​         
          Good Friday means a lot of different things to different people. Historically, it’s the day assigned to commemorate the grisly execution of a troublemaking preacher who was seen as a threat by the religious and civil authorities of his day and whose luck ran out during Passover. They were dead right about him being a threat. They were dead wrong about what they did about it. The most famous death in human history did more to propel his troublemaking ideas worldwide than they could ever have imagined.
 
          To a great many believers, it means a great deal more than even all that. To those who see Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate, it means an entirely new twist on religious belief and the whole idea of who or what God is. The Greek and Roman mythology of Jesus’  time had plenty of stories about Gods taking human form, doing wonders and miracles (usually destructive) and impregnating countless mortal women with their semi-divine offspring. The Jesus story is different. In the Christian version, the creator willingly chooses to take on the full burden of creaturehood – cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diarrhea, ear infections, hives, pain, fear, frustration and finally, the big one – death itself – and a brutal death at that, at the hands of the very creatures he supposedly came to save from themselves. Breaking his eternal silence, he uses a human tongue (with a human need to swallow between every few words) to preach a message of love, forgiveness and human equality and seals his credibility by forgiving his killers from the cross with his last breath. That’s a lot to take in. Most people, even believers, don’t try too hard. They fall back on the official story “He died for our sins” so as not to have to take in the enormity of the idea. A God who suffers, who chooses to suffer, who chooses to become his creation, is very different from the idea of a disembodied spirit running things from a safe distance.
 
          Whether you believe it or not, the introduction of such a powerful idea into human thought cannot be underestimated. It changes who we are. If the barrier between the source of all things and the things themselves no longer exists, then anything is possible and we are more than our biology. Most official religions have worked hard to suppress this central truth, or to cloud it in fancy imagery that dilutes its punch. The trick, the game if you will, is to treat Jesus as a one time thing, as opposed to a revelation about the actual nature of things. The nature of things is that all living things suffer – humans are no exception – but what we choose to do about it makes all the difference. We can deny our mortality, fight back, enslave each other to feel powerful, pile up wealth as a protective wall – or we can accept our shared situation, band together and do all we can to make our brief lives as fulfilling as possible. This is the central idea behind all the religions that have managed to survive over time, and the central conflict that has faced the human race since we crawled out of the caves.
 
          This is a Good Friday to remember it.  Jesus died, but he never left.


     

         Once again, events on the political front are turning into “philosophy with live ammo”.  The ongoing success of Donald Trump and his popularity with millions of voters, while confusing and more than a little scary to many conservatives and just about all liberals, is completely understandable given the current state of world and (especially) our national affairs. Mr. Trump is filling a void.
 
          It happens in nature all the time – a stroke of lightning burns the air away and the surrounding air masses slam together to fill the gap - warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico draw down cold air from the Arctic – it’s pretty much what runs everything. Human beings aren’t that much different. We are more than our biology and we need more than our biology. What every one of us needs in order to take our next step, almost in order to take our next breath, is a unifying sense of meaning that defines our place in the world and how we’re supposed to act in it. It’s not about religion. Religion was created (by humans) to fill part of this need. It drives everything we do, from the clothes we wear to our ideas about right and wrong to whether we pick up a pizza slice with our hands or use a knife and fork.
 
          Everything we do defines us and we create a mental/emotional structure around ourselves to support the definition. When church and state were linked at the hip, and everybody in the tribe was from the same ethnic group, this was easy to maintain. We knew who we were and what was expected of us, by our neighbors, the police, the king and even our God. It’s not so easy these days. What’s an American anyway?  We’re split down the middle politically, we’re ethnically and religiously diverse and faced with an economic disparity that is no longer supported by our culture. In ancient times, the king and the nobility were supposed  to be richer than the common folk. In America that wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not in the mythology that defined us. When we lose our sense of ourselves, especially if we feel that someone has taken it away from us, we get scared, and we get mad.
 
