Culture wars--a perspective from the Gospel of Luke

In Matthew 23 verse 4, Jesus says “Do not be like the Pharisees; for they tie up heavy burdens (hard to carry) and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.”

Let us not be like that. How do we act this way today? The Pharisees were teachers of the law, and so had a special responsibility to be kind and generous with their laws, instead of piling on impossible demands. Do these words apply to us modern Christians? Oh yes!! We are not excused from the Lord’s challenge. When do we lay heavy burdens on others, without lifting a finger to help them? If we lay a burden, will we help carry it?

When  a young woman becomes pregnant on an impulsive poor choice, discovers too late that her lover is abusive and indifferent to her, faces loss of her job and family if she carries the child through, and we tell her “abortion is a sin” we lay a heavy burden on her. A very heavy burden. Are we prepared to help her carry it? To help raise that child, to provide for this woman, to defend her from her accusers? Or are we sitting in our living room or kitchen, feeling self -righteous and morally upright because we have denounced a “pro choice” political candidate? Beware the leaven of the Pharisee!

When a young man or woman who is gay seeks to share their life in committed love, and wishes to have all of the recognition that society can afford to support and recognize that commitment, and we tell them gay marriage is a sin, we lay a heavy burden indeed. Are we prepared to share the burden? To help carry it? To join in solidarity, denying ourselves the advantages of marriage as well so as to be united with our gay brothers and sisters? To dedicate ourself to them as a family member then? If not, we share the leaven of the Pharisee when we condemn them to a marriage-less life but excuse ourselves from helping!

Whenever we enjoy our electricity, our car, our cheap and abundant meat and other food and our cheap gasoline, our low-priced consumer goods at the mall, we are laying a heavy burden on those who suffer from air pollution, on those whose food is too expensive because we must have our grain-fed meat on our table, on those who labor without a just wage because we must shop at the lowest-priced store in town, on those. Are we prepared to share that burden, to help carry it? To do with less so that they may have a lighter burden or at least to keep ourselves from forgetting?

When we send soldiers to die in a war, but are unwilling to make hard sacrifices that may render the war unnecessary, we lay a heavy burden on them and their families without lifting a finger to help. When we ask those soldiers to kill, but offer nothing to the victims of the war, keeping our own comforts unchanged, being untouched by the horrors they must carry their entire life now, we are laying down still more burdens.

Whenever we urge others to be more responsible, and to make sacrifices, while sitting back and doing nothing to help them, we lay a burden like the Pharisees.

It takes thought, it takes imagination, but most of all it takes personal sacrifice.

Until we make a personal sacrifice in solidarity to back up our morality, our morality is nothing but self-serving, hot air, and empty hypocrisy. It is finger pointing, it is sinful. Jesus had no patience, no tolerance, for this type of hypocrisy or this type of “morality”. In fact, in the entire Gospels he never condemned anyone, except the hypocrites who judged others. Let that give us pause in our loud morality. For as Christians today we practice it all the time, and we watch our politicians stand up and pronounce their hypocrisy and we never call them on it, instead we nod in agreement.

Let me spend less time focusing on “morality for other people,” that is, other people who should not have abortions, who should not get married, who should go off to war on my behalf, who must learn to live with less because I don’t want to think about the connections. Let me spend more time focusing on what morality demands of me personally, on what sacrifice in solidarity I will make to show that my morality is worth paying a personal price for. If a politician denounces abortion, but does not lift a finger to help women who are in a terrible predicament, his morality is empty and not worthy of support. When a politician makes a moral statement and applies it to him or herself, then we may want to listen. And in the meantime, let us all recall, before we denounce and set legal limits on others behavior, that the One who said “do not sin” also said, “do not judge.”

Poem: Athena

It is October, 2003. I am alone in Athens for an afternoon. I stand in the ruins. The Acropolis is all beauty, to the point of tears. I don’t know that I have ever wanted to weep for beauty’s sake before. The human heart seeking so to soar, that I ache to see it, breaking my own on such souls.

My God, here I stand,

At the temple of Athena, in ruins,

The sun slants across the rocky hills

Glinting on the hill of the muses,

And on the distant mountains ringing the city,

And on the glimmering among gaps between hills,

the sea, shining like yellow diamonds in the sun.

From down the hill, echoing from

the broken Odean theater of Herodes Atticus,

a woman sings, her voice rises like these pillars

to the sky, echoes from these stones,

as strong as they ever were.

