MindSpinner

When I was a girl living in the mountains, Christmas came twice. It came Christmas morning with the opening of a scandalous number of packages under a tree adorned with 600 ornaments, but it came quietly the midnight before, too, when I would rise from my bed in my little girl’s room, light a small white candle, and watch the stars at the window, the horse sleeping in the pasture below, the silhouette of the apple tree. Christmas came in the quiet of midnight, in the flame of an ordinary white candle, in waiting and wordless silence, in just breathing all that is.

Now Christmas is fragmented across households, and because I have the children more of the rest of the time, they spend time with their father over holidays. This Christmas will be quieter still, for I am ill - able to get about the house, but no better. There won’t be a trip with the kids to my childhood home in the mountains; instead there will be a test or two to be run as soon as doctors return to their offices after the holiday. So it will be a different sort of Christmas. I’m picking out books to keep near my bed, for if there is a silver lining to illness, it is that you really do have to ignore the house chores you should otherwise be doing. I’m settling in to finish a book long interrupted, and I’m eyeing the fattest, yet untasted volume on the shelf. I won’t say I wasn’t moping about the bad timing for an illness and for that Christmas filled with feast, family, and bustle that isn’t going to be, but I’m settling into the idea of opening whatever gifts Christmas brings.

At the county high school and in this community, a controversy has unfolded. A sole Muslim student objected to the assorted Christian invocations and benedictions traditionally said at graduation-related ceremonies. The school administration has responded by respecting the law regarding the separation of church and state and removing prayers from programs for honors night, graduation, etc.

They have done the right thing, of course. Separation of church and state preserves freedom of religion because it refrains from imposing religion. The last thing I want is somebody else’s version of religion imposed upon me. During the graduation season, baccalaureate services held in churches can offer graduates who wish to attend a Christian celebration of their achievement, and students can, of course, gather at school to pray - as long as prayer remains private and not institutionalized. (Likely, a group of Christian students will follow the example set by students at another school and stand up to recite the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of the graduation program anyway. In my own unlikely fantasy, students of other faiths follow suit with their own prayers, so that diversity finds its voice and makes its point.)

But now, who should be protesting the school’s Muslim students and the administration’s decision but the KKK. They’ll be outside the school on Tuesday. The students will be kept in classes, well clear of the protestors.

Nothing strikes a deeper horror in me than the sight of those white KKK robes, not even a snake at my bare feet. The KKK represents the worst of what we human beings can become, after all, while a snake is merely an animal with no design beyond survival. What the KKK has to do with defending Christianity, I cannot fathom. Hatred of more than half a world “God so loved” doesn’t square with the gospel message.

In the medieval morality plays, a frequent fixture was the Mouth of Hell, a stage prop constructed to reprepresent a ravening maw the height of a man, out of which devils could leap to snatch the wicked and drag them to damnation. When the KKK protests outside my daughter’s high school on Monday (while I’m stuck elsewhere with responsibilities I cannot hand off), I can only imagine them marching straight out of Hell’s Mouth. That the KKK still functions in parts of this country in this day breaks my heart and makes me hang my head in shame over how far short we still fall from spiritual enlightenment.

And though I am as white as a grub in the garden, it is not my race that needs defending; it is this entire species, all of us together along with our delicate, exquisitely beautiful ark of a planet - that indeed needs defending most of all from our own blindly destructive, short-sighted pursuit of self interest over common good.

A couple of weeks ago, I prefaced this post with another (Scop talk - I), but between those introductory notes and this continuation, holiday travel intervened, along with the beginning of a new semester at school. That’s life, no?

My initial and limited foray into brain science has netted an understanding that we human beings are, among animals, uniquely storytellers. Our ability to construct elaborate beliefs and stories - of how things work, mean, and come to be - offered survival advantages to us over the course of human history in our families, tribes, ethnic groups, religious faiths, and nations. Evolutionists would say that the edge our mindspinning brains gave to members of our species led to the refinement of those capabilities. Creationists would say that our creator endowed us with these capacities - that we were made in God’s image. (Into that argument I am not headed. Why? Because at this point I’m interested in a different argument with compelling significance for all of us, whatever our belief systems.)