          Now for some of us, defining ourselves by our sense of diversity works. Feeling that we’re part of an all-inclusive global community feels just fine and is in sync with the world around us. This is very much my own reality, supported by the urban multi-racial, multi cultural world I’ve spent most of my adult life (and made my living) in. For someone who sees their own ethnic, religious and economic identity being chipped away at by foreigners who take their jobs, rich CEOs who export whole industries to other countries and murderous terrorists who hate their country and their religion, it’s not so easy. If my sense of identity is “White American Christian with a job” it’s not hard to get the feeling that somebody who was supposed to be looking out for my interests has sold me out. This leaves me with what might be called an “identity gap”. Donald Trump is filling this gap. Last night he spelled it out.
 
          In his speech after sweeping several Super Tuesday primaries, Mr. Trump pitted his “Make America Great Again” slogan solidly against the “Make America Whole Again” slogan his likely opponent had spelled out just a few moments before (in front of the same TV audience).  His exact words were “Make America whole again, what does that even mean?”. He knows perfectly well what it means, and so do his supporters. “Whole Again” means “Diverse and Happy With It”. “Great Again” means “White Christian Again”.  His assertion that he can bring back the money that’s fled overseas with a half hour meeting in the oval office, while flying in the face of reason and why the money fled (non white Muslims work for less) makes perfect sense if you see the whole thing as a case of mythological identity – they’ll come back when they see they’ve got their White Christian country back.
 
          His supporters have, with some justification, lost their belief that the American political system represents not only their interests, but, more importantly, who they are. They want their sense of themselves as Americans back, and feel that restoring it will bring their jobs back too. Blaming the “enemy” (Muslims, Democrats, Barack Obama and anybody who likes him) for the loss of both is the oldest trick in the book and Mr. Trump knows how to play it very well.
 
          None of his opponents, either in his own party or on the Democratic side, have been able to conjure up a competing mythology of identity. They’re going to need to, regardless of who wins the nomination or the election, even more if he does.

I try not to get involved in direct political commentary, but Ted Cruz’s acceptance speech after winning the Iowa primary was a bit too over the top to ignore. What happened in the real world was that, when it came to people actually voting instead of just answering pollsters’ questions, Mr. Cruz had knocked Donald Trump off his perch - a potential game changer for the Republican Party.  But that’s not what he talked about. For anyone who didn’t see it (and many, many people did), Mr. Cruz opened his remarks with “Let me first say, to God be the Glory.” - not "Thank you to the voters of Iowa” not “Thanks to all the hard working volunteers who helped me do this” but a direct reference to the Almighty as the real power behind the process.

Now we’re used to this sort of thing from actresses and actors accepting Academy Awards and Golden Globes. For them it’s a little different though – what they’re really saying is “I didn’t create my own talent, I have it as a gift” – with a little nod to the role of dumb luck in their being up on the podium instead of one of the other nominees. What Ted Cruz did was different.
 
          As his remarks continued to reiterate during his carefully crafted speech, he repeatedly credited his candidacy, and the people who voted for him, with being on the side of (and getting  significant help from) the Lord God Almighty. Statements like “The promise of scripture” and “Our rights come from our creator” underscored this theme.
 
          While sparing his Republican opponents from any direct suggestion of their not being in Divine favor, he made no bones about labeling Barack Obama and both of the potential Democratic candidates for President with being on the side of the Antichrist. Linkage of the American way of life with the will of the Lord, and identifying Mr. Cruz’s potential opponents in November as a threat to both, was overt and consistent. What this kind of rhetoric does, and what it is meant to do, is to move the political battle into its most primitive form, bringing it back to the days when church and state were completely identified, and when an offense against the Gods by the king was likely to bring punishment down on the whole country. The remark about “our rights come from our creator” with its skewered invocation of the Declaration of Independence left little doubt about where Mr. Cruz was coming from.
 
          One of his last statements before the cameras deserted him to catch Hillary Clinton’s valiant attempt to reframe a tie as a marginal but comforting victory, was perhaps the most telling. His reference to “The Judeo-Christian values that built this great nation” laid out the battle lines clearly. While Jewish influence on the actions of America’s founding fathers was indirect (and has not been widely celebrated), and the empire America broke away from to create itself was a Christian one, the invocation of “Judeo-Christian” means just one thing in the context of this campaign. What it’s all about is this: it’s the real Americans against the Muslims. He never said it overtly, but Muslims are clearly neither Jewish nor Christian, hate both, and hate Americans most of all. The attempt to protect American “values” and “way of life” from the assaults of Muslims and Democrats alike (very much alike) has been a consistent theme on Mr. Cruz’ side of the debate. The Democrats' tolerance of Islam is portrayed as bordering on treason or, to put it in the underlying context, heresy.  Mr. Cruz's attempt to anoint himself as the designated angel of deliverance moves what was intended by our Founding fathers to be a civilized exercise in freedom of choice (in a country founded on the principles of religious tolerance) onto the primitive and dangerous ground of “my God is tougher than your God” that our Founding Fathers got out of Europe to escape. 
 
