I Needed This Christmas

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (John 1:5 NRSV)

"I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."                    (Philippians 1:6, NRSV)

I needed this season.  Yes, I love the Christmas tree anchoring the great room, and the nutcrackers standing guard.  I love the nativity set handmade by a friend, populating the mantle.  I love making use of the Christmas dishes and the extra sweets and the holiday playlist emanating from the speakers.  I love the anticipation of cards from loved ones reconnecting the gift of our lives.  I love the memories stirred reanimating people and places and stories from the past.  All that, and wrapping paper and bows never hurt anything, either.  

But none of that names the dimension of the season for which I only now realize I was desperate.  The darkness, I now can name, had overcome me.  

It is, by now, a familiar litany:

• The virus and the ensuing quarantine that have in countless ways stood over us like a severe parent with the constant refrain, "you can't do that."  The illnesses of friends.  The deaths.  So many deaths.
• The economic anxiety that has gripped so many as businesses have shuttered, jobs have been put on hold, while the rent still comes due and the nourishment and medicines still need taking.
• The racial acrimony that is a virus all its own, killing our souls and too many of our neighbors just as savagely as COVID-19.  And the tragic recognition that we don't even seem to be looking for a vaccine to "cure" this social, moral pestilence.
• The political rancor that long ago abandoned the microphone of honest and earnest debate, in favor of the boxing ring where we simply intend to bludgeon our adversaries into blood-covered unconsciousness.  
• The "Poor-Loser-in Chief" who persists in a toxic cocktail of self-aggrandizement and outright sedition.  Persuasively, so it seems.
• A church that, through the years and increasingly today, too often squanders its energies on its own popularity and "fun," and the insularity of enjoying its own salvation to the neglect of the incarnation it is called to be.

It has all been just about too much.  

It is certainly true that the darkness is incomplete.  I am literally surrounded by love and life in ways too plentiful to enumerate.  Unlike so many I know; unlike so many in the world, I live amidst an embarrassment of riches - health, comfort, shelter, food in the pantry, and medical insurance.  I know this.  I am humbled by this.  I am persistently challenged by this to be a better, more faithful steward of these assets to which I am not entitled but of which I find myself in possession; resources and opportunities I have "earned" only by virtue of a constellation of circumstances on which I have had minimal influence.  

Increasingly, however, over the recent months and years these brilliant beams have seemed more like a penlight by which I have been trying to read while huddled under a blanket, as the battery gradually dimmed.  

I haven't been in a good space.

I suppose I have to admit that I drifted far off the path.  

My soul got out of focus.

In ways of which I repent, I lost the faith...

...the faith reasserted this Christmas, with candle flames shared and lifted high, that, "what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Darkness, after all, is nothing new.  My particular darkness is hardly novel.  Poverty, disease, xenophobia, despotic and self-serving leaders are no strangers to the human family.  John's assertion of persistent light has never been an easy one.  Or obvious.  Or, I now realize, personal.  How is it that I have never heard it for the radical affirmation it is?  And ponder, prayerfully, what it has to say to my particular state of mind?  I needed John to remind me, this year especially, that we do not - dare not - ignore the myriad blights; we simply refuse to grant them sway.  Darkness, yes, but the darkness does not overcome it.

That determined affirmation, along with Paul's confident trust that the One who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.  

I needed this season, more than ever - more, perhaps, than I even realized.  

A reality check, of sorts.  

Or perhaps it has been the Spirit as obstetrician, slapping my infantile faith into cries of new life.

Let the New Year begin.

I Wonder...Out Under the Sky

It was there but a brief time – proudly plain in the southwestern sky as evening settled into darkness, then gone an hour later; descended, we assumed, beneath the horizon for someone else’s viewing pleasure.  It was intriguing, yes, but why all the interest?  Novelty is surely part of the answer.  This grand romance between Jupiter and Saturn won’t happen again in my lifetime, so there is that.

