Ponderings

The long awaited “Hillary calendars”, at least most of them, have been released and after more than 24 hours of Hillary-hating scouring, the largest stone to hurl is that she was at home when Bill was misbehaving.

Shame on us. Shame on the “family values” advocates who discreetly turn away while Hillary is trashed for ‘standing by her man’. Shame on the politically correct liberals for snickering. Shame on all of us who think we could have, would have, should have done better. Utopia means no where. And perfect marriage, perfect relationship, perfect anything happens only in utopia. For the rest, we make due with what we have.

Shame isn’t a term or a concept with which I am terribly comfortable. I’ll tiptoe through it and the other dark emotions at the end of Holy Week, taking comfort only in that it is a brief sprint. Easter is on the horizon, the carrot that pulls me through.

But as I read the headlines, I wonder if we have danced too quickly through the minefield and are too cavalier with searing truth of our own shadow selves. I wonder if we’ve been too quick to gloss over our own choices and compromises, our own limitations and failures. The stones are less appealing when we’ve taken account of the glass that surrounds us.

In their book, “The Last Week”, Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan make the point that the horror and highlight belong together. An Easter celebration without the spiritual weight of the God’s Friday is meaningless fluff and a Passion narrative devoid of God’s cosmic presence is horrifying. In order to fully embrace our own lives, we must face both the best and the worst in the human condition. In Christianity, the Lenten pilgrimage, culminating in this Holy Week drama is our invitation.

Fully immersed in our participation in the human drama, we see the stones in our hands and feel their weight anew. With the fluff blown away, we recognize the compromises and shortcomings in our own relationships, a painful view that is redemptive only in the light of a new dawn.

This Holy Week opened with a public crucifixion of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ and Barack Obama’s pastor. It is drawing to a close with a castigation of Hillary Clinton for exercising her choice to remain in a marriage even when the compromises are painfully public. In the interest of fairness, it must now be time to shred the humanity of Senator John McCain.

Blessedly, the week is coming to end and quickly. With Easter just a few short hours from now, I pray that we will drop the stones and get on with the work of Easter. If it is the risen Christ we seek, we needn’t read the latest smear campaign, we won’t find him there. Jesus told his friends he would meet them in Galilee, Galilee and the ministries of teaching, healing and feeding.

As I’m flipping through the Sunday “Parade” magazine in search of mind candy (like the endearing feature story about Jodie Foster), I was quite surprised to see numbers about our nation’s current on spending federal prisons ($6.2 billion!) in an otherwise pleasantly entertaining issue. The number is really pretty reasonable considering that 1/100 Americans are behind bars and we spend more than $40 billion annually to keep them there. Still, $6.2 billion would buy a lot of healthcare!

The numbers have become pretty mainstream these days. The Christian Century (Feb 26, 2008) points out that $2 billion is paid each year to for-profit companies to operate prisons and a whopping 1 million meals are served every day to inmates by Aramark Correctional Services! What is equally noteworthy but harder to quantify is the human toll of our incarceration rates. They guys who brought “The Wire” to HBO (Ed Burns and David Simon) have used their writing prowess to bring the human cost to life. Still, as the show wraps up the writers have hit the talk show circuit (and op-ed venues) to make a final plea. In an op-ed piece in the March 17, 2008 Time magazine, they acknowledge having ducked the “what do we do?” question as they’ve focused on bringing the Drug War to life on screen. “We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could. Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end?” They name the numbers and point out the painful reality that we have the world’s highest rate of imprisonment, a generation of law officers “no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner,” and most painfully of all, the reminder that “what the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has.”

This drama which had been the domain of storytellers and liberal pundits has gone mainstream in recent weeks. Yet it is this now mainstream concern that is at the heart of the most offending of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon clips. You-tube offers an endless replay of the soundbyte from a 2003 sermon in which Wright decries the effect of the “Drug War” on our urban core. He dances on the balls of his feet as he calls out:
“The government gives them the drugs,
builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law
and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’
No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,”
he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
Though the trajectory of Wright’s sermon is identical to that of The Wire’s Burns, Wright’s “God damn America” litany is a little more abrasive than the Burns’s shameless plea for the civil disobedience of jury nullification. Although our offense ought be the unwitting horror we’ve unleashed on our own people, we have a misguided fascination with the abrasive character of Wright’s sermon sound-byte.

Abrasive or no, the result of our “cradle to prison pipleline” (Children’s Defense Fund) is that the boys in my neighborhood are more likely to go to prison than college. I know it, and so do they. Cherubic preschoolers become confused by elementary and downright angry with the odds by adolescence. The abrasive edge to Wright’s sermon is tame compared to the raw edge of anger that I watch taking root. Our obsession with the tone of Wright’s delivery is a fool’s errand.

