MATThematics

One of the most horrible things I did in elementary school was to throw my math work in the trash in my first grade class out of frustration and when the teacher saw it and got mad, I blamed this really unpopular girl for it.  Pretty evil for first grade I think.  The teacher scolded her and I think she cried.  I haven't seen her in over 25 years and I still pray for her.  Math (and insecurity) makes me do horrible things... I've always hated it.

Math has also been a source of great irony in my life:

In high school I was the dunce in my math class.

Somehow, I went into the final with a 65 in the previous quarter and busted a 100% on the final. I still remember the looks of disbelief on my friends' faces.

I had to RE-learn it all for the GRE (graduate school acceptance exam).

The process infuriated me, but I worked my butt off and scored higher on the math than the verbal.

I was also the dunce in my high school accounting class and I never learned to use EXCEL until a couple years ago. Now I have to manage 8 different budgets.

A few weeks ago I had to multiply 20 times 15 to determine a figure for an unusual $ situation.

I came up with 3000. I gave this figure to several people.

15 hours after my original calculation, as I was laying in bed, it came to me that the correct answer was... Well, you probably know.

I can't multiple two 2-digit numbers in my head and come within 2000 of the correct figure!

I and a few other people got a good laugh out of this.

I hope to earn a PhD this year.

I hate math.

The Flip Side of Judgement

One of the wisest people I know pointed out that my concept of judgement (last post) could be misconstrued into a guilt-driven mania to "do more" or a despairing paralysis because there is always more to do. The point I was trying to make is that maybe it is how we "judge" our own lives that may make the most difference, but the critique is solid.

Bob Pierce, the heroic founder of World Vision declared that he wanted to "burn out for God" and essentially drove himself to ALWAYS try to save that "one more" (that Schindler had missed).

In the process, he essentially abandoned his family, failing even to respond to a daughter's suicide attempt (she later succeeded) and left a broad swathe of other broken relationships and deeply wounded people in his wake. He founded one of the world's largest relief and development organizations while always striving to do more. I think he could have done more. Pierce ran World Vision for 17 years, before he was essentially forced to resign and he died 11 years later at 64. If he had been less desperate to save the world, spent more time with his family and delegated more of his overseas work, he might have achieved the same results and left fewer damaged people behind.

Even Salvadoran martyr Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.

In reality, few of us appear to have messiah complexes. Few of us try to save ONE, let alone "one more." Why DO we make so many selfish decisions instead of trying to save one more? The simple answer is, "because we're all sinners." Sure, but maybe it's also because we fail to take the long view that Romero recommends, and the paralysis of the problems have already set in. Taking the long view is one prescription for selfish paralysis.
There is another prescription that seems counterintuitive. Howard Thurman wrote: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask, 'What makes me come alive?' and do that, because what the world needs most is people who are fully alive."

It sort of sounds selfish on one level, and Christians are supposed to be more concerned about magnifying God's reputation rather than our own "self-actualization," but Thurman was a contemplative, mystical lover of God. He imagined people taking the time and space to search out the answer to this in their souls with their creator. Is it possible that the things that would make us come alive are also the things that would bring God the most praise? Someone should be shouting now: "Jesus! Jesus makes us fully come alive and is the answer to our selfishness!" Once again, (and not at all flippantly) sure, but many followers of Jesus (including myself many days) don't exactly seem to be living lives of joyous abandon, humble self-evaluation, and diligent endeavor. Why?

I think a part of that problem is that we haven't figured out what makes us come alive and pursued it! Maybe we think God or Jesus would never be that indulgent. Maybe we think they don't care. Maybe we think God is only interested in seeing us come alive in church, or when we read our Bible. The problem is that for all the times we aren't in church or reading our Bible (95% of our week?), we've accepted someone else's answer for what will make us come alive and pursued that! Not only are many of those "golden rings" selfish, but their emptiness in the long-run keeps us grasping after one more thing, instead of getting off the merry-go-round and taking the time to reflect on our lives and what we were created to do. Or, on the contrary, we don't believe that what might make us "come alive" is compatible with security and stability and so we pursue a lesser good (and a lesser God?) for the sake of those things (didn't Jesus say that those who try to preserve their lives and those that give up their lives will find the opposite results?). These are manifestations of our cultural captivity. We worship the God-king of Zion but are oppressed by the forces of Babylon.

