Sin

The Day We Remember The People Who Are Thrown Away

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The Christ of the Breadlines, Fritz Eichenberg, Woodcut, 1951

For those Christians who worship a Holy God who cannot abide sin and whose righteousness demands punishment, today is a day to remember how God, the Father, inflicted all His anger on His Beloved Son, satisfying once and for all the debt of sin the human race has run up since we limped out of Eden.

I used to believe that myself. And, on a good day, I took comfort in it. I believed that my sins, even mine, were forgiven, and felt some peace, until I screwed up again.

As an old man, I have looked through enough microscopes and telescopes, stood at the foot of enough mountains, walked through enough forests, seen enough waves roll in, and held enough babies in my arms to change my definition of “Holy” from “Absolute Righteousness” to what Rudolf Otto was trying to express when he described the “Holy” as Mysterium et Tremendum:

“Mysterium” is the feeling I had in the mountains, at the seashore, and holding that new grandchild. It can’t be put into words.

“Tremendum” means what the hymn, “Were You There?,” is singing about:

“Sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”

This is what Moses felt when he stood before the burning bush. Isaiah felt this when he saw the Throne of God high and lifted up in the Temple. Mary felt this when the Angel Gabriel asked her to bear God’s Son.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe these stories are literally true or not. What matters is that they represent moments —moments I hope you have had—moments of awe that both humble you and fill your soul with a sense of your worth in the grand scheme of things.

The opposite of this feeling, these days, is consumerism. Consumerism only recognizes the value that can be rung up on a cash register, and throws away the things that no longer have value: toilet paper, laptops, and human beings. We are all immersed in it. Many of us struggle against it, but it can sometimes be overwhelming. The message is that our buying power measures our value. Those with more buying power are far more valuable than those with little or no buying power.

We Americans are currently ruled by two men who had the misfortune of being blessed with success by consumerism . One succeeded at making things that consumers will buy, and the other excels at selling things, even things that don’t exist. Consumerism has stunted our souls, so most of us buy what they sell—or at least don’t object to their pitch.

We are now beginning to see the ultimate evil that consumerism can drive us to — making a virtue of throwing away human beings

It is no accident that those who are now randomly firing “corrupt and lazy” scientists, weather forecasters, and park rangers and are advocating throwing away the elderly, the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and others they have deemed valueless, want us to forget that we did the same to Native Americans and Enslaved People. They don’t want us to see that their disparagement of DEI is a continuation of a pattern of cheating and exploiting women and people of color, while carving out some cushy positions for incompetent white guys.

According to some traditions, the place where Jesus was crucified was on top of Jerusalem’s trash heap. One of the things we remember on Good Friday is, “He took his place with sinners” . . . on the trash heap.

We always label the people we throw away “sinners” AKA criminals (read mentally ill, learning disabled, abused as children), shiftless people who can’t feed their kids even if they work three jobs, the disabled and old people who didn’t amass a fortune to support them and depend on Social Security instead. All of them drain money away from those of us who always want more. I am appalled at how well I understand that reasoning.

This Good Friday, Jesus takes his place with “gang members” (Guys with brown skin, Latino names, and wearing the wrong colored clothes) in a jungle prison in the ironically named country of El Salvador.

The only thing that will save Elon, Donald, MAGA, and me is to recover a belief in human beings as the image of God. To have an experience of the Holy, whether it manifests as a burning bush or a new grandbaby, a Heavenly Throne or a hug when we need it most and expect it least, an angel or an answer to our heart’s oldest question. We need the encounter with the Holy that Thomas Merton felt one day at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville.

He saw the faces of all the strangers passing him by and realized he loved them.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

