and how versed I was in biblical and theological issues.

We were talking about issues of difference, and I suggested that I found so much of interfaith dialogue frustrating because it always got bogged down in doctrinal differences instead of simply working on common problems. Poverty and social issues really don’t require that we are all on the same page regarding the issue of consubstantiation for instance.

Barbara suggested that it was probably not the best idea in the world to spend our time trying to “unite” doctrinally. I recall, taking that in, but being busy with other things, I let the significance of that statement wash over me with little recognition. She offered that we all have unique and special things to contribute to the great fund of Christianity, and unity would no doubt discard some of that.

Later, when I had time to digest and review that conversation, I saw that indeed, I had never considered whether the movement to unite was worthwhile. And, after having considered it for some weeks, I’m rather convinced Barbara was right.

Perhaps, we as this huge mosaic which we call Christianity are better off doing our separate things. Perhaps what is missing is the ability to recognize and respect that we all come to the table, enriching the full tapestry of Christianity by our differences. Perhaps it is through the fullness of our unique offerings that the clearest and most complete picture of God’s kingdom emerges.

I have long thought that the probability is that we have almost all of us, gotten it quite wrong. We have to one degree or another attempted to construct a faith that is faithful to what we understand to be  the message of Jesus. Given the plethora of opinions on that, just in the first two centuries following his crucifixion, I’d say we have but a limited clue of it really. Things, as we move through the centuries, just get worse.

Just one example will suffice. Nowhere did Jesus ever suggest that a priesthood need be either male nor celibate. True,  the men who wrote about his ministry, long after his crucifixion I might add, did not declare that Jesus picked women and named them apostles. That of course may mean no more than that the writer of the gospel or letter or such never understood it that way. But more clearly Jesus never restricted the priesthood to a celibate lifestyle.

That came much later, through the Spanish church. And since it was later adopted through what was then Christendom, it has stuck. Now the Roman church declares that said ideas (celibacy and male priesthood) is the will of the Holy Spirit and thus they have no power to change it. Convenient, but hardly definitive I would say. If you talk to Roman Catholics who adhere to the belief in celibacy and to a male priesthood, they will surely tell you that the Church has no power to change this. This is God’s will, evidenced by “tradition” which is synonymous with God’s will in their opinion. In other words, we never thought about doing it differently, so the fact that we have done it one way for a long time, is evidence that this is the way God wants it. Lousy logic I’d say.

So it hardly seems to me that today, we have gotten it more right than they did in say 50 CE or so. And that’s just Christianity. Things get no better, and only get worse when we add in all the other faiths, some of whom believe things quite drastically different than what is taught in Christian circles. Yet they have a rich heritage, and deep wisdom as anyone who has read sacred texts in Buddhism, Islam, or Hinduism can attest.

Many of the eastern faiths offer a breathtakingly beautiful explanation of God and humanity. So much resonates with us. We can recognize truth in what are otherwise foreign doctrines and beliefs. We are enriched and opened in amazing  ways. We benefit greatly. We are enlarged spiritually, fed with good food.

So I have come to a new conclusion about interfaith dialogue for the purpose of joining ourselves into one homogeneous and should I suggest bland concoction called Christianity. I think it’s a bad idea. I think we should stop worrying about it and arguing about it. I think we should worry about poverty, disease, and all the ills that face the world. We don’t have to agree about apostolic successions and Eucharistic prayers to address hunger do we? I think God might prefer we address those issues first.

It’s just what I was thinking about today.
**Cross Posted at Here I am Lord