As we consider Jesus’ last days, he a dark skinned Jew in the Roman Empire run by the pale skinned Italians, the parallels are unmistakable and chilling. This week we will remember Jesus carted off to prison, treated to a mockery of a justice, facing the cruelty of execution for the sole crime of uppitiness, and I shudder. In his book, “Are We Rome?” Cullen Murphy is one of many contemporary authors attempting to draw our recalcitrant minds to the haunting parallels. Perhaps it is not coincidental that we prefer to blame Herod, the Jewish client-King for Jesus’ execution rather than to lie the blame at Pilate’s feet where it belongs. To acknowledge Pilate’s role in the horror is to acknowledge Rome’s, which is one step closer to acknowledging our own.

Certainly for Obama’s sake, we can hope that Jeremiah Wright would find lighter fodder for his sermons. But our odds are better with Parade magazine, and even they can’t keep quiet on this one.

People of faith are not necessarily gifted scientists. I, for one, have a lot of faith and great comfort in discussions of theology but absolutely no grace in a science classroom.

A good homework night at our house includes Social Studies. Grammar and Algebra aren’t bad either. But when I’m called in to help on Science, we’re all in trouble. I was one of those mothers who actively discouraged my kids from participating in the Science Fair. Reading has dyslexics and Math has dyscalculia. I’m not sure what the LD designation would be for Science, but I am sure that whatever it is I would be the poster child. Not surprisingly, then, when I launch into a sermon example involving anything scientific, my spouse winces. Inevitably, I miss the mark.

The success of our annual summer Peace Trail program for children, which is an integration of theology and science, is the leadership of (scientist) Laurie Shornick and (applied mathematician) Alyssa Schnell. These two women bring the wonder and discipline of science to the work of peacemaking that typically eludes people like me. As we dream and plan together, I am struck by the incredible grace of sharing divergent gifts.

All of which is to say that I am incredibly grateful for the timely Pastoral Letter offered by the Rev. John H. Thomas (General Minister and President, the United Church of Christ) entitled “A New Voice Rising: A Pastoral Letter on Faith Engaging Science and Technology.” This letter speaks to the historic “combustible” relationship between faith and science and offers a prophetic word of inclusivity. “We are insatiably curious, and our profound curiosity fuels equally the venture of science and the quest of faith.” Thomas encourages us to embrace both our scientific and our moral minds, to experience the tension therein, and to strive for mutual accountability and respect.

Given my experience of this grace, I am admittedly perplexed about the fear of science in communities of faith. Confused, but not blind. As we approach another election year, a group of Missourians is again working to limit scientific inquiry in the name of faith. People of faith need to find our voices before it is too late. It is neither logical nor faithful to limit scientific inquiry based on scientific definitions offered by non-scientists.

What most amazes me, however, is that Thomas, a brilliant and compassionate theologian, is able to offer a statement that has scientific integrity. I can only assume that he has a gifted scientist in his congregation. We need them, now more than ever.

This afternoon I’ve been working on the Easter bulletin while pondering a sermon on the Lazarus story for this coming Sunday (Lent 5). Although I’ve not yet started on Palm Sunday, the eco-friendly palms are on order. I am a believer in the gift of the liturgical calendar with all of it’s funky dates and traditions, but as a worship planner I end up holding the varied and apparently contradictory layers together as Lent careens to a close.

The liturgical calendar is cyclical like the earth itself. Cyclical, but orderly. Advent prepares for Christmas which gives way to Epiphany’s emphasis on light. Following the climax of Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday moves us into Lent. Lent, the season preceding the triumphal strains of Easter is filled with the somber tones, it is a season of tilling the earth. Lent closes with Holy Week, the brief span from the Palm processions to Easter is a quiet week in which our spiritual beings lie fallow, in wait. From the quiet bursts the bloom of Easter. And so it goes.

The pile of books and papers on my desk, however, bear witness to the work of tilling simultaneous to the work of planting, weeding, and even harvesting. Quite honestly, the mess on my desk parallels the mess of emotions running through my mind while I try to see the flow of Easter worship.

The pileup of emotions at my computer is much like the pileup of loyalties in our political arena. Instead of gathering mud pies for the partisan fight this fall, the Democrats are still slinging mud at one another. Last week Hillary suggested that only she and John McCain were ready for the White House and Rush Limbaugh encouraged support for Hillary. It’s no wonder we’re all a bit confused. Multi-tasking political loyalties is downright exhausting.

Still, no multi-tasking comes close to the emotional wattage of parenting teens - except perhaps for that of parenting our parents (a hat I’ve yet to try). The thing I’ve learned about traversing these mine fields is that we do so wearing multiple hats and igniting emotions on any number of fronts. Even with parental eyes in the back, we cannot keep it all straight. A friend was sharing the theory that emotions are energy fields and as such can be transmuted into other fields. Maybe so, but to do so would require the ability to clearly identify any singular strand in the complex jumble of emotions.

Luckily, thanks to the buttress theory of stress management, the cacophonies of spiritual, political, and familial movement keep each other in check. Buttressed against one another, they preclude any one arena from dominating my field of vision and, at least in theory, keep me balanced.

For the sake of full disclosure, though, I must confess that my first stop each morning is to check not on the liturgical or the school calendar but rather the delegate count. Maybe the balance needs some tweaking.