Oh what a patriotic tempest a small Anabaptist Indiana teapot of a  college has provoked:

Monday, June 6, 2011

Goshen College Board of Directors ask for alternative to playing the national anthem

GOSHEN, Ind. — The Goshen College Board of Directors announced today that it has asked President James E. Brenneman to find an alternative to playing the Star-Spangled Banner that fits with sports tradition, that honors country and that resonates with Goshen College’s core values and respects the views of diverse constituencies. …

Mark Schlonger, pastor of Springdale Mennonite Church in Waynesboro, Virginia, wrote a thoughtful support of Goshen College’s decision for CNN’s blog My Faith, in which he said,

To Mennonites, a living faith in Jesus means faithfully living the way of Jesus. Jesus called his disciples to love their enemies and he loved his enemies all the way to the cross and beyond. Following Jesus and the martyrs before us, we testify with our lives that freedom is not a right that is granted or defended with rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. True freedom is given by God, and it is indeed not free. It comes with a cost, and it looks like a cross.

His point appears to be that Anabaptists, as Christians, really try to do as Jesus did, so singing a song glorifying violence makes a lot of them uncomfortable. But Mr. Scholonger also points out that not singing the The Star Spangled Banner does not make you un-American; you are not required to glorify war to be an American patriot.

His essay touched off a “fire storm” of comments, many of which seemed to consider patriotism, militarism and Christianity almost interchangeable concepts.

For example:

Texan … I thought the cross was blood-soaked. And that we were bought with a price. Spiritual freedom came at a price and physical freedom does too.

It does seem to me that “The Star Spangled Banner,” encourages such confusion. It is, after all, America as a song. And the country it lionizes is a nation of warriors, carrying big sticks and stomping enemies. That’s it. Nothing else about America rates glorification in our national anthem.

I’m not a Mennonite or even a Christian. In fact, I’m not religious at all. But I am a person of faith, who is a huge fan of Jesus. The guy’s message was, whether we like to admit it or not, pretty durn pacifistic. He talked a lot about turning other cheeks and loving enemies. If we really follow Jesus, it seems pretty clear that we shouldn’t be glorifying the resolution of struggle with clubs.  All the violence in Jesus’ life was perpetrated by the bad guys, not by him. Except, of course, for turning over a few tables.

It strikes me as bizarre when American Christians conflate love of Jesus, love of country, and a kind of “bring ‘em on” aggressive militarism. So on this most patriotic of holidays, as we Americans celebrate who and what we are, might it not be time for all us persons of faith to take a good long listen to our national anthem? Is it really an appropriate national hymn for a country that is predominantly Christian?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sits with his wife Callista before speaking at the Kiwanis Club luncheon, Monday, May 16, 2011, in Dubuque, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sits with his wife Callista before speaking at the Kiwanis Club luncheon, Monday, May 16, 2011, in Dubuque, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) (Charlie Neibergall – AP) I, for one, don’t care at all whether or not Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich cut some kind of special deal with Tiffany’s in order to deck his wife with diamonds. What I care about is why, when Newt’s always going on about being “pro classical Christianity,” buying diamonds occurred to him in the first place

Poking around in polling data, it appears that a hefty majority of Americans still link themselves to Christianity. So if that particular religion is so important to so many of us this country, when are we going to demand our presidential candidates live the Christianity they purport to espouse? And if we’re not going to demand this of them, why? What does that say about us?

Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich is easy pickings for anyone who wants to write about Christian inconsistency. Newt’s so prone to lecture and moralize, and yet will brush aside such personal Christian peccadillos as affairs and divorces by saying (as he did during a 2011 interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network), “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

I ask you! What kind of hornswoggle is that? Uttered by someone who claims to have gone from being a devout Southern Baptist to being a devout Catholic? If Newton Leroy’s that charitable toward himself, where’s his charity toward all those other people whose behavior he’s pretty quick to disparage?