I confess that in the hunger for that thing, whatever it is, there may be a bit of my generations sense of entitlement (that seems like a pipe-dream in this economy). I really do believe that with a long-view and a God-centered attitude, we can be full, satisfied and relatively unselfish in the midst of empty and unsatisfactory circumstances. However, I also think that we all ARE uniquely fashioned toward different purposes and if we took the time with God to find it (the thing that we were made for, that makes us truly come alive) and took the chance of pursuing it I really do think, we might find the joy and fulfillment that would make us less apt to make selfish choices in other areas of life. And I think God would revel in seeing our joy at living the way we were designed to live!

Judgement and Empathy

This is SO NOT "Christmasy."
Christians think quite a bit about the afterlife. I'm teaching "Intro to Judaism" right now and we've had a lot of conversations about the Jewish perspective. Most of my students can't comprehend the idea that Jews are frequently agnostic or not that concerned about the afterlife. In addition, Christians mostly think about the afterlife exclusively in terms of heaven and hell. The Bible actually talks a lot more about judgement. It's not clear. God is portrayed as the supreme judge, but Paul also implies that humans may act as subsidiary judges. Also, while the criteria for "salvation" is faith, the judgement is generally described in terms of what one has done, or hasn't done (see Matthew 25, Romans 2). Now, I know Christians have lots of different ways of reconciling all this but I'm less interested in that. C.S. Lewis wrote a little novelette about heaven and hell called The Great Divorce. Lewis was clear that he didn't want it to be taken "literally" but it should also be clear that it wasn't intended to be frivolous or meaningless.
I write the following imagination of judgement with the same intent.

I imagine the experience of judgement to be something like the experience of 20/20 hindsight portrayed at the end of Schindler's List. If you watch that scene, you see Oscar Schindler, a man who rescued many Jews from the fate of the concentration camps come to some tangible realizations about his life. The simple idea is: "I could have done more." Oscar Schindler was a hero, but he didn't do everything he could've done, even knowing that lives were on the line. He stares at a host of people he saved and is broken by the realization that he could very easily have saved more.
What if judgement is like 20/20 and 360 degree hindsight and empathy? I suddenly arrive at a sweeping and accurate assessment of my whole life. It life flashes before my eyes. I see, not only the things that I did and didn't do, but their actual effects on other people, the created world, society... For instance, I don't just see the time I was rude or said something inconsiderate to someone in 7th grade (let's call him Joe), but I see the ripple effect of that on Joe's interaction with his little brother, friends and parents. What if judgement involves receiving the curse of retroactive empathy for everyone I could have had a positive effect on and didn't. What if I could feel what that student felt when he was anxious, lonely and needed someone to give a crap and I didn't. What if I could feel what the panhandler felt when I was the 1000th person to ignore him that morning in Center City.
Will anyone escape judgement? I'm not talking about hell now. I'm talking about judgement.
I don't know. I imagine if I could feel what I describe above for even a brief moment right now, after 35 years of life, it would feel like an eternity of anguish. Maybe on some level this would be a gift, preparing me to experience the deepest mercy and grace and to freely live the life that God has in store for us. Maybe there is a deeper mercy too.

"God humbles the proud, but gives grace to the humble"

Maybe the judgement I recieve will correspond to the manner in which I present my life to God.
Perhaps if I have learned the lessons of empathy and humility now, I will present my life (as I understand it) to God as a paltry thing and God will show me the opposite.
Or maybe God presents it all to us, like a performance appraisal.