No Good Will Intended

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Most of the homes in our neighborhood were built between the World Wars. They are mostly colonials separated from each other by the width of a driveway. The people on our block work at being good neighbors. Recently, one resident developed an email list. We can use it to plan block parties or to check how many other people had a wet basement after the last downpour.
After last week’s snowstorm, MaryAnne sent an email asking, “Who cleared our sidewalk this morning? Doug and I would like to thank him.”
A couple of her neighbors chimed in. They too wanted to thank the mystery snowblower.
Finally, someone said, “I think it was David C.”
David, who remained anonymous up to this point, finally confessed. He said that Maryanne and Doug’s neighbor on the east side of their house hired him to clear their driveway. David lives a few doors to the west of MaryAnne and Doug.
He said he started his big, self-propelled snow blower in his driveway. He “drove” it up one side of the sidewalk to his client’s home. He cleared their drive, and then he “drove” his snowblower back home. He cleared the other side of the sidewalk as he went, he said. “No good will intended.”
I laughed. I had never heard anyone say that before.
How many times have I apologized by saying, “I didn’t mean it?”
“I did not mean to hurt your feelings with that joke. I was trying to cheer you up.”
“I was trying to help clear the table, I did not mean to chip that dish.”
“I did not intend to hurt you. I could not get out of work in time.”
Judging by the number of apologies that I have heard that ended with, “I did not intend to hurt you,” I am not alone. This is the first time I have ever heard someone say, “I did not intend to do anything good for you.”
All my life, I have wondered about something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount.
“When you give to the poor, do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.”*
How do you pull that off? How do I unconsciously, unintentionally, perhapsinadvertently, do good for people?
Have I ever seen anyone unintentionally do good for others?
The answer is “yes”.
This happens most often when people delight in what they are doing, or they delight in whom they are doing it for.
For example, some of my neighbors love to take care of their lawns and shrubs and flowers. They not only delight the rest of us, but also raise our property values. Someone who likes computers created that email list.
Some people love to cook and to eat good things. If, like me, you are lucky enough to marry someone like that, every meal is a gift.
The artist who creates music, words, or images with no eye on the market, but from sheer delight, benefits us all. Thank you, Emily Dickinson, Jackson Pollack, and Pete Seeger.
There are parents who delight in watching their children unfold in their own unique ways. They nurture that uniqueness instead of hammering their kids into images of themselves. My grandchildren have parents like that.
There are people who who get their priorities straight when they listen to the hungry over a meal.
There are people who see our deep connections to each other when they work with the homeless.
There are people who discover the preciousness of life when they work with the dying in a hospice.
They do good, but what they do is different from being “well-intended”. As Frederick Buechner wrote, ““The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Do that, and you will do a lot of good without knowing it.
Also, a lot of people may benefit, if you just do your job, like David did.
 
 
 
*Matthew 6:3 ESV

Riding a Bicycle in Circles

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Here are a couple of questions for you:

  • Are we fundamentally BAD people?
  • Are we fundamentally GOOD people ?

 This bicycle has been raising those questions for me recently and I wonder what you think?

Read on for some context:

priority-bicycle

Imagine a 9-year-old girl riding her bicycle around and around a circular driveway in front of her school every day instead of going to class. 

According to A. S. Neill, that happened at the unique private school he started called Summerhill. Unlike other schools, Summerhill doesn’t have rules that say you have to be in class at a certain time or that you have to study the alphabet in first grade and biology in 10th grade. You could follow your passions and the students there are surprisingly successful in life. 

The girl on the bike had come from a more traditional school with strict, top-down rules.  She had heard that Summerhill was different so, on the first day of school, she got on her bike and rode it instead of going to class. She did that day after day for a couple of months and then one day, she didn’t get on her bike. She went to class instead.

I read Neill’s book many years ago. I had a hard time imagining a school like that.  I went to a school where the principal and the teachers made the rules and the kids obeyed them. We operated on a strict schedule controlled by the clock and bells. If it was 10:15, I was to be sitting in my seat in Mrs. Barber’s Geometry class or else.

I carried this discipline to college and graduate school and into my adult life. It was useful and it made me useful. It also oriented me. I always knew when it was Tuesday morning because I had a  meeting every Monday night.

One of the things that terrified me about retirement was that it has no structure and no rules. I feared that if I didn’t have some kind of discipline imposed by external obligations, I would start drinking Jack Daniels for breakfast, become addicted to “Days of Our Lives”, and play solitaire ’til dawn with a deck of 51.

So, shortly after I retired, I started a blog called “The Second Half”. It got its name from this quotation from Carl Jung:

“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. . . . we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

Apparently, I did not read my own blog.

We bought bicycles a few weeks ago, and I admit that I’ve been riding my bicycle instead of writing a blog; feeling guilty at first, and then  . . .not so much.

Oddly, I’ve gone back to writing in the past few days. Not sure how often I will be publishing  posts to The Second Half, but I’m knocking out a lot of words for some other projects.

The purpose of this is not to fill you in on  exciting developments in my glamorous lifestyle. It’s to raise deeper questions about human nature.

Do you need disciplines imposed from the outside so that your inner urges and impulses don’t make you run amuck? 

Do you have an inner compass that points toward “true north” that  gets knocked off course by the magnetic attraction of trying to please others or when those more powerful than you are take the wheel of your life? 

What is your experience?