As I’ve said before in On Faith, I am a person of faith who is not religious. As I’ve also said before, I am a complete fan of Jesus Christ, largely because, according to the Gospels, the guy was so not a hypocrite. He flat-out lived his faith, putting into practice all those inconvenient rantings about inclusiveness and giving a damn about the poor; gunking things up for the rest of us with bothersome statements about rich men, needle eyes and camels.

At no point did Jesus say thou shalt covet diamonds that cost more than the houses a lot of Americans are losing.

Of course, Newt’s not the only politician who exudes the toxic glow of Christian hypocrisy. Almost all American presidential candidates claim to be fans of Jesus. So what are they fans of? The man’s outfits? His hairstyle? His commitment to walking everywhere and thus getting regular exercise?

It’s obviously not his selfless poverty, which, to me, non-Christian admirer of Jesus that I am, appears to be the heart of his message.

So, my fellow Americans, when are those of us who are either Christians or admirers of Jesus going to hold Newt – and all other presidential candidates – accountable for living the faith they talk about so much?

Do we shy away from doing this because then, we too, would have to follow Jesus a bit more scrupulously? Are we secretly reasoning that if we cut Newt some slack in the diamond-purchasing department, then someday when we, too, have finagled access to a half-million or so, we’ll feel free to buy diamonds ourselves instead of using our shekels to help those just struggling to survive?

My late father, the God-less man of conscience, claimed belief in what he borrowed words to term, “the fundamental isolation of the human spirit.” Pop had many friends, did much good work, but I think had no real sense that he lived connected to others. He certainly loved a few people and liked many, many more, but I don’t think he ever experienced what I think of as faith’s great gift of inclusion—a feeling of community, a feeling that whatever it is we’re all in, we’re all in it together.

I grew up awash in Pop’s doctrine of fundamental isolation; believing that I felt as alone as I did because that’s just how humans naturally feel. It continued through two marriages, as well as many relationships with lovers, friends, and colleagues.  After I became a person of faith however, at some point, I noticed that it had simply gone; that I now lived as a human among humans.

I don’t as a rule trust feeling to characterize my partnership with the Almighty, because I’ve learned the hard way that my feelings can too often reflect what I wish were true rather than what I know is true; but I do trust the feeling of inclusion in community that has come through it. Why? Because it has changed the way I act in community. I am much less focused on what’s in it for me. Today I believe—have faith— that the Almighty is present in each of us, and that it is this presence that can (and often does) link us together in all kinds of deeply satisfying ways. I can only think my father would have rejoiced and relaxed had he been able to discover and acknowledge a similar feeling of inclusion.

These days I’m able to accept (for the most part) that as a person of faith, I must slog through real life’s inevitable discomfort without attempting to dodge or deny its existence, doing what I need to do in spite of how discombobulated it makes me feel; learning, thinking, observing, caring, and making the best decisions I can. My partner, God, is the Whatever that is in me but isn’t of me., and It gives me the will and ability to rise above prejudice, fear, and personal anxiety in order to act and think in ways that are beyond my own self-interest. God binds me to others in common concern for a common good. I may hunger for protection from the discomforts of reality all I want within such a working partnership, but I leave it behind immediately once I expect God (or Rush Limbaugh or Einstein or MoveOn.org or my mother) to provide me with any such protection. God is my ability to participate in and, yes, enjoy, reality.

It took time for me to relax into a working faith; time to stop arguing with my own intellect, time to accept unequivocally that God both is and is available to me in some inconceivable way, time to accept that my part of our partnership was nothing more than living that acceptance.  But once I acknowledged the Almighty’s existence, I couldn’t seem to unacknowledged it. I might choose to ignore God’s voice, but I could no longer pretend God wasn’t there, nattering away.

My faith, then, is what I do with my absolute acceptance that God is. My partnership with the great Whatever is not something I need to think about or figure out. Instead it is inherently a call to kinder, gentler, more truthful, more forgiving action than I am capable of on my own.