Suppose we are given a box and the truth of our life can be seen glowing inside it.
The proud one is thrilled, imagining the rewarding experience it will be to open the box and see all that they have accomplished. They firmly and confidently lift the lid and breathe deeply before wilting, curling up into fetal position, gasping and weeping as they are emotionally and psychologically dismantled by the magnitude of their deficiencies.
The humble ones shake and stutters.
"No. I know what's in there. Please just take it away. I can't bear it."
Perhaps to these, God still responds, "You must open it."
They brace themselves and tear it open with gritted teeth, like ripping off a band-aid, but in their humility, their contribution to life is what shines forth. They experience empathy with those who were blessed by their kindness, however small.

I know some people will try to fit all this in to their theological boxes, and others will dismiss it as pious drivel. That's fine I suppose and yes, following Jesus is at the heart of this for me. But my point is that if the heroic Oscar Schindler could take a "do over" he might... I'd like to try it myself. Maybe I'll start now...

Benefitting from the Doubt

"Doubt" is a a popular movie and play right now. It is also popular for contemporary theologians to praise doubt as a necessary component of faith. What IS the "benefit of the doubt"?
Have you ever been wrong about someone? Has anyone ever been wrong about YOU?
Both my wife and one of my best friends have often been plagued with others prejudices. It's not a racial thing. They really ARE just misunderstood. The crux of the problem is that they are both good-looking people who happen to be introverts. Therefore, they are judged as aloof and arrogant. People rarely give them the benefit of the doubt. They are certainly not the only ones victimized by prejudices, nor are they the most severely victimized. Being human, they "no doubt" (?) often prejudge others as well. I do.

I vaguely remember a conversation I had with a Russian Orthodox Priest. He had two sage pieces of advice. First, and less relevantly spouses should not try to be accountability partners. Second, and more relevantly, he quoted an Orthodox Saint who had suggested that to truly forgive someone, the forgiver should try to come up with a humane excuse for why the offender behaved as they did. This is one way of giving the benefit of the doubt. It is assuming that there is some perfectly humane reason why someone behaves badly. At my church, we sometimes say, "Hurting people hurt people." A humorous essay on the male perspective offers this "rule" to women: "If we say something, and there are two ways you could take it, and one of them makes you mad, we meant the other way." That's a step in the right direction.

Taking self-doubt (and faith?) a bit further, we might become agnostic about the thing that leads to our judgement. This is to say, "I doubt that I know why this person is the way they are, but I take on faith that they are a person of immeasurable value and complexity. Certainly, there is a humane reason for their actions (however deplorable) and they are not innately worse than I." The benefit of the doubt does not suggest that we entrust ourselves to those that have hurt us, or even reduce guilt in many circumstances. It only asks that we don't assume the worst about them.
Dealing (as I do) in service, I sometimes have the opportunity to hear people trying to make sense of their service experiences. Since we often serve outside our own communities, we often find ourselves in contexts that we don't quite understand. Given our own experiences, Christian servants can get pulled into the American tendency of meritocracy that suggests that whatever needs are present in the life of any person or community, personal irresponsibility probably lies behind those needs. In this situation, the benefit of the doubt is to say, "I am not from here. I do not know the history of this community, or what it has been through. I do not know that they are any less responsible than I. I have a lot to learn." The old adage has it: "Do not judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes." Doubt should also be a call to learning. Even recognizing the permanent frailty of our knowledge does not mean that we should maintain cold ignorance! If you don't know about a person, get to know them better!

What about our relationships with God. Can they benefit from doubt? Indeed. C.S. Lewis and Fyodor Doestoyevsky have both written about scenarios in which God goes on trial. No doubt Job had the idea first. But doesn't faith demand that we give God the benefit of the doubt? I would suggest that if the God you claim doesn't deserve this benefit, then you should leave aside the worship of that "God" until you can imagine a God that does deserve it. That one is God.