          Whether Mr. Cruz honestly believes what he’s saying, or is just pandering to the Evangelical vote, this kind of religious demagoguery has no place in an American election. Hopefully, the American people, believers and unbelievers alike, will see it for what it is and reject it.

          The Isis-orchestrated attacks in Paris, followed closely by an armed assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado and an "Isis-inspired" terrorist attack in California have once again put the dangerous side of “belief” in the headlines.  The attackers in Paris and California were willing to kill and die for their beliefs. The gunman in Colorado was willing to kill but apparently less willing to die for his. Either way, the motivation behind both attacks is the same. Put simply, it’s: “What I believe demands that I kill those who disagree with me”.
 
          Ironically, “Believe” was also the catchword prominently displayed on the side of the Macy’s building during the Thanksgiving Day parade. In this instance, “Believe” refers to an annual holiday campaign by the Mega Store that answers letters to Santa Claus sent to the store by making Charitable contributions (with the side effect, one assumes, of stimulating holiday shopping). “Believe” in this case is short for “If you believe hard enough, dreams can come true”. So what does Santa Claus have to do with armed gunmen?
 
          More than any of us can afford to be comfortable with, I’m afraid.
 
          Tempting as it is to distance ourselves from ideology-based killers, what keeps them going is what keeps us all going. Biology isn’t enough. In order to get through the day, any day, we need to impose our internal symbolism on the world around us. What we do, from the smallest acts (what we have for lunch) to the biggest (who we kiss goodnight, or don’t) happen within the structure of our meaning system. Our raw perceptions - what we see, hear, feel or taste - can’t hit our brains without setting off millions of resonances in the echo chambers of our stored symbols. Proust’s famous madeleine  (a little taste of cake that triggered one the longest multi-volume novels in literary history) is only the tip of the iceberg. We need to make sense of our lives in order to live them.
 
          When we can’t, when our symbols fail us, when we can no longer find or trust the meaning in what we do, we become depressed and unproductive and can wind up drunk or suicidal (or homicidal) if it doesn’t let up. The only way to snap out of it is to either find some new symbols or a way to reboot the old ones.

         A real-world example would be a person who has spent years raising funds for a charitable organization for low pay but a high sense of personal satisfaction discovering that their organization is completely corrupt and that the public’s contributions are mainly going to enrich a few at the top. Aside from feeling like a fool, the loss of a sense of personal meaning, the thing that defined them as themselves (a “person who helps people”), would be devastating. Finding the energy and will to seek out a more “trustable” charity to work for would be difficult. The alternative might be to reject “Charity, Inc.” altogether and redefine themselves by putting their marketing skills at the service of a better paying Organization with fewer pretentions (Macy’s, for instance).  Either way, the loss of personal identity would be difficult to get over.
 
          The best protection for human beings from this kind of letdown is to find a belief system that can’t fail us, that can’t be disproven. Religion fills this gap for much of humanity, and has for a very long time. God, being invisible, is not subject to the usual rules of proof and is immune to the scientific method. An individual minister may steal church funds but God never does. The sense of “doing God’s will” can bring structure and order to your life  and endow the smallest human act with meaning.
 
          That sense of religious meaning evolved side by side with the development of the tribe as the locus and extension of individual identity and its evolution into the idea of “us” as a nation. And both religion and political systems developed in the context of our ongoing effort to impose our symbols onto raw nature for our survival, protection, comfort and, most of all, our sense of control. We want a house not a cave, goats in the pen not deer in the forest, with walls around the town to define our space and keep out potential threats. And, most of all, we want a sense of why we’re doing what we’re doing to help us cope with the very real troubles that biological life keeps throwing at us: diarrhea, arthritis, hurricanes, heartbreak, failure, debt and death at the end of the journey. There are two ways this can go.

