Well, I try really hard to avoid talking about politics, but I don't see how anyone can say nothing about this year's presidential race; especially now.

The most important thing I can say about Obama's victory, for myself, is that I realize it is deeply meaningful in profound ways, ways that many of us cannot possibly fully appreciate. Watching news coverage of people weeping, screaming, running and dancing in the streets and—I could be imaging it, but—the general excitement and pride I believe I've encountered in LA this week, is precious. I am very, very, very happy for this meaning in Obama's victory. I am grateful to be able to say that I've been a witness to it. And for those who smirk at the idea of this being the "most important" thing I can say, well, my response is that in my opinion you truly underestimate its meaning.

Other than that, during the campaigns I found myself more frustrated and saddened than ever; largely because I paid more attention to this campaign than any other, partly because I'm getting older, and partly because I pay more attention to rhetorical strategies nowadays. All of the candidates bent the truth (I'm being kind) with impunity, both potential presidents made promises they cannot possibly keep, and both said they will do things they cannot possibly do. My biggest frustration and sadness in this campaign was simply the further maturing realization that as a consumer of political propaganda, punditry and "analysis," I am assumed to be a gross moron fueled by fear, raw emotion and selfish motives. To whatever level, in actuality, that I rise above that, I have been deeply offended by the whole mess of it all. I almost, very closely, refused to vote. But as I've noted previously in this blog, I hold, in faith, to the importance of voting. So I voted. For the dude I knew was going to lose anyway. I cast a vote not for a person, nor for a party's ideology, but for my own ideology, and in a manner that would not be a part of anyone being put into the white house. My vote was one of supporting an idea while rejecting its methodologies; of supporting the process in principal while not being a part of it in effect.

And this may well mean, after all, that I am a gross moron fueled only by fear, raw emotion and selfish motives. The strange loops of being human are seemingly unavoidable.

Next week work will be taking me to LA. The week after that I'll be heading to… well, someplace else. Geez. I hate flying. I have a phobia. It terrifies me. Think "Rain Man." Anyway…

This week I've met a few well-travelled folks, people who are retired and spend their time travelling about the country building homes with Habitat for Humanity. My boss has extended me the luxury of working on a Habitat house in the day, and working my real job at night. I think I'm not wise for assuming this schedule, but I am thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying helping build the house. I get to do physical labor, I meet generous folks, I do something good for another family, and I feel like I'm living like I'm supposed to. And, you know, it's a good thing for one's humility to do something you know little about. I have no idea how many times this week I've been shown what I've done wrong. But there are some really fine, practical, hands-on educators doing this stuff. I've been working with a guy and I'll ask him, "So, how do I do this? What am I doing wrong here? How do I fix this?" He'll show me how to do it, and then have me do it myself. Then he'll say, "Do you want me to tell me you why?" and if you answer in the affirmative, he'll explain the reasoning behind the action. I am always fascinated that there's a reason behind pretty much everything, and that a zillion little things are discovered throughout history, preserved and passed down and taught, becoming common knowledge in a particular community. Anyway, I like this approach to teaching. Tell somebody how to do something. If they're happy with that, so be it. But then offer to explain why that's how it's done. If they want to know, tell them. Either way: easy, efficient, done.

One of my kids asked me why I'm doing this. So I explained, again, that everything we have, and everything we can do, has been given to us for a reason: to help other people. Hopefully, one of these days it will stick. And hopefully, one of these days I'll do a better job of living up to it myself.

Here's the interesting theoretical aspect to the experience: you've got the two poles of American socioeconomic political theory coming together in a way that works very well. The company sponsoring this house is a big-business capitalistic enterprise which just so happens to have invested one and a half million dollars into Habitat, and on this gig is pitching in big time. On the other hand, there's an element going on concerning the haves and the have-nots, about socioeconomics and about what's fair and what's not, and about people who aren't worried about getting their hands dirty and their knuckles busted. It's a really interesting mix of various ideologies coming together both in theory and in individual people. The frameworks battling it out silently and far behind the scenes are enormously complex. But, I like my version: everything we have, and everything we can do, is to help other people.

This basic understanding and agreement is part of what I'm preaching in life.