I’ve always liked a good challenge, and I’ve found living as a person of faith—engaging with real people in the real world—to be as tough as challenges gets. I also do a lot less harm, both to myself and to others. And occasionally I’m aware of feeling something that feels suspiciously like joy.

So, how are you with hope these days?

Speaking for myself, if I weren’t a person of faith, I’d probably be a cynic, chuckling away at history’s cyclical dark comedy. There are, after all, so many good, dark chuckles out there. Take the fact that 2011 is the centennial year of humankind’s first successful aerial bombing of itself; and the place we bombed then is the same place we’re bombing now: Libya.

I am first, last, always, a realist; a person who’s interested in considering the world as it actually is. So, if I hadn’t hooked up with God, the great Whatever, I’d be dismissing hopeful people such as myself – all us optimistic souls who believe goodness and kindness are the way to go – as complete doofuses.

(Astrid Riecken - FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

Of course, hope is easy, even for cynics, in the spring. Those first brave snowdrops and crocuses poke their cheerful selves up through the snow, followed apace by stout early daffodils, anemones, cherry blossoms and dandelions, and here comes hope, a fleeting expection that both ourselves and our world can do better. After our long winters of personal and global discontent, this blossom-fueled optimism sends us rushing outside to dance in the streets and hug strangers. Hope briefly trumps reason: For those brief shining days, we feel that everything is fundamentally all right, society’s screw-ups are transient; human beings are open-hearted creatures intent on doing right by each other. I am so right there, dancing and hugging, convinced for a few days or weeks that the world really is being remade into a better version of itself.

But then the blossoms always fall, while the bombings always continue; and I realize that not much – or maybe nothing — about the world has gotten less screwed-up. Spring’s hope is whipped-cream hope, not meat-and-potatoes hope. Pessimism beckons. If I am to be a year-round hopeful person, rather than a cynical person, I need heartier fare than blossoms. So what is hope, anyway?

For me, as a person of faith, hope is a cheerful acceptance that I have no control over anything other than my own efforts, combined with a quiet confidence that my life is, and will continue to be, an adventure worth having. No matter what happens to me, I—as a person who lives in companionable partnership with God, the great Whatever —will go on feeling comfortable with who I am in the world as it actually is.

I know from living both on my own and in partnership with God that, as a person of faith, I am kinder, gentler, more useful, much more hopeful person; much better at doing what I can, instead of sitting around moaning that I can’t do all that much. Don’t ask me to explain how or why hanging out with the great Whatever fuels the hope in me. I don’t know and I don’t care; I’m just glad that it does. As Van Morrison put it; it ain’t why, why, why, why, why; it just is.

Hope, as I see it, is both the gift and obligation that comes from choosing to live in partnership with God. You and I cannot make the blossoms last forever, we cannot remake the whole world into a kinder, gentler, less greedy place; but we can change how we, ourselves, deal with others – which as I see it makes us hope on two feet.

The way I see it is: As a person of faith, I become not just a feeler of hope, but a participant in it.

You with me on this?

A  couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Why can’t we just let Jesus be Jesus?” in the Washington Post and on this website.

That question generated a lot of interesting discussion about whether or not Jesus is divine. But almost no discussion about what effect following Jesus’ dictates and example, whether he’s divine or not, has on how we live.

The post that resonated most with me was a borrowed one, offered by AREYOUSAYING on the Washington Post website. It comes from an old Arthur Reid Reynolds gospel song, first recorded by his group, The Art Reynolds Singers, in 1966, later covered by   The Doobie Brothers, The Byrds, and the Ventures and quite a few others.

The quotation is short and to the point: Jesus is just alright with me.

To me, that says all I need to say to this guy, Jesus: I’m with you, buddy; now, let’s get down to business.

The question for me is what, exactly, is that business?

I’m always going on in these posts about how my partnership with God – my faith – is shown in how I live and what I do, not in what I say. But – and this struck me only quite recently – what I’m doing these days is spending huge chunks of time at my computer saying things.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I stoutly defend the need for reasoned, civil discourse about the ineffable great Whatever.