1. You decide that God wants us to “love our neighbors” and answer the unkindness the world throws at us by being kind to each other. This approach can express itself by respecting each other’s property, being generally nice to other people and donating to charities at Christmas time so those less fortunate can join in the Holiday festivities.
   
   
2. You decide that God only wants you to love the neighbors who follow the same set of rules or belong to the same group that you do and draw your sense of meaning from protecting and promoting the “standards” God has set for humanity. This approach can express itself by a refusal to associate (and absolutely a refusal to marry) anyone from outside your group, speaking out and voting against anyone promoting activities you see as sinful and, in the extreme, killing 130 Parisians or shooting up an abortion clinic.
   
   

          On the secular side, Position 1 expresses itself through a belief in the basic goodness of human beings (less easily provable than the existence of God given the available evidence) and a belief that doing good things makes you a better person. The secular side of Position 2 expresses itself through a desire to dominate other people, sometimes in the name of your country, and sometimes just to make a buck. The problem is that, secular or religious, they both come from the same place – the need to find meaning in our lives.
 
          The same underlying motivator is behind both the best and worst in humanity. It starts the wars and sends medics out to save the wounded at the risk of their own lives. It builds the warm houses and it drops the bombs. It sings our children to sleep and it punishes them when they’re bad. Very few individuals or groups live in either one of these camps exclusively and certainly not all the time. There are elements of both in all of us.
 
          Isis is an extreme. So is Mother Teresa. That they are both extremes of the same human process is something we need to understand and grapple with as we address the issues confronting our increasingly violent world.
 
          To bring it back to where we started, belief is a sword that cuts both ways. We’ve got it, we need it, we can’t do without it.
 
          It’s what we do with it that makes all the difference.
     
          More to come.

The slaughter of nine Afro-Americans in a Charleston church has cracked open the barely held down lid on the tensions that are tearing the United States of America apart. The fact that Dylann Roof acted alone and clearly had mental health issues has not been enough to silence the glaring facts: the mind set behind his act was fueled by the rhetoric of White Supremacy, and when it came time for him to start shooting his symbolic victims, he had a real gun to do it with. Both facts address a single issue for the United States: what kind of country are we? Are we even a country anymore?

It has very quickly become all about the symbols. The people Dylann Roof killed were as symbolic to him as the Confederate Flag on his car bumper. He’d never met them before, he didn’t care who they were. The fact that he is reported to have stated “You rape our women” before killing six women only underscores the separation between fact and imagery that fueled his rage.  The fact that white men through history have raped black women in numbers greater than all the black rapists in the world could ever hope to catch up with was equally indifferent to him. The fact that he did not belong to any organized group promoting White Supremacy, while giving these groups, and the State of South Carolina, room to distance themselves from his actions, made no difference to his embrace of their ideas.  Fortunately, it has not been enough to get them off the hook. Cries to take down the Confederate Flag over the South Carolina State Capital have been as loud as those for increased gun control. We may have better luck with the flag. There’s only one flag. There are millions of guns. And, like it or not, millions of racists. My Canadian wife turned to me from watching the non-stop coverage and asked “What is it with you Americans?”.  I knew what she meant. In spite of how much has changed since Selma, in spite of having black news anchors on television and a black president in the White House, we still seem to have racism in our drinking water.

So what kind of country are we?  A country of gun-toting white people who see minorities - racial, religious or sexual - as threats to be fought against, or are we a diverse country of people who treat each other with respect and compassion regardless of color, creed or orientation. The obvious answer, unfortunately, is yes to both. And, as ever, it’s all about the symbols.

A theme I came back to again and again in “The Holy Bluff” is that good symbolism is responsible for most of the progress, charity, peace and beauty the human race has been capable of while bad symbolism is responsible for most of the harm we do to each other, the world and ourselves.  Turn on your TV. One picture has thousands of people of all colors standing together in solidarity outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to pay respect to the victims. For the white participants, the symbolic message is clear: “I’m here to show that this killer doesn’t speak for me. All white people are not like him”. The message from the black mourners who welcomed their participation is equally clear: “We believe you”. This is good symbolism, a symbol of that diverse country we were talking about a minute ago. But then the next picture you see is that of the Confederate flag flying over the state capital, with a newsman intoning a  statement that “the leading Republican candidates are treading delicately so as not to risk offending the conservative white voters who venerate the most recognizable emblem of the Confederacy”. That’s a different kind of symbolism.