The nature of our relationship to others and to our environment has changed in essential ways because of globalization and because of the unfolding impact of human activity on the planet. Consequently, the stories we use to shape our perceptions of self, group, relationship, economics, government and the whole of reality must also adapt - otherwise the stories that served us on a smaller scale may doom us on a larger one.

There’s no end to the damage flawed stories and beliefs have done in the course of human history or can do in future on an ever larger scale. Certain powerful stories that have worked for some of us some of the time aren’t going to work for all of us for the rest of time. As a species we’ve got to take inventory, to think together, and to embrace stories that will sustain us. Or, simply put, we’ll reap the consequences of our inadequate perceptions and prove that we were not up to the challenge of living sustainably together on this earth.

This is an intimidating thesis, actually - just huge - and I am only one small chronically sleep-deprived person with too many other jobs and a thimbleful of spare time, so I haven’t a prayer of unfolding it the way it should be unfolded. The old, now unworkable stories pile up like a granite mountain, and I know I cannot move them or even erode them much.

I’ve just told myself a story about how things are, and that story shuts down possibility and comes close to bringing tears, so I take a deep breath and start over. I’ll write a few paragraphs about one thing and let it loose to do whatever work in the world it can do, because that is what each of us is given to do. It is not stewardship of a life to be passive and to cave in, to fail to say what needs to be said. I can steward a few paragraphs into being today, a few more next week, and so forth.

Almost three weeks ago I flew to DC. I don’t fly often, but I always ask for a window seat, and I look and look at the cities, the clouds and the land through the window, all the way up and all the way down. I see what I cannot see from the ground – how much is still forest, how much is city, how much is a patchwork of fields bounded by thin seams of darker green or threads of roadway. My thesis about our stories is big like that. I can’t garden the land from the plane. I can’t change the world with an idea too big for one person to voice effectively and authoritatively or to bring the world to hear. But I can come home and pull up the blackberry briar that sprouted in a crevice of the stone path, and I can write what asks to be said, one bit at time.

Last fall there was an afternoon when tornado warnings were predicted. After-school activities were cancelled, and students were allowed to pull out those cell phones we teachers are never supposed to see and use them to tell mom or dad, or in some cases, grandma, that there would be no ball practices or club meetings or academic competitions that afternoon. The students were abuzz, excited, apprehensive and totally unfocused on their assignment for last period. They chattered and playfully wrote their wills, and said, “We are preparing to die.” After all, a tornado had come through their town in 2004 while they were huddled in the basement hallway and smelly locker rooms. It tore up great trees, cleaved houses in two and decapitated rooftops; it ripped up the football field across the street, narrowly missing the school itself. Who was I to say their anxiety and nervous energy was unreasonable, given their experience?

Some students, the exceptions, diligently did their work. “What are you doing?” the writers of wills asked the doers of the assignment. “Don’t you know we could die today?”

I joked in return, “You are preparing to die, and they are preparing to live. This assignment is due tomorrow.”

“Yes, we are preparing to live!” chimed in the diligent, delighting in the retort.

Sure enough, we lived, and those who had prepared to die instead of preparing to live didn’t have their work the next day.

When I think about our beliefs and our stories, it occurs to me that we must as a species focus on business of preparing to live. Apocalyptic thinking tends to undermine that project, so the notion of impending apocalypse is the first story that’s got to adjust to the possibility of future and the desirability of making what future we have livable for ourselves, our children, and grandchildren.

According to a Newsweek poll, fifteen percent of American Christians believe Jesus will return in their lifetimes. (Thank you, Tim LaHaye. For an interesting read on LaHaye’s Left Behind series, see Joe Bageant .) My own son assures me, “The prophecies have been fulfilled; the end is soon.” Explanations follow, courtesy of a local Baptist church he attends with his father.

But anyone who knows anything of history knows that people have been believing that the end is at hand for a very long time. Jesus’ disciples interpreted the words of Jesus as meaning that he would return within their lifetimes. A Brief History of the Apocalypse offers a timeline of apocalyptic thinking sure to suggest that those of us who are sure we know what scripture says no one will know have a record of being wrong. And we are all still here. (I’ll speak within the Christian perspective here. No one who speaks outside Christianity is going to be readily heard within it.)

Let’s just suppose, for the sake of argument, that we who believe that end times are upon us are a little off in our calculations, and that Jesus doesn’t show for a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years. What then? What about the lives of our children and grandchildren on this planet?

