One Of These Things...

As I sat down to write this post, my mind wandered a bit and reminded me of a completely unrelated episode that seems to fit hand and glove with what I intended to write.  A few weeks back I was in Chicago for my 30th High School Class Reunion.  I expanded the weekend into a full week so that I could visit with friends I haven't seen in quite awhile.

A few weeks prior I contacted Carolyn with whom I've been friends for about twenty-three years.  As it happened, one of the days I suggested we spend together was Rosh Hashana, so she nixed it up front.  I thought about it, and in light of my recent reading and in recognition of the many years of our friendship, I suggested that I attend services with her if she didn't mind.

She pointed out that it wouldn't be like a regular Friday night service.  I asked how it would be different and she indicated it would be longer and with more singing.  Sounded good to me.  I explained how our Easter Vigil service can go on for hours.

I was struck by the similarities more than the differences.  This being one of the "big days" - like Christmas and Easter for Christian churches - they have to plan for three to four times the regular attendance.  The members who had planned the service were watching to see that people were in the right places at the right time.  Key readings from the Torah were shared.  All in all I can say I enjoyed myself.

I must admit that I thought about the Holocaust.  I looked around me at the hugh space filled with American Jews and wondered about their families, thought how in a different place and time they would be targeted for who they were.  I sat there, quite possibly the lone goy, and thought about being the outsider.  Much of the service was in Hebrew and the folks around me knew enought to at least be able to sing along regardless of whether or not they understood the exact meaning of the words.  Later at the brunch afterwards one of Carolyn's friends explained, "It's just like for you when the church used Latin."  I chose not to point out to her that in recent times only the Roman Church had used Latin in there service, but being raised Roman Catholic I figured she was close enough and I understood the point she was making.

The folks that had gathered for brunch were all members of this congregation.  It was like sitting in on a Coffee Hour conversation where the movers and the shakers are gathered.  They began to discuss ways in which to engage these extra folks who show up for the High Holy Days, get them to come around more often the rest of the year.  They began joking about having special material for when both of the spouses were actually Jewish..."No, not to worry, your Jewish-Jewish marriage is welcome here...we're not all mixed marriages."  Apparently they have a significant number of couples in which one of the couple is not Jewish.  Perhaps then I was far from being the only Christian in the service earlier.

The other episode from my past that came to mind involved a day I spent on the far South Side of Chicago.  I was working with this woman who had never ventured as far north in the city as she had to come to work at Children's Memorial Hospital in Lincoln Park.  She had planned a barbecue at her house and I agreed to come on down.  In fact, I agreed to come down early and help her get ready.

I took the train down from the Loop.  She met me at the station and we ran some errands.  The entire time I was the only caucasian.  For the first time in my life I experienced how it felt to be the other, the outsider.  It was an important experience that I have not forgotten.

I pause before typing this next bit...I feel the need to explain that it was a perfectly normal experience.  I did not feel threatened.  The folks around me were not hostile.  Yet the very fact that I feel the need to explain this belies the subtle racism that permeates the dominant culture.  Perhaps you think I'm being overly sensititve or overly politically correct.

When my mother was working on her PsyD she took a class on racial issues and psychotherapy.  The course was taught by this awesome woman, Samella Abdullah.  Early on in the quarter she announced a practical assignment.  Each student was to go to a community event where they would be the outsider.  They would then be expected to write about their experience.

My mother ended up talking to me about this assignment.  I said, "Yeah? So what?  She's not telling you to go to a Housing Project at midnight on a Saturday.  Go to a church service or something."

What we didn't realize then was that she expected the students to bring news of this assignment back to their friends and families.  In the days that followed, she questioned the students to see who had done this and every last one of them had.  She then asked about the responses they got from their friends and families.  My mother was the only student in the class who reported that her family member wasn't shocked and thought it was no big deal.  All the rest had horrified friends and family - "How can she make you do that?  How can she put you in danger like that?"

And so I pause as I acknowledge my need to explain that I was treated just like everyone else that day I visited the South Side.  As if you wouldn't assume that that was exactly how things would be.  I'm not sure how much of that is my own latent racism that I struggle with or an assumption of the same on the part of some of my readers.

Samella also once said that she would take an outspoken, bigoted conservative any day over a typical white liberal.  She felt that at least with the one she knew where she stood fromt he get go, whereas the liberal truly believes that he is not racist, unaware of all the subtle racism that permeates.