It’s just not all that I, personally, need to have going on as a person of faith. I certainly try to live my faith in my day-to-day relationships, but I want to move at least a part of my life back into society’s troubled trenches. I want to take on some struggle that could use my help. I want to donate my time and my skills; not just my brain and my money.

A couple of careers ago, I co-owned a couple of restaurants. At one of them, I served healthy, whole-wheat muffins with every meal. If I tried serving another bread, customers would clamor for those muffins.

In hindsight, I realize there’s something cozy, nurturing, and slightly comical about muffins. It’s hard to feel other than optimistic while eating one.

The closest town of any size has a wondrous, residential organization that “provides community-oriented programs and supervision for individuals in transition from prison to free society.” Residents are still technically incarcerated during the 90-days they live there, but they can work, get more intensive treatment for their addictions (all are in substance abuse recovery), get outside, and get re-acquainted with normal life, instead of being thrown out of prison one day with a few bucks and their parole officers phone number.

In the last few years, as the result of one-two economic and political punches, this wondrous organization has gone from flourishing to struggling. It’s pretty clear that what is needed is   an in-house business that can produce a sizeable income.

Soooooo …

… armed with my itch to have a more-than-cerebral partnership with the great Whatever and my limited culinary expertise, I’ve gone to this organizations board and proposed going into the “Recovery Muffin” business.

Recovery Muffins
are baked from fresh eggs, raw sugar,
whole wheat and unbleached flour,
real butter and buttermilk by people in addiction recovery.
They are an edible, communal celebration of healthy choices and second chances.

They have yet to get back to me, so who knows if we’ll go forward. But it is very satisfying have offered.

Jesus was, after all, into bread.

Any reaction to this urge of mine? Do you empathize with my hunger to get out there as a person of faith? Or am I just an old hippie still searching for peace and love in the communal kitchen?

P.S. How much would you pay for a really good, healthy muffin? Would you pay extra if you knew it was a non-profit, helpful, healthy muffin?

I find it impossible this morning to write the kind of post I usually write. Everything I have to say about faith seems impossibly trivial to me in the context of our wounded world. I want to do something — something that will help with the healing.

The first thing I do every morning when I fire up my computer is take a look at The Washington Post. This has been a daily ritual since 9/11. It’s my way of establishing that the world beyond my always peaceful cow pasture remains relatively recognizable and okay.

Or not, as was the case on 9/11.

Or today.

Today, The Washington Post headline reads: Prime Minister: Worst crisis since World War II. And the lead story is Authorities fear meltdown possiblity at Fukushima plant.

Such impersonally cataclysmic days as this one (and there have, thankfully, not been many) always make me think of the day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was killed. I was holed up in an isolated girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. Rumors of Kennedy’s assassination had gone flying around all afternoon, but I’d paid them no attention – rumors were always flying around my boarding school. Then I saw the school’s flag lowered to half-mast and knew this particular rumor was true.  I also knew that a far-away action had irrevocably changed my world.

What I remember is how much I wanted to do something to help and how, in those days, I couldn’t think of anything at all useful to do. The world was wounded and I had no power to join in its healing. I have never, before or since felt quite so isolated and impotent.

Today, however, it occurred to me that as person of faith, I’m reacting quite differently to the news that the world is enduring what I can only  (old hippie that I am) describe as cosmic mayhem. Instead of feeling isolated by disaster, I feel united with you and everyone who gives a damn about something other than their own survival as one of the fittest. In my opinion, those of us without specific disaster expertise probably can’t really help Japan or its people in any way other than to give a few bucks, but you and I can help the world heal by resolving to live our partnerships with God even more scrupulously; to be as kind and useful as we can toward everyone who comes our way. It’s as though we’re doing what we can to strengthen the world’s healing connection to God, by strengthening my own.

Chuck is a welcome newcomer to our conversation. In one of his posts he wrote something that I find so completely relevant to living as an unwounded inhabitant of our gravely wounded world.