I do not believe that preparing spiritually for the second coming of Christ need preclude preparing practically to make the world a sustainable and livable place together generation upon generation until Jesus shows up. Even a belief that Jesus may come back soon shouldn’t prevent or excuse Christians from taking care of a creation God pronounced good or facilitating peace on earth or taking care of the poor or the sick or simply trying to understand each other instead of branding each other infidels and getting more of God’s children, Christian and otherwise, killed in the process. In fact, preparing spiritually for the coming of the kingdom of God involves taking care of what God made and loves. When we do this, a measure of the kingdom of God arrives in our midst. It has no other way of finding meaningful expression in our world.

My word to those who believe end times are upon us is simply this - we will do best to prepare for the possibility of earthly tomorrows as well as the possibility of imminent Rapture. Else God may say to us, “Where is your homework? You haven’t prepared. I placed this creation in your hands, and what have you done?”

A long time ago, when I was a girl of fifteen, a professing Christian, duly dunked, certified saved, and a member of a small country Baptist Church in the South, I sensed that my prayers just bounced off the ceiling - of the church, of the Sunday School room, of my bedroom at night. Or if I was outside, perhaps they floated up a ways but then drifted down, like helium balloons when the buoyant gas leaks out. It was as if all our prayers were just coming back to us as echoes of ourselves, no better, no higher, revealing nothing divine. At best, they might make us better people, if we did not misguide ourselves in God’s name.

I remember the Ouija board I had as a child. It said what I wanted it to. I pushed, of course.

Where was God? Was it possible to reach God at all? There was little point in bouncing prayers off ceilings.

At a youth retreat one summer night, we sang “Just As I am,” and somehow, without any trigger whatsoever (we may as well have been singing “Ring Around the Rosies”), I found myself careening over an abyss which can only be described as “the absence of God” - certainly not a fear of hell or anything of that sort, just an incredible sense of a vast universe and all eternity and me alone in silence and dark. A boy from another youth group discerned my spiritual crisis and took me to talk with his minister, and I did, which proved no help, and when he walked me back to my cabin, he gave me my very first kiss, a chaste one, a kind of blessing. When I opened the door to a cabin full of people wondering where I was after curfew, I was visibly shaken by the sense of being utterly without God, and it is an amusing irony that certain of the adult chaperones decided that I had lost my virginity then and there that night, and that was why I was crying. I became a negative example for their daughters.

In my bed in my cabin, I prayed as I had never done before. I surrendered and I sought. I fell down into that abyss of all alone. If there was a God at all, I would fall until God caught me up out of the emptiness, and I would not grab for anything to keep me from that end, not one straw of will or reason.

It was long after midnight when utter emptiness and deepest desire were displaced in a moment. This is where words fail. Utterly. The spiritual presence which came to me was simply beyond anything I had known or was capable of conjuring or can find language to enword, then or now. Light is an apt metaphor. Love was essence. Tremendous reassurance. And revelation - of the essential goodness of being and of all things. An untying of every twisted little knot of pain or sorrow or angst in my soul. A certain knowledge that the perceived necessity of our living as twisted, knotted creatures was indeed an illusion, a lie that comes of living in a world in which the divine is partly and sometimes almost completely veiled. Knowledge that hate is superfluous and love is divine gift to be shared without limit or end.

What I needed to know of God in order to live a life came to me that night, as palpable presence and revelation. I haven’t always lived up to that revelation, year in and year out, and I am too fragmented and self-directed to dwell there wholly now, but there’s no question of me becoming an agnostic or an athiest, not ever. I can’t disbelieve what I encountered. It has helped to make me who I am.

And no, I have not also sighted UFOs or spoken in seances to the dead.

That encounter rendered superfluous some of the particularities of religions. God was not revealed as Baptist or Catholic or Buddhist or Hindu; there was nothing of doctrines and that damned religious game of who’s in and who’s out.

Perversions of faith still stand in dark, stark contrast against that light, and trivialities pale.

