Excerpt from "God Is Good" from Bees in Amber by John Oxenham, 1913.
God has been good to me and M.P. here in our little bungalow, and I am deeply grateful. Gratitude is one of the secrets of happiness.-----
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| Does anybody really know what time it is? |
In my foggy old mind, I've been trying to think what to say for the beginning of another year, how to sum up my thoughts and feelings at this turn in the road. Once again, I have been surprised to find that I already said all that as well I as could ever do. So with a few changes, I'm reprinting last year's post, for whatever it's worth.
The quiet days at the end of the year have always been a time of retreat and reflection for me. This past year, a dark new era has begun, and the old certainties have gone out the window -- no one can be sure what will come next.
The world has been in a parlous state all my adult life, what with wars and rumors of wars, crisis upon crisis, rebellion here, revolt there, and no end of foolishness among the peoples and leaders of the world. And yet, at some points there has been greater hope for the future than seems apparent just now.
Somehow, I have lived through many years of light and shadow, joys and sorrows, ups and downs, to be a very old man. And I have learned that nothing is guaranteed but change. The currents of human affairs are always shifting, now quickly, now slowly, like the winds and the waves; the pendulum is always swinging to and fro.
Human nature does not change; if it did, we would have become a different kind of critter long ago. But the world around us is always in flux. Moderation and balance, the middle way, is the best course to follow, but fools young and old are always chasing after something "new and different" - which soon enough they despise as "that old stuff." So the old lessons must be learned anew by every generation.
Human life is a mixed bag, a game of skill and chance - win, lose, or draw, you have to play the hand you are dealt, and do the best you can. Have fun, but don't be a prick. Be honest, fair, and kind to everyone. Do your part, don't leave a mess, and mind your own damn business.
We can't be sure what 2026 holds in store for us; but no matter what comes or goes, we can each be true to the goodness within us, and do small things with great love - with gratitude for all the good things we have. So here's wishing all my truckbuddies health, happiness, and peace in the New Year. God bless you all.
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1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
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Life is both faith and love. Without faith, love is only one dimensional and incomplete. Faith helps you to overlook other people's shortcomings, and love them as they are. If you ask too much of any relationship, you can't help but be disappointed. But if you ask nothing, you can't be hurt or disappointed.--Debbie Reynolds, 1964
Midnight is a confusing hour when it is difficult to be faithful. The most inspiring word that the church must speak is that no midnight long remains. The weary traveller by midnight who asks for bread is really seeking the dawn. Our eternal message of hope is that dawn will come. Our slave foreparents realized this. They were never unmindful of the fact of midnight, for always there was the rawhide whip of the overseer and the auction block where families were torn asunder to remind them of its reality. When they thought of the agonizing darkness of midnight, they sang:
Oh, nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen,
Glory Hallelujah!
Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down,
Oh, yes, Lord,
Sometimes I’m almost to de groun’,
Oh, yes, Lord,
Oh, nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen,
Glory Hallelujah!
Encompassed by a staggering midnight but believing that morning would come, they sang:
I’m so glad trouble don’t last alway.
O my Lord, O my Lord, what shall I do?
Their positive belief in the dawn was the growing edge of hope that kept the slaves faithful amid the most barren and tragic circumstances.
Faith in the dawn arises from the faith that God is good and just. When one believes this, he knows that the contradictions of life are neither final nor ultimate. He can walk through the dark night with the radiant conviction that all things work together for good for those that love God. Even the most starless midnight may herald the dawn of some great fulfillment.
I certainly don't think that sexuality is my prime focus here, though it is surely apposite. Would I prefer to live in a world where sex was a form of ownership of men over women, when it led to constant disease and appalling death-rates in childbirth, where every sexual act could lead to pregnancy, where gay people were hanged or persecuted or forced into lives of untold misery and pain? No fucking way. And do I think that Christianity's sexual doctrines are a corner-stone of the faith? Not in the slightest. Jesus was uninterested in these matters. True faith is not fixated on sex; it has left sex behind - along with money and wealth and pride - in the pursuit of the divine. The only people fixated on sex are those who wish to use its power to control others.