 

Coming as it does, however, on this Christmas week, perhaps the wonderment has to do with more than novelty.  Aren’t we, after all, always looking for signs?  Of what, we never really know, and signs are best read in retrospect, but we are always…wondering.

 

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky…”

 

Earlier in the day we were pondering the various birth stories in the Gospels, especially the lack of one in Mark’s account.  His is likely the more honest telling.  Matthew’s fanciful story of the Magi notwithstanding, who would have imagined or predicted much significance in the ordinary birth of an irrelevant baby to an irrelevant couple from an irrelevant town?  Mary, according to the stories, “kept and pondered these things in her heart,” but that isn’t unusual for a new mother.  Nobody else was likely taking notes.  It was only later – decades later – that people would have started to care about the beginnings of the man about whom they had come to care.  Hence, the “backfilling” of those natal blanks.

 

If, then, we completely missed the significance of that obscure 1^st century Palestinian birth – even if understandably so – it’s only natural I suppose that we would loathe the thought of missing the significance of other potentially earth-shaking convergences.  If it will mean that something holy is afoot, according to the psalmist, when “justice and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85), then perhaps there is something consequential about Jupiter and Saturn kissing as well?  It would be nice if it were more than mere planetary grinding.

 

A sign of new global health, perhaps.

 

Or the dawn of a new age of sanity.

 

At the very least, perhaps it signals the rebirth of curiosity to fill the void resulting from the erosion created by our leaden certitude about that which simply isn’t true.

 

Maybe that’s why we all trouped outside last night and looked up into the sky.  

 

Hoping…

 

…for even a little fresh light.

Who knows, after all, just what might be being born?

 

 

The Precipitation of Awe

Some keep the Sabbath going to church
by Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

 

Loving Without Bared Teeth

We experienced our first episode of puppy “resource guarding” here at the epicenter of puppy training 24/7.  We were expecting such challenges between the puppy and the older dogs, but painfully Cai perceived the threat to his chew bone to be Lori.  Ouch!  “Resource guarding” is that almost reflexive protection, via a snarl or a baring of teeth or a quick snap, of a highly valued object - such as a toy or food or the aforementioned chew bone.   In essence, it is an act of communicating, “This is mine.  I have it and you don’t, and you can’t have it.”  

According to one of the new volumes in our training library, “resource guarding, like so many other behavior challenges, is a natural, normal dog behavior that just isn’t acceptable in human society.” (Pat Miller in The Power of Positive Dog Training, 2nd Edition, pp. 220-221).

Our dwindling bandaid supply confirms that assessment.  It isn’t a behavior we can or intend to tolerate.  It isn’t a permissible style of interaction for a community of humans and canines that share a common space.

Sadly, the human community at-large hasn’t adopted for itself that simple but essential wisdom.  We are resource guarders.  With seasonal exceptions, signaled by the Salvation Army bells outside of grocery stores, our primary business is taking care of ourselves; hoarding our own bones; hovering over our dinner plates.

It is a persistent pattern that prompts no small amount of dismay in a guy like me who has spent his entire life in the church, first being taught and then proclaiming a very different character of life.  This year the evidence has been acute.  As we noted in our annual Advent reflection, “Each passing week of 2020 has confronted us with mounting and irrefutable evidence of how little skill we have for living together as a people, as a culture, as a country and world.  Two thousand years after Jesus elevated love of neighbor to the second highest commandment, and told the parable of the “Good Samaritan” by way of illustration, we reveal how much we still have to learn about discipleship.”

It isn’t just our behavior.  Our theology has gotten twisted up as well, though which came first - our snapping or our believing - is hard to say.  As Richard Rohr recently noted, “The common Christian understanding that Jesus came to save us by a cosmic evacuation plan is really very individualistic, petty, and even egocentric. It demands no solidarity with anything except oneself. We whittled the great Good News down into what Jesus could do for us personally and privately, rather than celebrating God’s invitation to participate in God’s universal creative work” (Daily Meditation, 12/7/2020).