While tourists mill about, talking, as if so much shining bright is nothing,

And joy, gold in the air itself,

Joy luminous and palpable,

Flying from hill to hill,

blue sky to blue earth;

Where great white columns nearly three eons old rise still,

Testament to the greatest dreams of men, of human beings using their short days

To see the human spirit soar, speaking the greatest longing in the soul,

For beauty, truth: my heart aches at the sight of that longing,

Still alive in the ancient ruins, reaching to the air, to the song: to all that ever matters or ever will.

How could beauty alone bring tears? Yet it does, tears of ache at the beauty, the touch of souls singing through stone, across thousands of years, all like a single day.

At that I guess that the grey-eyed goddess

Must have been a joyous spirit,

To coax a people to such heights, to set their spirits into the air so fast,

To make such leaps of beauty and of hope. If we’re lucky then

perhaps her spirit still haunts these same hilltops,

Smiling kindly on a world lost at sea.

*********************

Now,

Now it seems to me that a divine benificence

Bathes the world in light.

Clouds hide it from us, clouds

In our own spirit, and clouds

In our cultural milieu all around,

Preoccupied with misery, greed, and small things.

But from time to time in spite of it all,

Somehow the clouds part for a moment,

And we stand bathed in the divine light,

Transfixed,

Suddenly at home wherever we are,

At home in the whole wide world,

All one, all one, all one,

Wanting only to build temples, stupidly, try to hold on forever,

Instead of stand still, in the eternal,

For that fleeting moment.

It comes only once or twice in a year’s time,

And a year is like an instant, then life is over, shouting and perplexed.

It’s most easy when the sea is in view, or on a high hill.

For there are magic places where so many have felt that spirit,

The tall cliffs, or the ancient ruins,

Where we return again and again, as if hoping for a lost love to return;

Or some people make it seem easier, as when

I stand in the surf and turn,

To see you sitting in the sun, smiling,

The world stopping for that split second,

Angels dancing, fire on the water.

And then it passes, like a dream, we go on, alive after all,

Wondering at it all, hope rekindled.

****************************

Child of mine, if ever you had been born,

I would have urged you this:

The world is big and broad, and full

Of fabulous stories, and people everywhere are bursting with goodness

And beauty. Yet wherever you go,

bear patiently the five percent who are unpleasant, or petty, or cheating,

avoid cleverly the one percent who are malicious,

(and even more the one percent malicious with silver tongues of disguise),

so as to be freely friends with the ninety percent who seek the good

and are around you all the time, whenever a friend may be needed, to shine with light.

 

The Prodigal Son

It was the year of what I will call my divorce. Technically we were never married. But I still called it my divorce. I loved her, and she loved me, and I had come through a period of great doubt, and so now we lived together so we were married in my mind. There are many ways to divorce. A divorce like the one we experienced is not a single event, but a long grinding process, like being pushed slowly over a cliff by a glacial avalanche one has possibly somehow helped unwittingly to start but in any case now cannot stop but nonetheless fights desperately against until at last one must turn and leap into the icy river weeping and hope, but not much, to land alive. At 43, I was past the point at which I had believed I had finally arrived, and as far as I was concerned all my dreams of my life were turning to dust in my hands (as it turns out, not for the last time; what you think is a sorrow too great to bear, can yet be exceeded, and will be. The greatest humiliation, as Emmy Lou Harris so eloquently put it, is that one survives these sorrows and goes on living anyway). So I was searching for meaning, for some way forward in the midst. For, you might say, a meaningful choice in the midst of desolation.

I prayed for guidance; then brushed aside the next day’s phone calls from those who loved me. I thought God would only speak in my inner heart—I had forgotten that God usually speaks to us physically--through one another, through the voices of other people (“he has no hands but ours”). God answered my prayers as concretely as any human teacher ever could. There are a dozen examples, although I will note that most prayers I prayed were too casually uttered to mean anything. The half dozen prayers I can say were answered dramatically by God in my lifetime were essentially the ones I prayed from the heart, in earnest and in true reaching to the living God, when I prayed for the Holy Spirit and for the good.

At that time, I prayed for hope. My aunt and my mother visited us for my birthday. My aunt said, “Have you read Nouwen’s biography?”[1] I said no and returned to my prayer for help. “You should read it.” I shrugged and returned to prayer. “I could buy it for you.” Too busy praying to listen. “Here it is: are you going to read it or not?!” Oh. Right. God answers prayer this way.