Sufjan Stevens, writing "Vito's Ordination Song" in the voice of God offers these lyrics:
"To what I did and said, rest in my arms, sleep in my bed. There's a design.
To what I did and said..." As incomprehensible as many apparent "acts of God" (or God's non- intervention in acts of incomprehensible tragedy) might be, if God is God, might the benefit of the doubt include these things?

For those of us who offer God the benefit of the doubt without reservation, and desire it for ourselves, it is time to offer it to those around us who are created in God's image.

Is this a Pollyanna ploy for naivete? I hope it is intentional wisdom for healthy living.
When can we move beyond doubt? When we know fully, even as we are fully known.

The Mercy of Divine Pranks

There is a prank we used to play. You press a penny onto someone's forehead for thirty seconds, then you tell them that the game is to see how many whacks to the back of the head it will take to get the penny to fall off. The prank is in the sleight-of-hand. You remove the penny when you pull your hand away from their forehead. So... they go on whacking the back of their head until either humiliation or uncontrollable laughter ends the prank. Yes, it's cruel. If you do this to a real friend, you eventually really want them to "get it."
(Mind that in college my best friends & I shot each other with homemade blowdarts. Guy stuff.)
Wicked transition - let's ask a question: Where is God?

The Christian response is that God is everywhere. We call this "omnipresence."
However, most Christians also believe that God is more fully manifest in some other realm than the one that is apparent to us every day.

So, where is the realm of God's more complete manifestation?
At this point I think most Christians would say, "I have no idea."
That sounds like the best answer to me.

Other answers might include something about a "spiritual realm."
Fair enough. I think I generally imagine a multi-dimensional universe, most of which eludes us, and some dimension/s of which is the "place" (if we can call it that) that allows fuller communion between God and the world. I believe someday that dimension will break in on this one in a unprecedented "revelation." I'm not sure I would call it the "spiritual realm," because that seems to imply that the world we live in is not spiritual while I think of it as more integrated.

Simpler question: Does anyone think that the realm of God (or "heaven") is "up"?
If we could just travel vertically far enough, trangressing solar system, galaxy, etc. would we get there? I hope most Christians would say "no." Again, I think that's the best answer.

That being the case, here's a harder question:
Why did Jesus "ascend" into the heavens at the end of his physical time on earth?
A friend's answer was: "What do you want him to do, go left?"
Funny, but its not a matter of what I would "want him to do."

Let me suggest another answer.
If Jesus had sort of disappeared (In the manner of Star Trek "beaming") to "break on through to the other side" that would have communicated impermanence to his disciples, when he had just told them, "I am with you always."
Based on limited research, I think most pre-moderns did imagine that "up" was the direction to go to get to the realm of God/s, from Babel, to Mt. Sinai, to Mt. Olympus, to sun, moon and star worship, "up" seemed like the logical direction to direct worship, or to locate the presence of the divine, though obviously, this was far from exclusive.

So, when Jesus ascended, God was doing something that humans could understand. I'm suggesting that it was a concession to the particular human finitude of that time, as well as being a slightly theatrical way of communicating majesty. It wasn't a cruel "prank." It was a sort of "divine sleight-of-hand."

I wonder: What else did God do, that scripture records, to communicate, via a concession, with the people of that time and place? Are there senses in which scripture itself becomes a sort of "divine sleight-of-hand" that communicates WELL but necessarily "inaccurately," because accuracy would take the conversation way beyond us?

Would it honor God if we insisted that traveling vertically from Israel at a particular point in the earth's rotation and orbit (and who knows what else?) would ultimately get us to the throne of God?

I don't know anyone who thinks that, but are there other things that we are still clinging to, when it would now please God if we let go?

Maybe God really wants us to "get it" and stopped whacking ourselves in the back of the head.

The Gospel According to Gran Torino

Walt is doomed.  When Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino opens, his character is recently widowed, bitter, foul-mouthed, violent, borderline alcoholic and very sick.  His kids don't really care about him and he thinks they are self-absorbed and ridiculous.  But, maybe the worst part of it is that he hates his neighbors.  Like Dirty Harry, Walt is isn't a "racist," he hates everybody, but as a Korean War vet, he especially hates southeast Asians who remind him of the things he did there.  He is destined to die, coughing up blood on the floor of his garage, feeling guilty and alone.  And no one will care.  Let me try to lay this out without giving too much away.