Wanting desperately to not be racist, understanding the evil of racism, doesn't cleanse us of it completely.

Jesus and Mo

Click here to go to Jesus and Mo web site...

I had the pleasure of actually sitting down and visiting with a cyber friend who I only knew tangentially in high school.  We visited for a bit at our 30th reunion a few weeks back.  He asked what I was up to and I mentioned that I was reading The Source by James Michener.  He then said, "Why?!?"  Russ is a Political Scientist who specializes in the Middle East.  He was clearly not impressed that I would be reading this less than scholarly work of historical fiction.  I was quick to respond with the other related titles I was also reading and explained that Michener's book was like an outline to point me in other directions.

The Source tells the history of this small local in northern Israel.  For once he doesn't start with dinosaurs and early animals, but begins the ancient history (9000 BCE) with human characters.  The book then follows this locale in typical Michener fashion through many eras where descendents of the original characters live out their lives.  What follows is a nicely laid out history of the various battles for the land - Asyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Islamic Turks, etc.  The town is rebuilt and destroyed over and over again.  The residents are butchered or exiled or sold into slavery time and again.

Recently on OCICBW, Jonathan AKA Mad Priest made some strong statements about Islam.  It is clear from his argument that he sees a strong historical connection with war fare that is inherent in Islam from the beginning.  In particular, he cites the devastation of the Eastern Christians as an essential example of this connection.

To what extent I will ultimately agree or disagree with Jonathan will be dependent on further reading.  However, what I have seen so far tells me that all the major powers wrought significant destruction upon the residents of what ultimately became the State of Israel as they sought control of the territory.

Each group dragged its religion along with its army and imposed this religion to varying degrees on the local survivors.  Quite often the Hebrews paid the stiffest price.  This alone indicates that the warfaring violence of Islam is not unique for this period of history.

Both Michener's book and The First Crusade by Thomas Asbridge show in graphic detail the horror of what became known as the First Holocaust as tens of thousands of European Jews were butchered by the Crusaders heading off to the Holy Lands to fight the infidels.  Once in Islamic territory the crusaders frequently murdered other Christians because of how they were dressed and their physical characteristics - they assumed they were Muslims.

If we are to condemn Islam for the actions of it's Holy Armies, it would seem that we should also condemn Christianity - both Western and Eastern.  However, as I said, I have much reading to do before I come to a more solid conclusion.

Yes, Mohammed began to gather up converts to his new understanding of the monotheistic faith in Mecca, and once he was exiled to the city that became Medina, he fought valiantly with his growing army to centralize his power and the power of what was to become Islam.

Jesus had no army.  I understand that.

However, neither man sought to invent a new religion.  Jesus of Nazareth sought to introduce Judaism 2.0.  It was only after his death that it was eventually rebranded as Christianity 1.0.  Similary, Mohammed thought he was selling folks on Monotheism 3.0 initially - for in Islam both Jews and Christians are held in higher esteem than mere pagans as being Children of the Book and descended from Abraham.  Mohammed believed that they had gone astray and his revelations were to purify the traditional, historic monotheistic faith.

Of course, Christianity was not a significant political power in the Mediterranean region until Constantine decided to name it the offical religion of the Empire.  Christianity went from persecuted and powerless to top dog overnight.  Yet that power shrunk significantly with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the invasion of the barbarian (pagan) hordes.  Over time those peoples were converted to Christianity.

As Pope Urban II sought to consolidate power in Rome with the Papacy, he responded to a request for help from Byzantium with the call for the first Crusade.  The ruling class, knights and such, existed in a political reality that called for repeated violations of their Christian faith.  The near constant warring and killing and fighting created a powerful dilemna for these men.  The Pope's call in which the act of crusading would grant them penance and allow them to go straight to heaven.  An entire generation of nobility stopped their internecine European conflict and channeled all that violent energy on the Holy Lands and the infidel.  Political power and religion finally merged for Christianity.

Mohammed, on the other hand, needed to carve out territory from the beginning so the presence of stories of conquest and military victory in Islamic history is not surprising.  There was no Emperor ready to convert his Empire over with the single stroke of a pen.

As Islam flourished as a political power, the role of Caliph served as head of state.  This is not that different from the Orthodox Church where the Emperor of Byzantium was the head of the church.  Even in the Roman West, the struggle between kings and the Pope for ultimate power was played out over and over.