For all our talk of “love,” we demonstrate little comprehension of it, or facility with it.  Our literary luminaries recognize the problem.  Leo Tolstoy, for example, once observed that, “Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.”

Of course Tolstoy didn’t simply make that up.  Long before him, the apostle Paul admonished, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Even Paul, though, had whispers in his ear.  

It was Jesus, after all, who taught, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11).  And later, still more boldly, he asserted, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Indeed, our puppy has much to learn about living within a household economy.  As do the rest of us.  There simply aren’t enough bandaids to go around.

Some Evil is Easy to Name - And We Must

 "The Democrats, the news media - if the leftists, if scientists, professors have been working secretly with the Chinese Communist Party, then line 'em up against the wall and shoot them.  That's what you do with them."

--Rev. Rick Wiles, Senior Pastor of Flowing Streams Church, Florida

A few years ago, during a season of prolific terrorist activity perpetrated by Islamic extremists, many - myself included - wondered where the moderate Muslims were who could step forward and condemn these heinous acts in service to, and in defense of, a different, more honest expression of Islam.  It would be the voices of the moderates, we believed - insiders rather than outsiders - who could best counter and quell the madness of the extremists, and serve the better cause of humankind.

 

My gentle nudging from the sidelines was, I confess, more than a little hypocritical.  I have been a roaring disappointment to colleagues and friends through the years who have chastised me for not more effectively leveraging my voice in service to the common good.  They have a point, although I maintain the conviction that I had a point - at least a methodology - as well.  We choose, after all, our words but also our platforms. 

Suddenly, however, I have to take my own advice.  If it was true for Muslims, it is equally true for Christians.  Moderate Christians are suddenly obligated to speak out against our own who are vilely and publicly ravaging the cause of Christ.  Take a moment to read again the quote at the top of this entry.  Go ahead, reread it.  Ponder it.  Take your time.  I can wait.

Let those words sink in, and filter them through the Gospel message you read in the New Testament.  Surely it doesn't take deep scholarship or hours in prayer to recognize how egregiously oppositional that statement is to the way and words of Jesus.  There is, quite simply, nothing in them that represents the witness of Jesus or the Reign of God to which Jesus constantly pointed.  

 

Nothing.  

 

They could not be further from the Gospel, and it shouldn't be hard for Christians to condemn them for the very articulation of spiritual death that they represent.  

 

Unequivocally.  

Forthrightly.

Steadfastly.

With all due humility.

Earlier this fall, flag-flapping vehicles bearing signs in support of one presidential candidate attempted to run off the road a campaign bus of the opposing candidate.  I am aware that the electoral contest was heated, but surely we can agree that such behavior is unacceptable.  Around the same time, radicals attempted to kidnap a sitting Governor, purportedly to put her on trial for treason and mete out their own form of justice.  Regardless of your partisanship, surely we can agree that such behavior is self-evidently reprehensible, unAmerican, and a fundamental violation of the rule of law.  They represent the early seeds of anarchy; the antithesis of the lofty aspirations of our nation's founders.  We ought to be able to agree on such things, but given the selective silence that ensued, we appear to be too far gone as a citizenry to manage it.

But all of that is a civil matter.  Law enforcement officials should take these matters in hand.  I have no knowledge of the faith persuasion claimed by the perpetrators of either of these earlier atrocities - or if they claim a faith tradition at all.  That's their business.

The assertion at the top of this entry, however, is a different thing.  These sentiments come from the lips of a Christian pastor - at least one who represents himself as such.  They aren't my paraphrase of his words; they are his actual words.  Spoken, I might add, with calm, cool self-assurance.  I copied them verbatim as he said them.  And here is what I would say:  they are an affront to Jesus and everyone who seeks to follow him.  Neither an American, nor a Republican or Democrat, Jesus did not live and die for such blasphemous nonsense as this.  This neither characterizes the "Holy City", nor marks the way there.  It is, to use a good churchy word,  simply heresy.  This is not what scripture teaches.  This is not what Jesus modeled.  This is not the "good news" we were commissioned to proclaim.  This is not the face of Christianity we should want the world to know.  This is the soul's sickness unto death.