To the killer, the Confederate Flag was a symbol of White Supremacy, a standard to be carried into battle against the perceived threat of a “black takeover” of America. To a great many people, overwhelmingly white, it’s a symbol of their refusal to trust the United States Government, along with a murky sense of the pre-War South as some kind of elegant White Utopia, usurped by Northerners with no respect for the finer things. There’s a fine line between the two, with racism on both sides of it. What gives the symbol its power, 150 years after Lee’s surrender, is the same power any symbol has – the ability, in a more direct, soul-gripping way than any written statement, law or creed, to enable a person to say “this is who I am”. 

The search for human meaning is all about identity. The flag I carry tells you who I am. More importantly, it tells me. The killer in Charleston found in the rhetoric available to him on White Supremacist websites the means to define himself, to give his life meaning. He was in a sense a microcosm of the thousands of young Southern boys who could never have afforded to own a slave, but cheerfully went off to into battle to protect somebody else’s property rights. The battle itself gave them meaning, much as Dylann Roof’s imagined battle gave him his.

America is badly need of unifying symbolism, some central image that tells us who we are. The Stars and Stripes just aren’t enough any more. In the absence of that, Americans in search of meaning will find other symbol. Hopefully it will be something that evokes a diverse and welcoming crowd praying and singing together in memory of slain innocents, not the gun that killed them.

 

 

 

We live in a world of images. You don’t just hear about tornadoes in the Midwest - you see a crying mother standing in front of her crushed house. The image is the story – the story is the image. Once you start reading (or watching as the case may be), there’ll be reports on the weather system that caused this particular group of storms, statistics on the damage, interviews with local authorities - but it’s the image that pulls you in. The story it tells is simple: tornadoes are bad, tornadoes are powerful, tornadoes crush houses, houses like the one you live in. That’s why you care about the weather systems that are tearing up a neighborhood a thousand miles away from your own – because people like you live there. And because weather reporting is considered news, you’d be disappointed to find out later that the woman in front of the crushed house was an actress, and that the house wasn’t even hers but a picture of a crushed house projected on a screen behind her – disappointed but probably not surprised, given the commercial realities of our image-driven world.

So there it was, Time Magazine - on the newsstand – in the supermarket no less - competing for space with the Soaps and Star Couples’ Divorce Rumors - Time Magazine, a news magazine. What caught my eye was the black and white cover picture, dramatic in its minimalism, a picture of what appeared to be the moon vaguely glowing between the trees on a dark, foggy night and the words:  FINDING GOD IN THE DARK in white, bold letters.  A closer look at the cover revealed what looked like dim tracks going off into the darkness, suggesting that perhaps the “moon” was in fact the headlight of an oncoming train – pretty powerful imagery by anybody’s standards. The print under the title announced that that “Acclaimed preacher Barbara Brown Taylor argues that strength, purpose and true faith are found in the shadows”. And that was the news.

The story behind the picture is that Ms.Taylor is a best-selling religious author and charismatic preacher who found that her celebrity was drowning out her message - so she’s pulled back into the quiet places to try to reconnect. She takes walks late at night, finding the dark more comforting and likely to provide inspiration than the glare of the spotlights. Not a bad idea if you think about it, especially given the battering we’ve all been getting from that image driven world we were talking about a minute ago. I tried to keep my cynical side at bay, did my best to keep the fact that Ms. Taylor’s private “retreat from the light” is on  newsstands all over the country and that she has a new book to sell. Her point is a valid one – anyone trying to hold onto their faith (if not their sanity) in a world of mega-churches, non-stop social media and constant bombardment by images of natural and man-made disasters might do well to step back from it all, shut out the noise, and let whatever inner voice guides them squeeze a few words through – a sort of religious twist on the quiet revolution. It’s an interesting idea, and the sort of thing anyone familiar with my work knows I spend a lot of time kicking around - but is it news?