            I read it. Nouwen, to my mind was one of the great synthesizers of personal experience, psychology, and pastoral spirituality, whom I had been inspired by decades earlier. In college I read his “Wounded Healer” and was given hope. I read his work on converting loneliness to solitude, and I understood my entire destiny (though little I realized back then how profoundly this theme would color my entire life). Nouwen lectured, taught, and wrote, one of the great pastors of the twentieth century.

            Yet as I learned here, he had led a more worried life than I had ever imagined. By 50 he realized he had lost his way. By 55 he had found his home. This was a story of hope when I was 43 and saw only darkness, and is hopeful now when I am 53 and feel I have not found my home (or maybe I have). The biographer noted one more thing: Nouwen’s most mature work was The Return of the Prodigal Son.  I didn’t need a second clue on this one. I set down the Biography and opened the Return.

            Now I was listening again, for the first time in twenty years, to Nouwen himself. And again, Nouwen had me hooked by page 3. Like many Catholic boys (and girls), I tried my whole life to be good. Not just okay, but good. In every sense of the word: good at what I do, and good in a moral sense, and the kind of person everyone likes and wants around. I managed to create quite a delightful façade of kindness, reasonableness, even charm. Girlfriend’s mothers tended to like me. I was the kind of guy a girl could definitely bring to dinner. Dependable, Honest. Wholesome. So it seemed. So many people believe about me, even those who think they know me.

            In reality of course I was often honest when it didn’t cost too much, but just as easily treasonous under pressure, my impulses violent, and my callow use of others well-hidden. None of this was any clearer to me than it was to anyone else, until I was well into my thirties and became somewhat more deeply self-aware and able to begin to be more authentically true to others and to myself.

            But I digress. Nouwen identified himself with this club. He had always been good, had denied impulses that other men had lived. Yes, I know it is said: “bad men do what good men dream.” That is too simple. Bad men don’t bother to notice what effect their actions have, and simply call those actions good or necessary because they are merely convenient. Good men do bad things, admit they are bad, but pretend their actions are having good effects, or soon will. Indeed good men resist—either due to virtue or to lack of guts—the temptations of violence and vengeance. They choose lesser sins.

This can come at cost for those among us unable to find a workable integration of the hidden dark side of our psyche, the anger, fear, and rage that hides within us, impotent. Or for whom the resistance to violence has more to do, perhaps, with cowardice than virtue (thinking again of Gandhi’s challenge). Pleasing other people becomes a way to lose your soul, as sure as any violent impulse. Some men might have been better off throwing a few more good right hooks and breaking a few chairs, rather than smiling at assholes and eating shit for all those years. But you can’t get those years back—spiritual rebirth is like this: you die, then you get to go back into your life at any point you wish, and now you have to take that mess and do something with it. You have the same mess, but a new consciousness with which to try to play those poorly chosen cards. It can take awhile to play the game back to even, and even longer to get anywhere near ahead.

            Nouwen lived all this. He was a “good Catholic boy” who did what he was supposed to do, and went on to be a priest and a great pastor only to find himself spiritually empty. Where was God?

            In the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15, 11-32), Jesus of Nazareth sums it all up, as he so aptly could and so regularly did, in an unforgettable story rather than a technical essay. A man had two sons. The older son worked his entire life to serve the old man without question, never admitting his own desires, telling himself the sacrifice was righteous and would prove worthy in time. He seemed to represent those who lived the life of the good boy and the good man. But wait. The younger son came to his father one day and said, “give me now my inheritance.” This was a great insult to the father; in that culture it amounted to repudiation of the father. But without a word, the father gave him the inheritance. The younger son went off to a life of loose women, gambling, and reckless partying (think Maxim on steroids—a truly shallow life), burning through the entire inheritance and awakening broke. He seems to represent the life of the thoughtless partier, the sinner, the fool with no one to blame but himself. Who could have sympathy for such a character? Certainly not any of us who lived a good life at some cost! (and kept our Maxim moments out of sight). But one day, the younger son was out working in a field, in the midst of a great famine, and longed to eat the slop fed to the hogs. Coming to his senses at last, he resolved to return to his father and say “I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me one of your hired men.”