Outside of reading The Cost of Discipleship and being aware of the general legendary respect given by many to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I've never studied him. I've been working on this post for about an hour, and have decided to just give up trying to write it. This interview is compelling at so many levels, I don't know where to start talking about it.

And by the way, the documentary referenced in the interview is available at Netflix for instant viewing.

The opening and concluding paragraphs of in our poverty, chapter 10:

To many people the Bible is more important than God. They consider the Bible to be the only validation of anything man can possibly have to do with God. They believe there is no point in believing there is a God unless you believe in the Bible. To them there is no useful God apart from the Bible, and there would be no point to God's existence without the Bible. Reduced to its pure practicality, their view is that without the Bible there is no God.

If I am to live in this physical world and see it rightly, see each created thing as a manifestation of God's glory, I must see that the world, both in its visible forms and in its hidden forms, is part of the word of God. I must then take what I see and I must love what I see; not love a particular thing as if for its own sake, but love it for the particular word or words of God it is. I do not need to love the things of this world, but I must come to dearly and passionately love the spirit of God as it shows itself to me within and through them. Once I have seen and learned to love what is before me, I must welcome this love into my heart that it may compel me to act in accord with God's word all around me. If I cannot do this, the meaning of all these things will be lost to me and I will not hear his voice. Each utterance of God around me will fall upon my deafness, and if I hear anything at all it will only be because I mistake my own voice for that of God.

Probably just me, but is Jimmy Carter the only president in my lifetime who… no, that would seem rude. Let's just say he remains the only politician to impress me; which cannot be wholly unrelated to the fact that he wasn't particularly successful at being one. The mp3 here has some stuff worth hearing.

Several months ago, probably closer to a year ago, I began putting together a post but had some problems working it out in my mind. I thought up until this week that I had eventually posted it, but I can find it nowhere, so I'm guessing that I didn't. In that case, it's a nice thing that I didn't, because I think I've now remedied the problem I was having (best as I can recall) with feeling good about posting it in the first place.

The post was supposed to be the first of three concerning "dirty little secrets" of Christian faith (note, please, that I'm referring to specific traditions in modern Christian faith; not Christian faith in general). Well, so I didn't publish the first, I forgot the second, and I ended up posting the third as "Faith, Belief, Reality etc. Part III." Now that I recently posted some ideas on judgment, I think I'm ready to publish the first post now, in a slightly edited form without some introductory materials concerning dirty little secrets. I'll include the post here and now, and append a comment or two related to the judgment post:

[begin]

A lot of us, Christian or not, spend a fair amount of time talking about "justice." Oftentimes, perhaps usually, we talk about how justice was or was not carried out in a particular criminal or civil case. Sometimes we talk about justice in terms of our Christian faith, generally when we talk about Heaven and Hell and who will or should go to either place. In the majority of all these cases we like to say we "cry out" for justice to be served, which is in itself a borrowing of language inherited from religious tradition. We believe, for whatever reasons, that crying out for justice is a good, moral, Godly thing for us to do. And so it is. But now we have to get a little closer to the dirty little secret, and to inch toward it I'll start with Micah, who is credited with saying:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, NRSV)

Some English translations of the Old Testament give us "mercy" instead of kindness in this verse, and I'm not sure which, if either, is closer to the Hebrew. I'm going to go with mercy, since it's what I've heard most often and because, admittedly, it goes better with my point. To love mercy implies that we will extend mercy, and extending mercy necessitates that beforehand a wrong must have been committed. (After all, if none had been committed, there would be no need for mercy.) In short, it seems to me that if we accept that the three things Micah admonishes us to pursue are not mutually exclusive—and there is no reason to think they are so—then mercy is dealing with gracious forgiveness toward wrong-doing and if so, then the justice we are supposed to "do" is not about dispensing an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. It is not about people "getting what they deserve." Justice here cannot be about punishing wrong, nor about giving another person their just desserts. So here's the beginning of the dirty little secret: The justice we typically seek in mainstream Christianity is not the justice God asks of us, but is a purposeful misinterpretation on our parts; one which allows us to ignore what Micah says the LORD really requires of us: that we be socially just.

