The Fat Lady is Humming

The end of the Iraq occupation began November 7, 2006, when the electorate spoke clearly on the subject. One by one, official voices concede that the military occupation of Iraq is a losing effort, if not a lost cause. In an Op Ed piece in the June 12th Los Angeles Times, Christopher Fettweis asked, “What happens after Iraq?” In that piece, “Post traumatic Iraq Syndrome,” the National Security Affairs Professor at the U.S. Naval War College began the post Iraq conversation. He sees a tumultuous time coming. “The consequences (of withdrawal from Iraq) for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation.” Clearly, the work of national reconciliation will be a long term and difficult project. Congregations of every stripe will be crucial to that effort. We can do a better job this time around, I believe.

Atop the agenda for congregations will be to assess the theological voices that have led us to disaster in the first place. One such voice demanding clear response is that of Mike Evans, the head of the “Jerusalem Prayer Team,” and cheerleader of the Apocalypse. Of course, such voices have always been present on the American scene. We have effectively dealt with them in the past. In fact, Evans may be self discrediting. His post Iraq vision is the theme of the New York Times best seller, The Final Move Beyond Iraq. What to do post Iraq? Attack Iran! He recommends stepping out of the frying pan into the fire! People of faith have something important to say about that sort of thinking.

It is not too early for faith communities to begin the conversation. Post Iraq reconciliation will be incubated starting now. Talking about the faith community’s response to the 9-11 tragedy might be a good starting point. What got us into trouble? How did faith communities aid and abet the disastrous Iraq response? What did faith communities do to ameliorate the same disaster. When you find consensus, take it to the next level. Invite resolutions, debates, conversations in your faith community and in the wider community. Publicize your conversation in local media. Build a Post Iraq agenda and circulate it.

Christian and Hebrew Congregations might contextualize these discussions with a review of the Iraq materials in their own scriptures. The Bible's Babylon is today's Iraq, a nation that was a key player in the Jewish history. The literature of the exile in Babylon can provide deep background to a conversation about Iraq. Of particular impact are the writings of Prophets Jeremiah and Daniel. The songs from a strange land in the Psalms and in the Song of the Three Young Men (Canticle 12, p. 88 in the BCP) can supplement the conversation.

Whatever approach you take, we will all benefit from forward movement toward reconciliation in the post Iraq period. The work of building a Post Iraq consensus cannot start too soon.

Sunset on the Goose Season

The other day, the Parks and Rec Supervisor passed along the news that the Goose Chasing season had come to an end for this year. With the influx of human beings into the parks and golf courses, the Canadas are wary of hanging around. It has been a wonderful experience. To take two dogs who had no experience at herding Geese and to watch them develop their tactics over the spring has been a treat. Just when they were getting some expertise, the season finished. Their last trip out was a tour de force. Wagster, the old gal, finally hit the water and took on the herding work with seriousness. Bridget, the youngster, was not falling for the old tricks that had her chasing her tail in the middle of the pond, or worse, endangering herself.

Now, the Geese that are on the water have their broods, they will not leave the place, regardless of provocation. But the dogs haven't yet gotten the message. Any trip in the car has to be a goose chase. They take off on the job, even when they are walking where there are no geese! At least they have the memory and will be hot stuff next spring.

Milestones from the spring chase: Bridget had her first run in with a swan. (one of the tricks she fell for) Geese are scared, swans are not. They confront. I got her out of the water just before the old swan was ready to clobber her. The dogs quickly adjusted to their quarry shortly after that swan run in. They don't even mess with the ducks. That big old blue heron that haunts the pond is of no interest to them whatsoever. Even the sandhill cranes, as dramatic as they are, got nothing more than a passing note from the dogs.

So that was the season past. It was a lot of fun. Meanwhile, I need to find a way to keep the fat off of them. Mutton, anyone?

Faith and T.V.: Buyer Beware

Analysis of television, its effects on our lives and the way it drives the choices we make, is a relatively recent undertaking. Pierre Bourdieu’s 1996 lectures, printed in a book entitled On Television, is one of these early attempts at analysis. That was 11 years ago! Fifty some years after the invention of t.v. we come to Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason. Gore starts his analysis by an examination of the disfiguring effects of television on our democratic institutions. But what has t.v. done to religion? Even the novice channel surfer is keenly aware of the myriad of channels that purport offer faith to its watchers. I believe that television is as corrosive to the practice of faith as it is to political health. Here is a short outline of the features that faux faith brings to the tiny screen.