Leonard Cohen’s haunting anthem “Hallelujah ” always sounds notes of truth for me. He writes,

There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Mostly, we hear broken Hallelujahs. Our sermons, our songs, my words on this page, even scriptures (and I’m not thinking merely of the Bible) - all these are broken Hallelujahs, for we cannot piece words together that serve as adequate vessels to hold and pour out the divine. And whatever we do piece together is always, well, full of us. I loved Julia Sweeney’s monologue, “Letting Go of God,” broadcast recently on This American Life. Sweeney makes me laugh. She makes me ponder. She reminds us of just how broken human hallelujahs are, as recorded in scripture. The end of her journey through the Bible from cover to cover is her letting go of God. That gives me pause. My journey proceeds differently. I look for the blaze of a familiar light wherever it shines through, and see our own humanity in much of the rest, muddily reflected back at us.

In our time, Hallelujah has been corrupted for political campaign slogans by those who know how to harness religion for their own ends. Hallelujah has been enslaved to intolerance and injustice in the name of a righteousness that forgets the very nature of God. Hallelujah has been co-opted to serve the rich and fleece the poor, in an inversion of the beatitudes, and to exploit a creation (by whatever processes it came to be) that rightly inspires awe and reverent stewardship. None of this is new, and it makes us sometimes wonder if no religion would serve us better than religion if this is what religion comes to.

I long for a corrective. I appreciate Alessandro Camon’s essay Rescuing Jesus, posted a few weeks ago at Salon.com. He asserts that “Bush & Co. have hijacked Jesus, using him as the poster child for their callous worldview” and declares, “It’s time to rescue Christ from his kidnappers.” He sums up his case this way:

The American Christian right has hijacked Jesus Christ. It has made him into a brand, a logo, a bumper sticker. It celebrates his suffering on the cross, but largely neglects what he had to say. It prefers an Old Testament God, a “Jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.” It elevates success to proof of God’s favor, and washes its hands of responsibility for the poor. It combines a self-righteous vision of Americans as the chosen people with shrill intimations of imminent apocalypse, to justify indifference to the rest of the world and to the planet itself.

More than this, he goes on to correct our understanding of what Jesus actually did say, a project which matters to me because I recognize in the words of Jesus this blaze of light it was once given to me to glimpse.

I think of how much of God is missed in this muddied world because of our corrupted Hallelujahs. I think of what is empowered because Hallelujah is used deftly as a tool for the ends of the powerful. And I remember a short story by Langston Hughes - “On the Road.” Hughes’ protagonist, Sargeant, an African American man down on his luck on a winter day, tries to take refuge at a white church in the time of segregation. Sergeant is turned away, beaten, and, knocked unconscious, he dreams that he pulls the church down, like a Samson. When the church falls, the sculpted Christ is freed from his cross, and the two walk together:

“Yes,” said Christ, crunching his feet in the snow. “You had to pull the church down to get me off the cross.”

“You glad?” said Sargeant.

“I sure am,” said Christ.

They both laughed.

“I’m a hell of a fellow, ain’t I?” said Sargeant. “Done pulled the church down!”

“You did a good job,” said Christ. “They have kept me nailed on a cross for nearly two thousand years.”

It is time - perhaps this is perpetually so - for us to examine our broken Hallelujahs, to sort out our blazes of light from our flawed humanity, and from distortions we are led (far, far too passively) to accept as truth. Otherwise, we should not claim that we do the things that we do, or vote at the ballot box, in the name of Hallelujah.

As a person who finds no resemblance between the spirit of the gospels and the thrust of the conservative political agenda, I find Anne Lamott’s little essay, “God doesn’t take sides” to be considerable solace, a cup of cold water, a breath of fresh air in very smelly world. I really need that. But I need more than a cup of cold water; I need a bucketful dumped over my head to cool me off. I’m trying to figure out what it is that makes me so angry - that powerful people try to make God into a puppet, an oversized caricature of themselves, purportedly infallible? that they thereby obscure who God is in a world that needs the genuine article? that they miss the entire thrust of the gospel, which is love? that they play on peoples’ feelings about a couple of issues in order to manipulate behavior at the polls and thereby run the world? that they alienate and exclude rather than embrace? that they take words and make them mean what they want them to, carrying me ever farther from the language of my own faith, such that I now feel I have to define what I mean when I say I’m a Christian? Yes, Anne Lamott is definitely handling the matter more gracefully than I am. It’s just that I’m not sure it’s merely grace that’s called for.