. . .If there is a God (which I believe), we don’t have all the answers for a reason…..we don’t need them. Life is about living every day; we don’t need a spiritual map from some mystical being or divine guide. If God exist it is not to rule or force us into submission and worship but to walk with us as we live everyday to the fullest with the greatest gift….Life.

The longer I live in partnership with God, the great Whatever, the simpler faith gets: It involves nothing more or less than doing what I may to help whomever I can every day.

We can only do what we can do; but we must  take care to do that.

Why can’t we just let Jesus be Jesus?

I’m not close to being a Christian, but I am a person of faith who is quite the Jesus fan. Why? Because this guy, more than anyone I’ve ever known or heard of, fearlessly lived his relationship with God, the great Whatever. That relationship was his joy and satisfaction; wherever it took him was where he went. He didn’t prevaricate or rationalize or temporize when it came to living his faith; he suited up and showed up.

I cannot imagine a better role model for a person of faith; for anyone who also tries to live a relationship with God, rather than just talk about it.

If I’m so into Jesus, why am I not a Christian?

Because the magical deification stories seem both silly and unnecessary – beginning with Jesus being the hybrid son of Mary and God. Could someone please explain to me what, exactly, that’s about? And why it’s essential to believe it in order to follow Jesus?

It seems to me we owe God more respect than to pussyfoot around with the truth, even if that pussyfooting gives us communal or personal comfort. As I see it, if my relationship with God cannot be based on what I’ve experienced and so know is true, then – pardon the expression – but to hell with it.

I do believe that God, the great Whatever, both is and is available for partnership with us humans. These beliefs are based personal experience as a long-time sober addict and alcoholic; someone who was unable to get sober on her own, but was able to get and stay sober living in such a partnership.

Also from experience, I know that when I’m living in a partnership with God, life is flat-out simpler, more productive, and more fun. I feel perfectly entitled to think of the great Whatever as my conscience, my common humanity, my selflessness, my ability to forgive; indeed, as any urge I have to park my ego in the interest of the common good. God by any other name is that which is in me that isn’t focused on me. Faith in God is simply choosing to live that other-directed focus, even when it’s inconvenient and/or costly.

So back to this Jesus, a knowable figure in history. Personally, I admire and wish to emulate him, without having any urge to deify him.

It does seem to me Christianity’s insistence that Jesus be god repels people who might otherwise happily trot along in his path. And that path trotting is, I would suggest, what Jesus, himself, calls us to do.

At least one Christian appears to somewhat agree with me. In his book, Saving Jesus from the Church, Robin Meyers, a Congregationalist pastor, calls us “to reconsider what it means to follow Jesus, instead of arguing over things that the church has insisted we must all believe about Christ. Doctrines divide by nature. Discipleship brings us together.”

Amen! Why can’t we leave it that Jesus is the person in history who managed to most fully inhabit a partnership with the great Whatever. His focus was so blessedly outward. He lived so simply and lovingly. At great personal risk, Jesus called out the greedy, the bigoted, the liars, the cheats, and the mean–all those inwardly-focus folks who place their personal success or wealth before the general good. Shouldn’t that be how we live as well, if we’re to call ourselves followers of Jesus?

What I want so badly is for all persons of faith to recognize the irrelevance of the magic of Jesus in the face of the mission of Jesus. I want us to stop worrying about what we say about Jesus, and start worrying about how we can most effectively follow his example. Therein, to me, lies the true power of the guy who is, arguably, western history’s most fully-realized person of faith.

Your thoughts?

Thomas Merton 1915-1968

Early in The Seven Storey Mountain (which I only recently got around to reading), Thomas Merton writes that shortly after World War 1 his father took a job as an organist at an Episcopalian church in Douglaston on Long Island.  The old Zion church had stained-glass windows, one of which had the design of an anchor. As a child, Merton would gaze up at that window and dream of going to sea. Twenty years later, he writes that this was a “strange interpretation of a religious symbol ordinarily taken to signify stability in Hope; the theological virtue of Hope, dependence on God.”