Until I picked up Time Magazine, I wasn’t aware of Ms. Taylor’s work. Some quick research made it clear that she’s one of small but growing number of religious teachers who are wrestling with the idea of  belief that can stand on its own without dogma. She is willing to trust in the Lord despite feelings of real anxiety over aging, death and, perhaps most of all, the Lord’s own silence. I’ve got to give her credit for that, and apparently her work is comforting to a lot of people.

As one of the minority, at least in America, who are living with a simple and obvious if not at all comforting reason for the silence of God, what makes me uncomfortable about Time Magazine’s treating her approach as hard news is that it’s an insult to my position - gratuitous religious propaganda at its worst.  If you go a little deeper though, it is in many ways an insult to Ms. Taylor’s position as well.

While I’m sure she’s grateful for the publicity and clearly participated in putting the whole thing together, the problem is that a lot more people will see the cover than will actually read the article. The article itself skims the surface and is more concerned with Ms. Taylor’s popularity and her pulling back from it than with the deeper issues she’s trying to deal with – though interested parties may at least be inspired to look further.

The problem with the cover is the same as the problem with our actress posing in front of that phony squashed house. It sends a message - simple, direct and way too easy: “Don’t worry, He’s out there.” Or, to put it another way – “You may not be able to find Him where you used to find Him, but a celebrity preacher is here to tell you that He’s still there, just using different imagery to reveal Himself”.  Unless I’m completely projecting my own willingness to live with real doubt onto Ms. Taylor, that’s not what she’s saying. The house she’s standing in front of is really hers and it’s really wrecked. There’s no guaranteed light at the end of the tunnel, shining though the tress, down the track or whatever. Belief without guarantees takes guts, the same kind of guts it takes to commit to unbelief – not the kind of unbelief that enjoys taking pot shots at organized religion (a relatively easy target) but the kind that’s willing to confront the terrifying reality of living in a Godless universe. Ms. Taylor’s willingness to stand in the dark may be the beginning of a badly needed dialogue between believers and unbelievers. Time magazine is feeding the divide and, unless I’m missing the point, missing the point.

Obviously, they wouldn’t have run this as a cover story if they didn’t think there was a market for it. And there is. People are interested. They’re looking for answers and, far too often, unfortunately, will take them wherever they can find them – even Time Magazine. This isn’t news, it’s religious opinion, and should have been labeled as such. The answers aren’t that easy to come by.

To my slight surprise, Philadelphia was full of ashes yesterday. I knew it was Ash Wednesday of course – the day of the year when practicing Catholics officially confront the soil we came from and to which we must return - the day the church lets its guard down and acknowledges the dark truth it protects its members from for the rest of the year. It takes guts, for the church and even more for the believers who are willing to stand up and be counted – to go out in public with their mortality and their religious convictions smeared on their foreheads for all to see. I was impressed to see so many – men in suits, women in office dress, teenagers in jeans, mothers pushing baby carriages, elders pushing walkers – the whole spectrum of humanity between my various bus and subway stops. Being out of the religious loop I tend to forget at times how many sincere believers there are out there. The half-in, half-out, “officially Catholic so I can call myself something” types don’t do ashes. It’s an easy pass. It always happens on a weekday so you’ve always got someplace else to be besides church. And nobody can tell if you don’t, only if you do.

          I said “of course” in the second sentence because, as a person who spends a considerable portion of my waking hours chasing after human meaning, every day is Ash Wednesday for me – or Ash Monday or Ash Tuesday as the case may be. And I wore the ashes myself for several years so I know when it’s coming. I miss it – the use of ritual to confront our darkest fears. It’s a basic human need and a basic (and successful) human technique for dealing with the undealable - something I’ve had to deny myself as the price of whatever fragile intellectual freedom I’ve been able to muster – not without regret and not without respect. Some rituals are simple “go through the motions and don’t think about it”, but not this one. The pure primitivism of having the priest smear dirt on your face takes religious imagery back to its tribal roots, when ritual involved blood and prayers were taken very, very seriously. Other rituals take place in a protected setting, behind the church doors and in front of your fellow believers - this one you take on the subway.  

          The problem of course is that the next day the ashes come off, death goes back in its box and normal life reasserts itself, with its necessary and unnecessary denials securely back in place.  But for moment, if only for a day, the believers and unbelievers find themselves standing together in the dust we all share – our starting point, our ending point and, like it or not, our best chance of getting though this thing alive.