One way conversation Television is not anything like like real talk. It is more like being targeted. It all comes one way, at you. In fact, television religionists aim their messages in the same way politicians target particular populations. At targeting, televised religion has been devastatingly effective. But faith happens "where two or three are gathered, in the context of a community. Faith is continually tested in the context of real human relationships. There, the faith involves persons and ideas that usually conflict, grate on the nerves. Here is the test of the Spirit to the test. (this sort of thing inhabits nearly every gathering in the biblical literature.) Television is a no community. Rather, the one way messages breed a kind of conformity and passivity that is the hallmark of the consumer age. Further this sort of Christianity, or Islam for that matter, is untested where people live. It has a synthetic quality to it.

Thinking in a line T.V. Christianity is of one type of thinking only, linear thinking. It starts at one point and drives to a destination. But faith is lived in a 360 degree context. Insights into the divine life and the human dilemma come upon us as surprises, often from the periphery. This "quid pro quo" faith leads to vending machine expectations about God, expectations that are continually frustrated in the practice of living religion.

The need for spectacle Writers of the Gospels were acutely aware of the seduction of spectacle. The Gospel of Matthew introduces its protagonist in a confrontation with Satan who makes some spectacular demands. Turning stones into bread or leaping off the pinnacle of the Temple are the sorts of things that are made for television. Producers and advertisers alike are on a perpetual search for them, no matter how they harm or degrade the participants.

As seen on t.v. The medium confers legitimacy even on the most harebrained or inane of suggestions. How often does one walk away from the talking heads with a sense of unease, countered by the notion, if it's on t.v., it must be true. Simply to appear on television to gain legitimacy. (the clowns of children's television 40 years ago testify to that!) Evel Knievel’s warning, “kids, don’t try this at home,” applies doubly to the consumers of television religion.

The tyranny of time Even the novice television viewer marvels at the way a drama reaches its conclusion in the allotted 22 minutes. Early television drama, the old ½ hour shows that Baby Boomers grew up on, had to wrap things up in the allotted time. But the Spirit forms us on another schedule. The greatest lessons and life skills are learned over a life time. They come slowly, often requiring at least a season. Faith lessons, meted out within the allotted time t.v. allows, are useless fare for serious life directed belief.

For those seeking to grow in faith, not all is lost in television’s fantasy land. Occasionally, one can be inspired to action by the presentation of a way of life or of a particularly pressing problem. But let’s not be fooled. Most of the time, television makes of us couch potatoes. As watching sports does not convey physical fitness; (You need to go to the gym for that!) so, television, can only offer a poor and distorted substitute for the real thing. The best place to begin the exploration of faith is in the midst of a living, breathing, serving faith community, far from the boob tube. We dare not wait. Faith communities already strain under the demands of a deluded public marinated in the illusions of t.v. religion.

Listen to the words of poet William Butler Yeats.

We had fed the heart on fantasy,
and the heart's grown brutal on the fare.

Such brutality, the companion to t. v. religion, is the hallmark of our time.

With Our Wind Knocked Out

James Arthur Kelsey

Bishop of the Diocese of Northern Michigan

1952 - 2007

News of Jim Kelsey’s premature death comes as a crushing blow to friends and colleagues across the nation, indeed the globe. For those in Northern Michigan, the news is an insult, like a paralyzed diaphragm that has stopped our very breath. It is not simply the loss Jim’s vigor that we feel in nearly physical ways. It is the vision of the Church to which he gave himself. We are with the disciples along the Emmaus Road. 'We stand still, looking sad.'

There is so much more to this grief than the shock of the death of a close friend, the frightening specter such a tragedy visits upon us. Jim was inhabited by a Gospel so urgent that it shone a bright light. It was as piercing as the penetrating lights of the prophets themselves. No more clearly is this light than as it shines through Jim’s reflections on the Beatitudes, And it is this world that the gospel turns upside down. Calling have-nots “Blessed”?? Can you imagine?