Christianity is in crisis - and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe. I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists - of total papal or Biblical authority - because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. . . .I would add only this, and I think Sullivan would agree: the fact that in every age and every clime, in every culture and society, a certain percentage of people are born gay instead of straight; that it is not an illness, a mental disorder, a perversion, or a choice; that it is not the result of demonic influence or bad parenting; that it is as much a wholesome variety of nature, of the universe, as a red rose or a yellow one; that gay people are fully as capable of love and devotion, of self-sacrifice and service to the greater good as any straight person is; all this is part of reality also, which faith to be worthy of belief must acknowledge and value as it values all that is truly human.
No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have - copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories - are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later. Anyone who believes that the Holy Spirit automatically guides every church leader to the perfect truth at all times need only look at the current hierarchy to be disabused of such childish wish-fulfillment; or cast an eye on church history for more than a few minutes.
So the solid architecture of the faith we inherited has been exposed more thoroughly in the last few decades than ever before. There is no single authoritative text, written by one God, word for word true. There is a much more complicated series of writings designed by many men, doubtless under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that help us see some form of the figure Jesus through languages and texts and memories. I think the character and message of Jesus are searingly clear and distinctive even taking into account that daunting veil through which we are asked to see. But we can only begin to see this once we have understood the veil that both obstructs and made possible our view.
The same, I think, is true of the papacy as an alternative to Biblical literalism. This is in some ways a more durable defense against logos than Biblical literalism, but it is just another form of fundamentalism, deploying total obedience to total authority as an alternative to a living faith that can both doubt and yet also practice the love of God and one's enemies, Jesus's core instructions. I do not see how the limits and flaws of such total authoritarianism could have been more thoroughly illuminated than in the recent sex abuse scandal. When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called "absolute corruption".
So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely. We will catch Him at times; He will elude us at others. We will have to listen to many words he may have spoken before we can each discern the words he may have meant; we will have to keep our eyes and ears open for science's revelations about the world, while understanding that science is just one way of understanding the world and that poetry, history, and practical perspectives have things to tell us as well. The cathedral at Chartres; the long story of Christian debate and theology; the rituals and daily practices that help us stay trained to intuit the divine we cannot understand and the divine we do not always see in every face around us: these too tell us things that go beyond fact, archeology and hermeneutics.
Yes, this intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith; yes, it may end with more mystery than clarity. But if our faith is to be true, it must rest on something more than denial of reality. It must rest on being the greatest experience of reality.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.To the glory of God and in memory of those I love but see no longer: a hymn without which, in these parts at least, it just wouldn't be Easter at all. I came across two kickin' versions of it, and couldn't decide between them. So I used both, hope you enjoy.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is celebrated February 12, never kept a diary, and never lived to write an autobiography. He was so utterly private a man that even his best friends frequently admitted that there were regions of his mind to which they were never granted access. He was a “terribly reticent, secretive, shut mouth man,” said his law-partner of fourteen years, William Henry Herndon, “and close-minded as to his plans, wishes, hopes, and fears.”
That was particularly true about religion. “I don't know anything about Lincoln's Religion,” grumbled David Davis, Lincoln’s personal attorney and his first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, and “don’t think anybody knew.” . . .
Lincoln’s election to the presidency, just in time to see the country fall into civil war, presented him with a different set of challenges to his meager stock of religious belief. Lincoln expected a quick and direct restoration of the Union. But in battle after battle, the Union armies were handed humiliating defeats. The president could make no logical sense of this apparent contradiction of progress. After a year-and-a-half of seemingly fruitless bloodshed, he concluded that God had taken a direct hand in events to stymie the war’s progress so long as it was waged for purely political purposes, and to force Lincoln to recognize that the war must be turned in a moral direction that spoke directly to the crime of slavery.
This insight is what eventually drove Lincoln to depart from the policy direction with which he had begun the war, and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the astonishment of his Cabinet, Lincoln explained that his decision to issue the Proclamation was a “vow” he had made “to myself, and...to my Maker.”
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln came as close to preaching a sermon as any U.S. President has ever dared utter. The war, he said, was not a struggle between a righteous Union and evil slaveholders – both North and South had been complicit in the crime of slavery, and the war was a judgment that God had chosen to bring on the entire nation “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Only by submitting to that national judgment, Lincoln told his audience, could “malice toward none” and “charity for all” follow.