 

And every Christian ought to readily say so.  Loudly, and often.

 

It ought to be easy.  

 

Regardless of political persuasion, it ought to be easy.  

Uncharacteristically for me, then, I am saying so. 

Stocking Up on Treats

 “The social dynamics of a wolf pack is often used as a model for dog-dog and dog-human interactions. I have seen dog people (and some wolf people as well) caught up in the idea of always maintaining high rank by aggressive means, believing their only choices are between forcibly dominating the animal or submitting to it. The problem with this approach is two-fold. Firstly, aggression may well escalate, and secondly, an either-or choice between forcible dominance or submission is not the only choice available to wolves, to dogs or to humans.”

— from the Forward, On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals, by Turid Rugaas

 

Having been several years since we had raised a puppy, and with the day approaching for bringing home the 8-week old Welsh Corgi who is to join our household, we got busy reading up. "Reading up," especially since the continuing pandemic precautions will keep us home and away from the "obedience" classes we have relied on with new puppies in the past.  This time we will be on our own.

The truth is, time elapsed is not our only concern. Puppy training has never been our most celebrated success. Love?  Yes. Training?  Uh, no.  This time, we resolved to get it right. 

 

But what is “right?”  It turns out that there is quite a difference of opinion on best practice. There is, of course, the long-standing, “whip-them-into-shape” theory of “dominance”.  Here, the eager trainer will find books and accessories touting the need to teach your dog that you are the boss. Choke collars, prong collars, shock collars, and the “alpha roll” feature prominently in this school of thought. Language is stern. “House breaking” is a big objective. There is lots of talk about “pack mentality,” drawing upon the genetic linkage of dogs to wolves.  

 

There is, however, another school of thought – the “dog friendly” approach.  Dogs may well be the genetic descendants of wolves, this approach acknowledges, but understanding wolf behavior no more clarifies dog behavior than understanding ape behavior predicts how humans will necessarily interact.   “Breaking” is less the focus in this philosophy than “training”.  Aversion and pain are eschewed in favor of incentivizing.  Treats and praise replace thwacks and volts.  Trainers following this path capitalize on the dog’s innate desire to please – and its subsequent rewards – rather than building on avoidance of pain and instilling fear.  Dominance gives way to partnership.

 

It hasn’t been hard to decide which path we will follow.  We look around and observe how commonly the “dominance” theory has been employed - in the way humans have historically approached their pets, to be sure, but each other as well, and all of creation – and see how poorly it has served us.  Even among people of faith.  Having wrestled the almost felonious interpretation of “domination” out of the Genesis assignment to have “dominion,” we have armed ourselves with a divine minting of James Bond’s “License to Kill.”  And kill we have – each other, the air, the soil, and the very atmosphere that suspends us.  We have, to put it pithily, been hellbent on being dominant.

 

One obvious problem with that approach is that, however satisfying it might feel to the dominant few, it simply doesn’t work very well.  Just look at the human community – interpersonally, internationally, politically. “Winning” is very loudly celebrated, but it should be obvious by now to even the casual observer that even when we win we lose.  When we get our way by coercion rather than consent, we condemn ourselves to a never ending application of power and energy to "keep the lid on" that depletes and diminishes everyone involved.

 

Another problem is that it’s sinful. People who purport to follow Jesus certainly ought to know better.  The word “dominion” is etymologically the same as “lordship,” and clearly the model of lordship that Jesus lived bears little resemblance to the practices of domination we employ.  

 

As Richard Rohr observes, “Jesus did not come to impose Christendom like an imperial system. Every description he offers of God’s Reign—of love, relationship, non-judgment, and forgiveness, where the last shall be first and the first shall be last—shows that imposition is an impossibility! Wherever we have tried to force Christianity on people, the long-term results have been disastrous.”