His fresh young priest tries to get him to come to confession, but Walt constantly and vehemently rejects him.  The priest character is great.  Initially, one is inclined to feel about him exactly as Walt does, but as the movie develops, we see that he is also 3 dimensional and has something to offer.

Walt's life begins to change when the son of his Hmong neighbors gets in gang trouble.  In a classic "Dirty Harry as Grumpy Old-Man" scene, Walt inadvertently saves this young man by wielding his M-1 and growling "Get off my lawn!"  The Hmong community responds by showering him with gifts.  Eventually, the older sister Su befriends Walt, seeing past his tough-guy bluster and sort of integrates this racial-slur-spewing crust of a person into her family.

The major text of the film becomes a commentary on manhood.  Walt ends up mentoring Tao, the teenage boy next door and trying to "man him up" in blue-collar Detroit "Greatest Generation" style.  Though his version of manhood is basically comic-relief at this point, Tao eventually does become more confident and assertive and Walt becomes more warm and human.  Still, he turns to violence to try to stop the gang-intimidation and learns a lesson he should have learned in Korea.  Violent begets violence.

Ultimately, Walt has to stop the cycle of violence and he lands on a creative solution.  He goes to confession to fulfill his wife's last wishes.  Then he confesses the things that have TRULY haunted him to Tao.

He drives over to the gang-house and calls them out.  They emerge, brandishing their pistols.

He talks tough for a minute or two until all the eyes of the neighborhood are on the scene.  They wait, and so do we, for Walt to rain down lead-vengeance on these neighborhood terrorists.  Through lips clenched on a cigarette, Walt snarls, "Got a light? (pause) I've got a light!" Then he enacts his plan.  

What does he do?  Oddly enough, Walt sort of pulls a WWJD.

Throughout this film, Walt is the hero saving the Hmong family, but at the end, it seems clear that they have saved him from dying alone, bitter, uncared-for and uncaring.  

Walt has changed, though his language still leaves a great deal to be desired.  

He loves his neighbors as himself.  He is honest about his pain.  He is reconciled.  

In the last moments of the film, he is literally an icon of Christ. 

He is very nearly a new creation.

How many of us can say the same?

In Ephesians 2-3, Paul says that the mystery of Christ is when Christ on the cross broke down the wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles and made them one.  It is a work of reconciliation.  

When someone goes from hating his neighbors, to loving them, God is at work.  It may not be the whole picture, but it is a picture of salvation and redemption.

Connecting to God - II

Another way of trying to connect to God is by trying to set the tone for the day with some sort of meditation or conscious commitment of one's day to God.


In college a friend of mine and I decided we would spend (I think it was 20 minutes) meditating each day. This posed 3 problems. First was finding a quiet place of solitude. My apartment was completely out of the question. The library was a pretty social place sometimes. BUT, in the basement of the college building next door there was a rarely used classroom and an almost never used restroom. I had my spots! This leads to the second problem, which was my narcolepsy. I am not clinically diagnosed, but I have fallen asleep in the car at red-lights (never on the motorcycle, which is why I may be the only person for whom a motorcycle is actually a safer mode of travel).

I tried the classroom first. Walked in, closed the door, sat down at a desk and discovered problem 3: I had no idea what I was doing. I just sort of tried to quiet myself, figuring that meditation could not be just praying (talking to God), nor could it be reading something thoughtful and thinking about it. Of course it could have been, but I didn't think so at that point.
I woke up in the dark, embarrassed but alone. I waved my arms around to get the motion detector to turn the lights back on and left.

For my second attempt, the next day, I entered the restroom, entered the single stall in the restroom, put the seat-cover down and settled into what I thought might be a good meditating position.