Lincoln’s public role as president embodied a profound struggle to preserve a “government of the people” that nevertheless still respected a core of moral truth which not even “the people” could repeal. And in that role, he reminds us that religion is neither alien to public life (to be locked up in private) nor a jack-in-the-box (ready to jump into every situation). It is, instead, a reminder of the feebleness of our own wisdom, and of the costliness of truth.
It has not always been easy—I went through a terrible period as a young sister—to the point that I thought I would have to leave the religious life because I doubted the divinity of Jesus. Only when I realized that I did believe deeply and profoundly in God could I come to peace with the fact that faith in God would have to be enough. It was a dark, empty time. It threw me back on the barest of beliefs but the deepest of beliefs. I hung on in hope like a spider on a thread. But the thread was enough for me. As a result, my faith actually deepened over the years. The humanity of Jesus gave promise to my own. Jesus ceased to be distant and ethereal and “perfect.” Jesus let no system, no matter how revered, keep him from a relationship with God. And that union with God, I came to understand, was divine. Then I also understood that questions are of the essence in a mature faith.(Honk to Andrew Sullivan)
I don’t fear the questions any more. I know that they are all part of the process of coming to union with God and refusing to make an idol of anything less. The point is that during that difficult time I didn’t try to force anything. I simply lived in the desert believing that whatever life I found there was life enough for me. I believed that God was in the darkness. It is all part of the purification process and should be revered. It takes away from us our paltry little definitions of God and brings us face-to-face with the Transcendent. It is not to be feared. It is simply to be experienced. Then, God begins to live in us without benefit of recipes and rituals, laws, and “answers”—of which there are, in the final analysis, none at all.
An excerpt from Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology For Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families and Friends (1988), by John J. McNeil, psychotherapist and former Jesuit priest: It is important for us to be aware that our religious faith needs to grow up and mature, just as we grow up and mature in all other aspects of our lives. This is a process that continues until we die. There are aspects of our faith that are healthy and favorable to growth; there are other aspects that are neurotic and destructive. We are all called on to be aware of the state of our faith, to strengthen what is healthy in it and to diminish what is sick and neurotic. . . .
Today we gay people have a desperate need for a healthy and adult faith; a faith built directly on our own experience; a faith that can lead us to reach out in love to each other; rather than selfishly seek our own security; a faith strong enough to overcome all fears, especially fear of death. . . .
The threat of AIDS can cause us to fall back into immature, neurotic faith. Neurotic faith is based in fear and a spirit of cowardice. In the chapters that follow I will attempt to spell out many of the forms that neurotic faith can take and what we must do to live out our lives as gay people with a healthy commitment to life and to each other. . .
The supreme gift of God is love. To experience genuine human love, to be part of a community of love is to experience the presence of God. However; love is paradoxical. It is absolutely necessary for a happy, fulfilled human life. And it is absolutely impossible by human means alone. That is why John could write, "Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love" (1 Jn. 4:8). . . .
Love is always a miracle; always God's gift of self; always an experience of the divine. In the community of love to which we belong, we daily experience the presence of God. This is an experience we freely receive, and one that we can, if we wish, out of gratitude freely give to others in return.
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. . . .
For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular and material worlds over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth.
The story of Abraham and Isaac offers a simple but powerful example. According to the Bible, Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his "only son, Isaac, whom you love," as a burnt offering. Without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, we know the happy ending—God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute. Abraham has passed God's test of devotion. He becomes a model of fidelity to God, and his great faith is rewarded through future generations.
And yet it is fair to say that if any of us saw a 21st century Abraham raising the knife on the roof of his apartment building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child abuse. We would do so because God doesn't reveal Himself or His angels to all of us in a single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to
know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true—as individuals or communities of faith—will be true for us alone.
This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.
If all the soccer moms and baseball dads of this country, with their devout belief in timeless certainties, truly understood the Orwellian nightmare so cavalierly proclaimed here--the utter, arrogant, cold-blooded contempt for constitutional government, democracy, liberty, justice--well, I think we would have already had a new administration in office long before now.In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
