Tom's dock
Sometimes as Time and its day slip by outside my window, I sit here and write, as a draft blogpost, something that's on my mind, my reaction to something I've read, or a thought that leads to "a stream of consciousness" or mental dump, to use overworked commons. Going back, if I perceive anger or a rant I'll edit or delete it, or I may set it aside to age and moulder before coming back to have another look.
That has happened with this writing, which was started a couple of weeks ago. I think I'll just post it and be done with it.
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The essay from Patheos (scroll down) says what needs to be said. Some things are too profound and basic to be written by fools like me, who try to explain that which cannot be explained because it's so simple as to be ineffable!
And also because I may tiptoe around what makes me different that may offend, when it is never my purpose to offend: some sort of Progressive Christian among literalist fundamentalist Christian nationalists, my pier out to deep water is long, and the sign on my gate says,
SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL.
Walking a little farther out the pier, another sign reminds me,
NO AMOUNT OF BELIEF MAKES ANYTHING TRUE.
And just before jumping off the deep end, a final sign suggests,
RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY IS THE GREATEST SIN.
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One day in Cove School, it could have been third grade - - but because we were herded down the hall to the double room with the stage, which I don't think was there yet in 1943-44 so I think it was fifth grade and I was ten years old - - we were taken to hear a guest speaker. Mr Barnett came to speak an important message to the students, we didn't know about what. For an hour, I listened rapt as he ranted to elementary school students against the evils of alcohol.
I was convinced! But my spell was broken when, filing back to class, I overheard our teacher, Miss Ruth Martin, exclaim in outrage to another teacher, "What an idiot, that was ridiculous."
Not Mr Barnett about alcohol, but Miss Martin about thinking for myself, gave me a teaching moment that has stuck with me near eighty years: Just because a man in a suit says something, proclaims it loud and long, and is convincingly absolutely certain of his Truth, that don't make it so!
That someone believes something, even believes it with every fibre of their Being, does not make it true. I had a strong dose of this again at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, reading the sign in the lintel over the library door: Seek the Truth, Come whence it May, Cost what it Will.
And this basic message for thinking people was underscored again in Steve Jobs' well-quoted address to a Stanford graduating class:
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."
Have I done that? Not always, which could be cause for the regrets that haunt people at the end of life, the "if onlys". Anyway, above all for me in a religion of beloved stories, a religion that mandates a creed be stood up and said every Sunday after the sermon, "Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking" is central.
Quiet and compliant, I am not vehement about it, the liturgy is part of our Christian story and the creed part of the liturgy, so obediently I stand and say the Nicene Creed with everyone else. Theologically, the creed is more Tradition than Scripture, and I know its dark history, as can anyone who reads John Philip Jenkins' book "The Jesus Wars". But I acquiesce every Sunday. Others, including New Testament scholar Professor Bart Ehrman, have balked and walked, but faith is a decision not a certainty, and I'm standing, saying, and staying.
Vance Morgan's essay below brings to mind a visit to Lincoln Park one Saturday morning in Spring 1970 when my ship was in Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for repairs, replacement of the ship's propeller that had cracked while we were deployed to WestPac, and we'd returned home for a month, then back.
Anyone who'd wanted to had been allowed to bring a car up to San Francisco from San Diego on the ship's hangar deck, and I took my ancient green VW beetle. I used it exploring San Francisco evenings after ship's work and weekends before we were allowed to fly home to San Diego on Fridays in the ship's helicopter and back Monday morning. A favorite destination was Lincoln Park after driving through Japan Town to purchase a box of fresh sushi and a bottle of Kirin. Park on the bluff overlooking Golden Gate Bridge, eat sushi, sip beer, and love life.
This Saturday morning I was hiking around the park and heard chanting from a distance, growing closer. I waited and watched as a small crowd of young people, my memory is that they were all or mostly girls, high school or college age. Marching in step as they chanted over and over, "The Loorrrd Jesus! Hallelujah, Amen! The Looooorrrrd Jesus! Amen!
Lifelong Episcopalians, we were members of a small parish near us in Chula Vista, San Diego. The chanting girls surprised me, religion had always been "private and personal" to me, not knock on doors, not pass out tracts, not chant in the streets, and frankly, I was charmed watching as they strode along enthusiastically proclaiming Jesus. They seemed simple, certain, and naive, but charming.
It was spring 1970. They would have been a then-new oddity of "charismatic" Christians; as an Episcopal priest years later, I was one for a while myself. And I am okay with almost any flavor of Christianity except literalist inerrantist certainty that begins worship by pledging allegiance to the American flag and then pledges "allegiance to the Bible, the inerrant word of God" and everyone nods their head while the preacher condemns "liberal homosexuals," and whose Christian nationalism embraces certainty, religion, and politics that favors government making people's personal decisions for them. Neither that Jesus nor that America is for me, and it pretty much is not found in the Episcopal Church.