Now, I don’t mean to imply that Thomas Merton offers this story as anything other than a casual, back-ward glance. Yet while reading it, I had what I think of one of those light bulb moments of faith, a jump in awareness of what it means to me (or you or anyone) to live in partnership with God. Reading this slight anecdote from a monk’s childhood, it came to me that one of major gifts of faith is the persistent presence of hope in one’s head and heart. And by hope, I mean a kind of blessed, essential calmness—a deep certainty that what’s truly indispensable to one’s sense of well-being is fundamentally unaffected by what happens; that it has to do, instead, with rooting one’s life in a partnership with God. And so, it came to me while reading that paragraph written by Thomas Merton, that I was now a truly hopeful person, because I feel certain that no matter what happens to me, I—as a person of faith—will go on feeling comfortable with who I am in the world as it is.

Such hopefulness is, of course, easy to claim while reading The Seven Storey Mountain tucked up in bed on a Sunday morning, but how does my hopefulness as a person of faith hold up when I’m out amongst ’em? Well, at the same time I was discovering Thomas Merton’s mountain, my beloved public radio station was being severely pummeled by the current economic downturn. We who work there were told to prepare for cuts in salaries that were not all that great to begin with. Lay-offs were announced as possible at any time, with very little notice.

As I write this, our financial troubles are still dire, yet, confronting the very real possibility of getting laid off, I feel confident that it will be a much different internal experience from the first time I lost a job. Thirty years ago, when I was let go as magazine editor, I was terrified, for it felt to me as though I’d lost the underpinnings of my life. I responded by getting very drunk and going into a black, angry depression. Now, however, if  I were to lose my public radio job, I would, of course, be tremendously sad to lose work that I love, daily contact with colleagues who are like a second family, and—let’s stay real here—of course, I would be worried about money and health care. But I would not be terrified because my life would not have lost its underpinnings. It would continue to rest on what it rests on now; it would rest on faith. My partnership with God would keep right giving me deep joy, the means to be useful, and, yes, hopefulness.

Going back to Thomas Merton’s mentioning of hope as “dependence on God.” I used to have great difficulty thinking of myself as dependent on anything, because that felt like an abdication of belief in my personal abilities. Yet now—as difficult as it is for a knee-jerk rebel like me to acknowledge—as a person of faith, I’ve come to accept that I am, at the very least, inter-dependent with God.  These days, for me, hope is yet another way to describe what it feels  like to live in partnership with the great Whatever.

When I was little I used to love to lie on the living room floor and look at this gigantic art book of my mother’s that had full-page reproductions of famous paintings by the Old Masters. I remember in particular the book’s centerfold, which was Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” how the hand of God and the hand of Adam almost, but not quite touched. I remember staring at that gap. Years later I came to see it as Michelangelo’s painting of both God’s presence and the distance between the Almighty and us that has to be leapt by faith.

I’ve wandered into countless Sunday school rooms, mostly to attend 12-Step meetings, but also occasionally to go to Sunday school. Often—at least in Southern Christian Sunday school rooms—there’s a picture of young children with a kind of hovering, protective Christ above or behind them. The message is clear: God is here.

The final irony presented by the social and financial entrenchment of our current religious practices seems to me to be that God is here and is our way out of the inherent limitations of this entrenchment. I believe that once we get our faith in gear, our religious practices will follow its lead. I believe that once we, as individuals, strengthen our partnership with the Almighty, then groups of us will become able to give up our spiritual security blankets—all those answers to the unanswerable, all the false comfort for our fears, all that pandering to our need to feel we are right about the imponderables and that everyone who differs from us is wrong.

I believe that it is only through an active partnership with God that we humans become immune to the devil’s insistence that it is all right to meet our needs and assuage our fears by limiting God to fit within the scope of human imagination and understanding.  I believe that it is only in partnership with God that we fearful, arrogant humans find the courage to stick our  timid toes into the uncharted waters of a useful, working faith and rise to its challenge of God is: now what?

Your thoughts?