This time, when I woke up, it was pitch black and I didn't know where I was. I waved my arms around but since I was in the stall, nothing happened. Then I stood up and ran into each wall of the stall before I came to my senses, managed to feel my way to freedom and gave up on "meditating."
I think the reason that I don't make it a priority to connect to God some days is not a lack of time. Time is there (see below). I think it is because I don't always believe that it will matter, or make a difference for me. This means that I am seeing the connection to God as a self-serving device for my gratification or assistance, rather than the possible benefit that might be passed on to those around me. Sometimes, it is because I am experiencing what Buddhists have called "monkey-mind." I try to settle into a mental and physical posture of connection, but my brain won't stop grabbing at things (that I "need" to do, want to do, or am worried about).

Interestingly, the bathroom is still the primary place I go to make a brief connection with God every day. It is really the only place where my children MIGHT respect my privacy and need for quiet. It also has a fan, which creates great white noise. I no longer have the narcolepsy issue in the same way, though occasionally it still strikes.
The following "advice" could make me sound like a "real spiritual person" but I assure you...
Well, lets put it this way... I didn't really do any of the following this morning and when Beth got up, she looked at me and asked: "Are you mad about something?" The nice thing about being alive is that there is always another day to get some small thing right - like in Groundhog Day.

My daily connection with God usually amounts to 4 things.
In the morning:
1. Try to be aware of God's presence. This often involves willing myself to belief that God is truly everywhere, no less in my bathroom than in my favorite church or on my favorite hiking trail. It involves rejecting an impulse to look upward for God or to direct my thoughts in some direction.

2. Submit my day. I say something like: "God, take my life today to use as you will. Free me from bondage to self so that my life will show others your love, your power, and your way of life.
Give me wisdom and insight to know you, sense your presence and do your will."

3. Read something thoughtful and think about it. For me this means scripture or something related to scripture.

At night:
4. Thank God for the day and recite either the 23rd Psalm, the Lord's Prayer or something else I have committed to memory, until I fall asleep.

You could also build other connection points into your day:
1. Make it a habit of connecting to God as you go in or out your door. Religious Jews often keep a text of scripture in a small box or mezuzah, that they touch upon entering or leaving. You could buy one or create your own practice. Think to yourself "Let's go!" as a way of reminding yourself that you aren't leaving God at home. Your family members or mates might also appreciate it if you reminded yourself upon arriving at home, that God is still with you all.
Put meaningful statements on your dashboard, refrigerator or bathroom mirror.

2. While you're waiting for anything. Why not just offer up your anxiety or impatience? Some people like the serenity prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."

3. With friends (and maybe enemies). C.S. Lewis, keeping in mind the idea of being created in the image of God, said, "You will never meet a mere mortal." I certainly experience God through other people, whether they know it or not. When you are with other people, briefly invite God to be present also. God IS present. Inviting God is just a way of reminding us and setting our mind to the "welcoming" position.

4. Taking a breather. Is it possible that the frenetic pace we keep is less productive than a pace that allows us to step back, breathe and say a b'racha before we continue?

5. Twitter God. Just whatever you might feel like saying. God can handle it. Your friends might not "get it" but who cares? It might be the most interesting twitter all day. If you don't Twitter (I don't) just write whatever you might want to say to God in reply to the most annoying spam email of the day. The point isn't to publicize, and certainly God knows what's going on with us. The point is to be mindful of God by actively directing our thoughts to God at various points in the day.
6. On the drive home. What else are you doing? Minimally, you could say a b'racha for the music you are enjoying or ask for God's mercy and grace to enter whatever situation you are hearing about on the news.

I hope some of this inspires you to set the bar LOW. You don't need to "meditate" for 20 minutes a day. Maybe someday you'll want to (and so will I), but it is said that God says:
"When a child of mine comes to me walking, I am already running."

and:
"The Lord knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust."

Give yourself, your loved ones and the world a gift today by trying to make some sort of connection to God.