I have long believed and often said that every problem of man comes down to his frighteningly insidious and clever pride. In the case of ourselves vis-à-vis Micah, what we have is a pride that tells us we should be able to possess whatever we want in life no matter what the cost to those who can't seem to get what they need in life. It is pride that tells us that we deserve spoils and they don't, because, simply, we are good and they are not (in a sort of incestuous reasoning , we have previously concluded, via our poor theology, that they are not good because they do not have). Once this pride convinces us that justice is about punishment and vengeance rather than social welfare and fairness, then we can tell—which is to say, lie to—ourselves that we cry out for justice, while we commit all manner of crimes against social justice. Furthermore, because this twisted view of life necessitates that we relegate the justice for which we "must" cry out to the realm of punishment and just desserts, we throw mercy out the window, saving it as well for those whom we judge to be deserving—which we read as those who haven't really done anything wrong other than what we ourselves may have already done or are currently doing. In short, we somehow manage to make sure that justice and mercy are defined in such a way that each affords us personally the most benefit possible. Whatever that psychological, intellectual "somehow" may be, it is allowed to succeed because it is approved by our pride.

What the secret comes down to, the dirty little secret too dirty for our minds to allow to bubble up to the surface of our consciences, is that we rich, Bible-thumping Christians are not leading the lives God asks us to live. In spite of all our rhetoric, in spite of all our crying out, in spite of all our so-called morality, we are missing the basic, essential facts of Godliness. And dirtiest of all, when it comes down to it and the rubber meets the road, we aren't really willing to face the facts. Plain and simple, we don't want to be in line with God's program. We don't want to be, because we are too selfish. We don't want to be, because we don't want to share. We don't want to be, because we would rather believe that we deserve life's extravagant spoils and others deserve comparatively nothing. We don't want to be, because in the end we care about ourselves far more than we care about others. We don't want to be, because we like it this way. We don't want to be, because it's a lot more fun to wheel our SUV through the drive-thru than it is to be like much of the rest of the world: hungry, sick and suffering from exposure to the elements. Besides, what thinking person can't see the truth that some of us are blessed because of who we are, some are cursed because of who they are, and this is the way life always will and should be? (Well and of course, notwithstanding that Micah, the other prophets and Jesus disagree.)

Many of us, and I fear myself included, are hypocrites in the realm of justice. It's a secret that only we don't know.

[end]

As best as I can recall (and believe me, my memory is not so great anymore), the problem I had with this post was questioning myself on my interpretation of the word justice. I seem to recall going a few rounds in my head about whether or not I was being sufficiently open to the form of justice that I was rejecting. But, after reviewing Jesus' invective in Matthew, where (it seems clear to me, anyway) that Jesus is quoting the prophets regarding justice, mercy and humility, I have to side with my original thoughts. Jesus was far more interested in social justice (or, more correctly, the lack thereof) in his time than about "legal" justice. What is significant here is that I can find no evidence that the Pharisees, scribes and such were short on the "legal" justice. To the point, given that these men were more than willing to deny, cast out and punish those whom they considered to fall short, and given that in such an environment Jesus would say they had neglected justice, I really must conclude that Jesus' take on the prophet was that the reference is to social justice.

Do I feel better? Yes, in that I think the original post stands on firm footing. And no, in that I think the post stands on firm footing.

This post has an underlying complication, which to my mind is a rather large one, that I will try to address in a later post; one that I started this past week but have yet to finish.

In the vivid darkness of God within us there sometimes come deep movements of love that deliver us entirely, for a moment, from our old burden of selfishness, and number us among those little children of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.

And when God allows us to fall back into our own confusion of desires and judgments and temptations, we carry a scar over the place where that joy exulted for moment in our hearts.

The scar burns us. The sore wound aches within us, and we remember that we have fallen back into what we are not, and are not yet allowed to remain where God would have us belong. We long for the place He has destined for us and weep with desire for the time when this pure poverty will catch us and hold us in its liberty and never let us go, when we will never fall back from the Paradise of the simple and the little children into the forum of prudence where the wise of this world go up and down in sorrow and set their traps for a happiness that cannot exist. —New Seeds, chapter 31

There are moments in God, beautiful, mind-numbing moments, where the Love of God is glimpsed and all of life becomes crystal clear in its profound simplicity. To the human mind God is full of paradoxes, and the profound nature of that simplicity is one of them. It's an absolutely glorious thing. But true, the moment never lasts, and only the scar remains. And those scars, over time, remind us of God's Love while we are in our normal everyday living. We remember, though we cannot feel at the moment, that it answers everything. We hold onto enough of our memory of those moments that our view of life is forver changed. Even though we fall back to our weakened states of self-absorption, we never forget that Love rules all, and that we are on this earth to be part of that Love.