 

And so the puppy is coming home – a home within which we have and will often fail to live up to that biblical model, but toward which we aspire. Perhaps together we, the puppy and our whole growing menagerie, will learn from and teach one another something life-giving about life together.

 

And so, there is much training in store - all around - around the house and around the world. 

The treats are ready.  

To be given and received. 

 

The Scaffold That Sways the Future

“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated.  A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.  In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.”

— Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 1949

 In the communication curriculum that Lori and I have come to value and teach, originally developed at the University of Minnesota Family Study Center, approaching an issue together involves processing a series of elements.  While in no particular order, each element requires its own care and reflection.  It all hinges on the naming of sensory data (the likes of which a camera or a microphone might record).   Within a household that "data" might involve dirty dishes or missed appointments or bills that need to be paid.  Ordinarily, establishing the data is simple.  The process gets more challenging when it moves on to consider, among other things, the unique thinking with which we surround that data - thoughts shaped by past experiences, parental influences, religious beliefs, cultural norms, prejudices, etc., and then the emotions those thoughts arouse.   But it all hinges on that common recognition of - agreement upon - the data; the facts.  

As suggested, once upon a time that was the easy part.  We could generally agree on the due date of a bill or the languishing existence of the greasy skillet.  Culturally speaking, however, that has somehow become the hard part.

No wonder we have come to find ourselves at the throat of each other in recent years.  Somehow it has come to be the case that we can't even agree on the facts - the 'is-ness" of our common reality.  Orange is green and yellow is purple and up is down and 2+2=5 -- or 20 or 2000 if that better suits our agenda.  Never mind what the recording captured me saying, it never came out of my mouth.  If I say there were a thousand on the lawn, then the photograph showing a total of 12 is fake; "doctored"; maliciously tampered with and falsified.  If I don't like "your facts", I'll simply assert "my own" that better reinforce my point of view.  

Word is that we are engulfed in a tsunami of "fake news."  The inevitable implication is that we can trust nothing, not even our own eyes and ears.

Back to that communication theory, it is difficult to parse out our respective thoughts and emotions, or consider what we are really after and the actions we are willing to undertake in their pursuit, if we can't even agree on the data about which we are purportedly thinking, and to which we are presumably reacting.  We are islands of righteously fortified, well-insulated ignorance.  Or as the band, Stealers Wheel sang in the heyday of my youth, "Clowns to the left of me; jokers to the right.  Here I am:  stuck in the middle with you."  And I don't really trust you.  

The inevitable destination of such personal and collective delusion is depravity.  We can speak from experience, because we have collectively arrived there, unpacked, and made of it a home.  Through our indulgence of the lie - our refusal to agree on the simplest facts, we have, as Thurman predicted all those decades ago, become deception itself; the moral mercury of life reduced to zero.  We are told it is all in the service of "greatness," but that, too, is a fiction.  In the eyes of the rest of the world, such faux "greatness" is variously the stuff of derision, mockery, or disconcerted perplexity.  

It isn't, of course, a hopeless state.  It is a prison, but one of our own making.  C.S. Lewis once famously observed that "The gates of hell are locked on the inside."  Whether or not that is true of hell, I am certain it is true of this desolate courtyard of moral, politically driven depravity.  We can emerge if we choose.  The key is neither hard to find nor difficult to use.  

In fact, it isn't even particularly new.  But, then, what is?  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wryly observed, "There is nothing new under the sun."  

The 19th century hymn writer James Russell Lowell insisted,

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future...

Truth.  Not wrong.  

The key is not will-power or asserted imagination, but simple honesty.  

Truthfulness sways the future.

Once inserted in the lock, the key doesn't take strength to turn; rather, simple...

...humility.

We have to give up believing that we are the only person, and the only set of opinions, in the room who matter.  And then, even when it disfavors us, and despite its occasional sour taste, to acknowledge the facts.  

And speak the truth.

Only then can we truly begin to communicate.

And get the bills paid and the dishes washed and who knows what else?