I want to lay Jim’s work along side the groundbreaking work of Miles Horton at the Highlander Folk School, from which sprang the heart of the Civil Right’s Revolution. It was powered by Wes Frensdorff’s “Dream” of a church of radical companionship. Jim’s church is one of great imagination, of steely commitment to a Gospel of inclusion and of astonishing gratitude. Even while he was taking on the work of reshaping congregational life in Northern Michigan, rediscovering the radical inclusion of the Good News and fighting to keep the focus on the humanizing values at the heart of the Gospel, he would write this line. Let us be thankful that we a part of a Church which is trying, at least, to figure out how to bring these matters to the table, so we might discover what future God is calling us to.

He ended a recent chronicle of the House of Bishop’s wrenching consideration of the emerging, and punishing, Covenant being proposed by many in the Anglican Communion, Jim was able to end his report saying: It's kind of cool being an Episcopalian after all! This was not an expression of foolish optimism, but of the conviction that what was being made alive among us, as yet in small ways, would one day be seen as the beating heart of the Church. We were then, and are now, becoming a people in which hope resides, where everyone is able to exercise their gifts for ministry, and all, positively all, are welcome. Jim's life's work was about breaking down the walls the kept us from the power of our own proclamation.

Now the seed is sown. Jim’s work, even now, brings tears of joy to those who live near the edge of hope. The hope he posessed is a bright light shining through his life.

The world is turning upside down. And those who are losing altitude in the transaction are not well pleased. But as those who have been held down for so long are allowed to rise, with God's new laws of gravity, we are all of us blessed with an opportunity to rediscover how we are bound one to another, to God, and to all of creation.

For now, our attention and care involves finding our breath. With Mary, Nathan, Lydia, Amos, Steve and the whole Diocese of Northern Michigan our innards strain to breathe in a living hope. For now, we are the have nots. We are blessed. Can you imagine such a thing?

Faith of Our Sisters

Sara Paretsky has published a memoir, Writing in the Age of Silence. She is beloved for her detective fiction. As the creator of Chicago detective V. I. Warshawski, Paretsky has been exploring a woman’s role in what was a man’s world. In this recent book, she reflects on the road she and her sisters have traveled from the days when “women have been property, first of our fathers, then of our husbands or brothers.”

The chapter, “Not Angel, Not Monster, Just Human,” traces the progress of second wave feminism. She dwells on a glaring irony in the attitude of the hard right.

We are in a peculiar state of mind in America these days. We want untrammeled capital markets. We think speed limits, handgun controls and taxes are unwarranted intrusion into personal liberty. But we feel an overwhelming need to control women’s sexuality.

We can trust Wall Streeters, drivers, gun owners and the wealthy enough to loosen our policy grip, while we must tighten our grip on the bodies of our sisters, wives and mothers. The rationale of the religious right is at the heart of the hypocrisy. There is a ferocious effort to turn back the clock. It shows its ugly face in a peculiar American iteration of violence. For when it comes to the control of women over their own bodies, a kind of home grown terrorism soon appears.

Paretsky unveils another, more pernicious, irony. By returning our sisters to the status of objects, we are reseeding the foundations of pornography. At its most basic, pornography stems from the confusion of persons with objects. This dirty little secret remains unrecognized in these churches. All the happy talk about healthy relationships, acceptable sex roles, so called family values, disguise a contempt for human sexuality and ultimately its abuse. “As women are bombarded with images of themselves as sexual objects or sexual monsters, . . .women seem to seek to appear harmless.” That is the prevailing dynamic in right wing congregations. Dealing with sexuality in such stereotypic terms, in fact, is dangerous.

Just human, that is Paretsky’s destination. Theologians would do well to begin their thinking there. The scriptures do! “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Faith communities are starving for such discerning voices.

Falwell la la la la la la la

The soupy obituaries in the nation’s press at the death of Jerry Falwell strain to find something significant to say. Most of the coverage is an enormous back handed compliment resembling the joke, “For a fat guy, you don’t sweat much.” What a travesty. One has come to expect that sort of dissembling from the media. “What ever happened to fair and balanced?” I ask myself. So, I decided that if fair and balanced was going to happen, I would have to do it.

In fact, the media love power, even if it's that power which corrupts absolutely. What would the truth look like about Rev. Falwell? I start with the con man, Joe “Paper Collar” Bessimer, whose bastardization of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s famous phrase reads like this, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Falwell was this generation’s P. T. Barnum, a showman. He began on television in 1956 with the Gospel of Segregation. But, you see, television concerns itself little with what people say, but with how the spokesman says it. That’s how Ronald Reagan seemed to do so well. He had mastered the “how to say it” puzzle. So did Falwell.