My perspective on religion includes God's permissively jussive word "ye-hi" that opens Pandora's box to whatever evolves; and the farthest reaches of this Universe, a Pantokrator beyond human knowing, the mysterious possibility that I am known and loved, and have even been spoken to once; and no fears or worries about eternity. I do my own exploring, try to do my own thinking, discerning and believing, I love Time alone with my thoughts; and I often realize that I am wrong.
Vance Morgan's essay, "Truth Is Too Fragile To Be Chanted On The Street" took me way back in my own Time this morning.
RSF&PTL
T88&c
Truth Is Too Fragile To Be Chanted On The Street
There is a saying attributed to Saint Francis that I have heard frequently in more than three decades as a non-Catholic professor in Catholic higher education: Preach the Gospel—use words if necessary. If you google the statement, the items at the top of the search results are mostly attempts to establish that despite the popularity of the attribution, Francis never said this. Not only did he not say it, some deniers argue, it would be misleading and problematic if he had said it. “It is impossible to preach without words. The Gospel is inherently verbal.” Of course, it is impossible to know from a distance of eight centuries whether Francis ever suggested that preaching is more about how you live than what you say—but it certainly is compatible with many things that we know he did say. Quoting a good friend and mentor from my early years of teaching, “if he didn’t say it, he should have.”
I was taught from a very early age that “real” Christians are enthusiastic about their faith; a natural expression of this enthusiasm is to tell other people about it. “Enthusiasm” comes from two Greek words that mean “God in you” or “infused with the divine.” During the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries in this country, “enthusiasm” in a religious sense meant speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit,” and any number of other unusual indications that God was in the house. In many corners of religious activity, that still holds true.
In the religious world of my youth, we called telling other people about our faith “witnessing,” letting others know that, among other things, they would be going to hell if they did not invite Jesus into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior. Witnessing was a requirement, whether the witnessed wanted to hear about our enthusiasm or not. Our youth group would occasionally spend a Saturday morning distributing pamphlets and tracts containing our particular version of Christianity’s propaganda either in front of the grocery store downtown or in people’s mailboxes. I always opted for mailbox duty and often left my entire wad of pamphlets in the first mailbox.
I have always attributed my constitutional resistance to and hatred of witnessing to my extreme introversion—and I’m sure that played a big part in it. But over the years I have come to believe that not only is aggressive, in-your-face religion anathema to introverts, but it is also anathema to Christianity itself. Years ago, I came across the following from Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm—she could have been describing the church I grew up in.
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? . . . On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? . . . The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Tell me about it. In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman observes that “the casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible, piety.” Perhaps this is what Saint Francis meant when, in the saying he never said, he advised believers to preach with their lives and rely on words as the last resort. Worth remembering the next time you are bitten by the witnessing bug.
Tomáš Halik’s Patience with God was the final text in my Faith and Doubt colloquium last srping, recommended by my teaching partner (who is a Dominican priest in the Political Science department). Halik is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian, ordained in the “underground” Catholic church while Czechoslovakia was still under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, he was first confused, then appalled the first time he saw a mega-Christian evangelist on American television.
[I hoped] for a long time that it was just a comedy program caricaturing religion. I didn’t want to believe that someone could seriously believe that it is possible to talk about God with such vulgar matter-of-factness and propagate the Gospel as if it were some reliable brand of automobile.
Halik asks early on in his book what it takes to bring someone closer to Christ, and therefore to God. He worries that “it isn’t quite as easy as certain enthusiastic Christians believe,” simply because “truth is too fragile to be chanted on the street.”
I spent many years of my adult life hesitant to call myself a Christian in public for a number of reasons, not the least being that in our culture the word “Christian” often means something like the dog-and-pony show that Tomáš Halik watched on television, or worse, white MAGA nationalism. It wasn’t until a transformational sabbatical semester over a decade ago that I began making my faith public—this blog has been the primary vehicle for my “coming out party.”
As friends and colleagues on campus began to read my blog and listened to a couple of post-sabbatical presentations I made on campus, their reactions were interesting. “I had no idea about your background and faith,” several said, “but given what I know about you from the past many years, it makes perfect sense.” Perhaps I had been living out the advice that Saint Francis never gave—my life with my colleagues over the previous fifteen years or so was congruent with the Christian words I was now writing and saying.
Christian Wiman writes that “Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it.” Certainty is, after all, the opposite of faith. If you are inclined to “witness,” remember that you are not selling a car. You are drawing attention to a way of life.
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Photo: a gift from a special friend. There was a pier, an old dock, along the Bay side sidewalk on East Beach Drive. Decades and hurricanes have done their best, to its worst. It's still good, though, for pelicans perching, circling out to fish, and returning to rest. In my day, and Robert's, it was a solid pier, protected from public use by a locked gate where it met the sidewalk. Likely the property of the people who owned the house across the street. I/We watched it deteriorate in its final years.