            Nouwen and many preachers have remarked on the phrase “coming to his senses” which can also be phrased as “coming to himself at last.” Have you ever had that experience—coming back to yourself? It is a great feeling. You can face anything at those moments. And the son now faces his life. He now re-enters the mess of his life, with a new awareness. He has died, and been sent back to live anew. He starts quite deep in the hole. He has got some pretty bad cards that he now has to find a way to play, with his new consciousness. He walks, we guess a far distance taking many weeks or even months, like the hero of Cold Mountain, like Odysseus, back to his father’s house. Nouwen spent some time discussing Rembrant’s painting of the moment when he arrives back. The son has the soles off his shoes. He is in rags. His head is bare and shaven, resembling a monk or a newborn infant. He kneels before his father as a free man, ready to accept the consequences of his choices and his actions—even those he made as a different, and an unconscious man. He offers no excuses.  

The older son stands by, watching, understandably skeptical, as I would be. For I thought I was the older son. Nouwen thought he was too. He asked early on in the book, what does a man like me have in common with the younger son? For the father is understood, initially, as the God of Jesus Christ, a God described as unbounded mercy, forgiveness, healing, new life, and hope, and love. He lifts the son to his feet and embraces him, and calls for a big party. (We tend to forget that God likes parties, as Jesus did).

The older son sulks. His fate remains unknown. The father says, “But your brother was dead, and has come back to life.” Indeed, The Lord does not say he was lost, and now is found. He says he was dead, as he surely was, and is now alive. So the celebration is on!

            How does the good boy relate to the wastrel son? Nouwen answered the question in a way I did not expect. He wrote that he is the younger son whenever he defines his value by the opinions of others. For that is leaving the father’s house, God’s immanent love, and wandering off after hog’s food. This may not seem stunning to you, dear reader, but it was to me: I had dedicated my life to impressing people and winning their esteem as a good man—good at what I do, and good in character. Never mind that my sex life would make Bill Clinton look like a boy scout or that I had developed the ability to smile and lie to a man’s face saying what he wanted to hear, that I nursed anger for long periods, and that I gave to the poor only what I could afford. Those were immaterial details in the self image I cultivated and that others bought into. I worked from first waking to last sleeping to prove myself good in all things and in all ways to all people. I drove myself with utmost dedication toward that single goal.

I was like the terminator machine portayed by Arnold Shwarzenegger in Terminator II (damn good chase scenes in that movie too, by the way). The terminator machine had a mission. It walked into fire for that mission, and it continued without complaint no matter how overwhelming the odds, how outrageous the demands, or how disfigured it became in the fight. There was no tomorrow! That terminator character perfectly portrayed my inner life and, I suspect, that of many men in our world today. Giving it all for a mission, all the time and without rest, being disfigured, without what would feel like due credit for what was given up, for a goal one only prays is worthy, buying the hero myth.

Only: in that moment I just found out it’s the wrong mission, it’s not worthy, and my disfiguring is not required here.

This is not a comfortable realization. But it is the kind of thing that I guess happens when the living God is encountered.

            Nouwen had just proven to me, with the words of Christ himself, that my eagerness to prove myself to others was needless and indeed, unholy. My achievements—real, imagined, planned, present, past, in all spheres, were optional. Jesus had called my bluff, seen through my bullshit and invited me to give it up. God had already embraced me, and my salvation and worth were already a done deal. All that work and courage and deception and humiliation and fear and shame was optional. I did not need it anymore. Nothing was required. Freedom was REAL.

            Damn! I’d been told this a hundred times, but now Nouwen had explained it in a way that spoke directly to me and I understood for the first time. Suddenly I had nothing I had to do.

My life had become truly empty. I was dead. My dreams were ash, my children unborn, my sacrifices not needed, and my ambitions optional and perhaps pointless. My decades of work to create an image as a good man were needless and everything fell in this wake. One must mourn, and I do, but it was instantly obvious that all that mattered now was to play the cards the way God wanted them played. Paul writes in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. I still have my human life, but it is a life of faith in the son of God, who…died for me.” What was I to do with my time remaining?

I have tried since then to think about donation of self, about service. Tagore, the great Hindu master, wrote this: I dreamed life was joy; I awoke and saw that life was service; I served and discovered that service is joy.

I am not there. But my aspirations lean in this direction.

But I have also reconstructed the failed dreams, sometimes failed to accept that discovery. We do not give up our dreams easily. Like cut forests, they grow back, stunted, less full, but recognizable. They trip us up again and again, they fail us again and again. Gradually we are burned to nothing by the fire of pain, and left with only the burning fire of infinite light, infinite grace, infinite mercy, infinite compassion for a world of broken dreams and human hope.

---

[1] Henry Nouwen (1932-1996) was a much loved Catholic spiritual writer in the last half of the 20^th century. See his classic The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. (Doubleday 1992).