Jonathan has made it a key point that "Islam" depended on violent conquest from the beginning.  I find it hard not to separate the church from the state...  My reading so far has also shown that overall Islamic Overlords were much more tolerant of the existance of other faith traditions in their lands than were the Chrisians. 

Just last night as I read a few more chapters in A Case for God by Karen Armstrong, I learned about the forced conversions of the Jews by Isabella and Ferdinand.  Many chose exile to Portugal, until Isabella and Ferdinand forced Portugal to do the same.  Then, with the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, those same converted Jews were suspect because they were forced...nice logic that.

All this is not to deny that there is a dangerous, fundamentalist form of Islam out there.  I am not willing, however, to condemn the entire faith until I have done my homework.  Peace.

Wrong Way?

I felt like I had so much to say yesterday after not blogging for so long.  I want to spend a bit more time on this wrong worship vs. wrong God idea.  I briefly reference the Nicene Creed in which we state the "We believe in one God..."  It is quite common amongst many Christians to acknowledge that we are all talking about the same God, particularly amongst the Children of the Book - the three main Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  A goodly number of us would argue that even the other faiths of the world are all pointing to the same divine essense - the words we use, the traditions we follow, the way we pray, may seem different but that "all roads lead to God."

Yes, there are some fundamentalist and evangelical folk who take a very literal only through Christ hard line.  It is likely that there are fundamentalists in most faiths who believe that they alone are right.  These are the folks who would argue WRONG GOD over what I am calling Wrong Worship.

I am not suggesting that Wrong Worship means "incorrect worship."  Perhaps it might be better to think of it as wrong for us...or in the case of the Ancient Hebrews, wrong for the Jews of YHWH.

Those Canaanite Gods, Ba'al in particular, were still a group of humanity trying to understand the divine - the great, all encompassing Being - and how that Being interacted with them where they were.  Even the Canaanites though, imagined a greater, more removed abstract God, the Prime Mover, the Creator - they called this God "El."  Ba'al was the God who was closer to home as it were.  Not exactly an "Incarnation" but God reaching out and touching them.  The God who lived in the place with them.

The Ancient Hebrews also struggled with this - understanding the greater Being (YHWH) and understanding how that Being comes down to interact with us in our limited physical lives.  The Exodus reading this past Sunday concerned Moses arguing with God about staying with the Hebrews and making his presence known.  YHWH agrees to stay close but essentially tells Moses that at best humanity will only see the vapor trail of God's presence...his backside as it were...that will be the closest they will be to seeing God.  Besides he tells them that to look on the face of God would be more than their frail human bodies could handle.

Even in Christianity, as we struggle to understand the Trinity, we are essentially struggling with understanding the divine Being (God the Father) and how God interacts with us here in the mere physical realm (God the Son)...however, rather than a monolith housed pagan God or a vapor trail of YHWH we got Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The chapter I am currently working through in Karen Armstrong's book, The Case for God, has opened my eyes.  We are not meant to understand the Trinity, it is a paradox to meditate upon.  As we sit in church and say our communal prayers, we are to remind ourselves continuously of the inability of mere human words to adequately express what God is.  All those times we trip up on phrases where we feel need to cross our fingers or simply stop and let others say the words because we slip into a too literal mode of thinking.  Those are the very moments when we can remind ourselves of the inadequacy of our words...and the silence that follows is a recognition of the divine within us.

In fact, that one tricky word in the Nicene Creed -- Believe -- didn't used to mean what we say it means.  I believe the Latin word is credere and "believe" is a weak translation.  A more appropriate definition that doesn't appear to mean "take as the literal Truth" is apparently along the lines of trust or put myself in trust of...we trust that their is one God, we put ourselves in the the trust that there is one Lord, Jesus Christ...  This wording isn't about swearing on the Bible that this is the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth...it's a subtle difference, and, remember, we're not meant to understand the Trinity...it's a paradox that reminds us of our inability to adequately express in mere words what we are not able to understand.

Just like the God of Exodus telling Moses that we mere humans cannot survive looking onto the face of God, (to quote Jack Nicholson/Tom Cruise:  You want answers?/I want the truth/You can't handle the truth!)  Or as a posted on Facebook as a status update, quoting from The Case for God, "...get beyond simplistically anthropomorphic ideas of God and experience the divine as a transcendent presence within."  Peace.