The souvenirs brought back to our house this weekend include a book of poetry and a poster from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial. I was greatly touched that my wife and daughter would pick these two gifts for me. I like to think that, perhaps, they say something of what I try to stand for in life; that even though I am weak and frail and full of selfishness, I carry the scars and do not forget their pain. The poster is of a very famous quote by Martin Niemoller, a quote which exists in many variations:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Niemoller is a very controversial figure because in the 1930's he held anti-Semitic views. To be clear, I know almost nothing of Niemoller's life, but it remains that this quote (or rather, versions of it) appear on walls at both the U.S. and New England Holocaust Memorials. For good or for bad, Niemoller has become somewhat of a hero in relation to the Holocaust. It may be that Niemoller serves as a perfect example of his poem. He didn't speak up for those who were "different" from him, and in the end the system caught up with him—a lesson we should take to heart, I think. Do not believe that we stand alone, cherished and special, while others fall by the wayside. Hatred, fear and insanity are rarely satisfied in erasing only one or two "different" classes of people. Once a single class is done and gone, those who hate have nothing left to do, no one left to hate, until they can invent the next class that is not quite enough like them, and so must be eliminated. The poster I was given notes that the Nazi party created colored symbols to denote each class of people they needed to eliminate in order to cleanse society. Among them were the communists, the socialists, the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the emigrants. Should this list give us pause? I think so. I think a list, period, should give us pause.

In those moments where one touches the Love of God, when one glimpses briefly through the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, one learns that God's love is about a Oneness; about a Love that gathers us one to another in God and makes us all one in God's presence. To divide humans into groups, factions and classes is the antithesis of Loving them. A Christianity which divides and casts out, therefore and quite clearly, is really not much of a Christianity. Yet, to say so is to cause division, and here is where I will work on the complication—another day.

Last year the congregation I attend announced that it would be holding a congregation-wide, weekend long retreat to promote fellowship. Good idea.

Well, except that the facility hosting the retreat, it was known at the time, charged around two hundred dollars to feed and house a family for the weekend. This meant, in effect, that the weekend of fellowship was for those in the minority portion of the congregation who could afford it. Bad idea. Really, really, bad idea.

Oh, there was no backlash. Nobody mentioned it in public. I heard no grumbling. But I was terribly bothered by it. It was so simple, so clear, so blatant. Did anybody organizing the event realize what it sounds like, what it means, when you stand in a pulpit and say that the whole congregation is invited, when most of the people know it is impossible for them, and those doing the inviting already know that? What exactly is the congregation implied to be in such circumstances? Those who can afford to be a part of it? And uh, parenthetically, isn't this the opposite of what Jesus taught?

This a perfect example of how socio-economics works in the real world: money divides people, all of the time in a myriad of ways. But the example is especially disconcerting in an organization where nobody is supposed to be divided in any way. Even more worrisome is that when I mentioned this to a few people who could afford to attend the retreat, as far as I could tell the economics and the consequent divide hadn't occurred to them at all. None of these people were mean or cruel people, but they were—and this is not an excuse—clueless. Those of us who enjoy power and privilege in a group small or large are likely to never notice the way we flaunt our position and lord it over others, and why should we? When all is well, when we have everything we need and most everything we want, what would cause us to stop and see the other side? What could cause us to question what we've always known? What would incite inquiry into that which seems so normal, so natural and so right to us? What, that is, except a heart and mind in a different, which is to say proper, place?

We need to stop and think. We need to think about the things we say and choose to do. There are numerous examples of the above case in point; little situations we probably don't even notice, that drive a wedge between humans because of economics. We need to think about a Christianity that prides itself on following the Bible and striving to emulate the church of the first century. In that church, everyone had everything in common, and no one was in need. Those who had, sold what they had so that those who had not, could have. We need to think about how we don't like to think about that little detail. We need to think about getting a clue.

And by "we," I mean myself most of all.