What one sees in the public life of a Jerry Falwell is what happens when the methods of bigotry are given their head. True, he did recant his segregationist line. But he kept on with the approach, the fear mongering, that succeeded so well. His most successful promotion, The Moral Majority, in fact, was one big media savvy complaining fear monger. Complaining about women, frightened about gays, warning of evils under every bush. . . that was his stock in trade. But it was not Gospel. It was bad news.

In all of the glitz, reality got lost. We were ushered into the grand battle of good and evil that has brought us to travesties like the Iraq war. Reality is sumberged, out of view. The Falwells of this world brought us a construction that no longer bore any relation to what actually goes on . Evolution is become a liberal bias, 9-11 has became the opening salvo in the world Muslim/Christian warfare, and a thousand complaints about the human race have won the day. No, Rev. Falwell’s meteoric rise wasn’t about the concern a pastor has for the flock. Neither was it about the search for truth. It was about the thirst a media entrepreneur has for power. Plain and simple.

There. At least somewhere, someone has tried to balance the fawning media elites. Whether it makes any difference is up to you. For me, Falwell stands as a stark warning about the price we pay when we confuse the showman with the show. There is a sucker born every minute. That may sell tickets, but it is no basis for a theology.

The View from Bareback

Along Lake Superior's southern shore, a rock face runs in parallel, less than a mile from the big water. At some points, it is a daunting climb to reach the overlooks. Marquette's Hogs Back and Sugar Loaf Mountains are popular challenges for the young. Bareback Ridge has been a particular favorite for me over the years. It is become a vision place. The unbroken expanse of water to the east and the birds eye view of Harlow Lake to the north provide a stimulating milieu. This week, I happened by the place again. I was astonished by the richness of the hike, bringing to mind the rich blueberry crops of years past, the splashes of color that illuminated the autumn there. It might be the sort of thing one might find on a hackneyed greeting card, except that over the years, the place has become inhabited in a deep way.

So, I sat on the rock promintory listening for a familiar voice. This year, it came in the form of a look back over 20 years of hiking this path, sitting on these same rocks. In all that time, one begins to notice things. There was the hike when I happened upon an enormous jackpine snapped like a kitchen match by the east wind. Last year's footholds were not always there. A tree or a rock on which I had come to rely may have moved, fallen away down the steep slope, or taken up residence across the path. New flora appeared and receded. (The first ever jack in the pulpit appeared on this spring hike.) Old paths gave way to new. A meadow expanded to inhabit what was the shade of a now fallen oak.

One tends to associate movement in the wilds with the swirling clouds of gnats, the darting of a songbird, the lumbering shape off in the brush, the gurgling of water on the move. With 20 years of noticing along the Bareback Path, I began to see that everything was on the move. Gospel visions of shouting stones; trees and boulders that amble across the landscape and toss themselves into the sea, these are not exceptional images. From bareback such swirling movement is the fundamental fact of life.

The voice from Bareback Ridge this year does not speak in the majesty of the Huron Mountains across the north; nor in the sheer expanse of the Inland Sea of Lake Superior; nor in the intricacy of the darting life forms all around. . . it speaks is in the sheer flow of it all. Like the volcano's lava, the entire creation is awash in movement. The creation dances.

I realized that I spend way too much time looking for anchors, for boulders too large to move. I'm constantly trying to put in stakes and claim stability, where movement is the only fact of life. It is most helpful to speak of the divine life as rocks and trees as one is deeply mindful that they, too are on the move. Dancing, swimming, moving, pilgrimage, these are the images that cry out to be recovered in contemporary religious experience. It may be that the terrors of Jihad (our own and that which we fear) arise from a God who does not dance. Life in the Spirit is about learning to move.

The Rabbi lay on his deathbed. His students formed a line that stretched from the bedside, down the hallway, descending the stairs, out the door and around the block. They were arranged from the best student to the least accomplished at the far end of the line. The prize pupil asked, "Rabbi, what is the meaning of life?" The holy man whispered, "Life is a river." The students passed along this bit of wisdom, one to another, clear to the farthest student, who asked, "What does the Rabbi mean, 'Life is a river?'" The question bubbled back through the line to the bedside, the prize pupil asking, "Rabbi, what do you mean, "Life is a river?" To this the Rabbi, "So, maybe life is not a river."