A New Beginning

If you are at all familiar with the Old Testament, I want you to think a moment about the various tribes of people encountered by the Ancient Hebrews. This is my question…when you think about these other tribes do you think they have the wrong God or the wrong way of worshiping God? This is what you, living in the 21st Century, think - not what they or the Ancient Hebrews thought, nor what the writers of the Old Testament thought.

Mad Priest posted the following at OCICBW regarding the Jews and YHWH. I started seeing these comments from liberal minded folks who leapt right into criticism of how God “WAS” back then. I realized that otherwise sensible, progressive minded folk were taking a rather literal view of things. How do we get from understanding that much of Genesis is better understood as mythology than as history to judging God by how YHWH is presented in later Old Testament stories? --stories composed and eventually written down and then revised by divinely inspired men trying to understand their relationship to YHWH and express that relationship with the limitation of human words.

It was while thinking about this that I formulated my question.  I believe we have been encouraged to think that they had the wrong God. For example, remember the “Golden Calf” from The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston?  Most of us would describe that scene, and the portion of the story it represents, as follows: Moses is gone up on the mountain for a long time and the wandering Hebrews begin to get twitchy, eventually losing control, gathering up their gold and forging a sacred cow to worship in place of YHWH (I.e., the wrong God). This cow god allows for them to act like they’re at a frat party - at least in the movie. In the end, there’s Hell to pay…

However, I believe that those confused Hebrews as well as the other tribes were not following the wrong God but, rather, were wrong in their style of worship.

I am working my way through a Great Courses series on the “Old Testament,” taught by Professor A.J. Levine. She explains that all the other religions of the time saw their Gods as being very much connected to place. They believed strongly in monoliths that marked sacred mountains or locations where their Gods resided. The Ancient Hebrews, however, believed that YHWH was always everywhere with them.

Professor Levine suggests that what really occurs while Moses is up the mountain is that the people begin to get anxious and question this new way of thinking about the presence of God. In creating the Golden Calf they are not making up some new deity so they can have a big drunken orgy and to hell with Moses and YHWY. Rather they are reverting to an older way of worship - they lose faith in what they have been doing and create an idol in which their God can be satisfied and come down and live with them in a physical place like the other tribes’ Gods.

Once I heard it expressed this way, the entire Golden Calf episode made much more sense to me. Further, I believe the issue is wrong worship, not wrong God.  After all, every Sunday we recite, "We believe in one God..."

And with that thought, I reintroduce my blog. I have hinted over the past few months that I want to use my blog as a tool to mark my spiritual journey. To that end I have been reading and gathering up future reading (fancy way of saying “bought more unread books”). I am inspired by cyber friends who blog with a spiritual focus. I also have a desire to flesh out this secular monasticm - this hermit lifestyle - I value so much. Part of my future studies will include a better understanding of The Rule of St. Benedict in the hope of writing my own “Rule” for my Hermitage.

Brother John up in British Columbia is a brother with the Community of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and his new home in a more rural section of Vancouver Island has been named St. Cuthbert’s Cottage by his Order. Perhaps some day I will christen my log home with a similar new name.

I purchased The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Joan Chittister as a promising introduction to the Rule.

Late in the Summer I read Mary Called Magdalene by Margaret George. I had picked up this copy from the $2 rack at my local bookstore. They wheel out this old style library cart in front of the shop every day and it holds what can be called “less than remaindered homeless” books. Yet two of the more interesting books I’ve read recently came off that rack, and now too my cyber sistah Maria has picked up a copy of God Among The Shakers upon my recommendation (it speaks to our mutual secular monasticm).

Margaret George’s book, more than anything, forced me to think about how all the main characters from the Gospels were Jews. We get so caught up in our Christianity sometimes that we minimize or forget about Jesus’ Jewish faith.  We have blamed the Jews for crucifying Christ - as if he was this Christian outsider.

There was significant overlap between Judaism and the early church - for many years Christianity was looked about as a sect of Judaism. All this ruminating over our deep connection guided my reading. I finally dusted off my copy of The Source by Michener, as well as cracked open a few other titles that have been patiently waiting on my shelves for a number of years now: The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill, The First Crusade, and The Oxford History of Byzantium in particular.

Well, I suppose this is long enough, and it has sat on my computer waiting for me to find some wireless zone to actually post. I look forward to reading your comments. Peace.

UPDATE:  It's so much harder to edit on the fly.  My apologies to Brother John, but now the post reflects the correct info.