Thinking about politics; a debate with myself

Last November I decided that what I wanted to do was write 500 words a day for a year. I did pretty well the week after Thanksgiving and the first few days of December. Kind of fell off the wagon then until January; made exactly two entries that month, one on the first of February, and here I am heading into mid-April, starting over. Not a good track record so far, and this is a confession. Okay.

One of the things that has occupied my attention during this time is the semi-serious question of whether or not to get into politics. Over the last few years a number of sincere, well-meaning people have tried to talk me into running for elective office. When I have complained about this confidingly to other friends, the response I get is much less on the line of a sympathetic dismissal of the idea, and more often a serious discussion of the pros and cons, emphasis on the pros. I’m near enough to a megalomaniac all by myself, so it doesn’t take much of this sort of thing to get me started. So over the last couple of months I’ve actually given a bit of serious thought as to whether to run, this year, in a primary and, if successful, a general election for public office at the county level.

Problem with this is, I’m a preacher, and one who has been admonished more than once with a repetition of the famous words: “If a man be called to preach, let him not stoop to be a king”. As a preacher of the Gospel, I’ve already got a pretty important job, and as such also quite enough standing in the community to suffice for most people.

Thing is, I’m not most people.

Then there’s the whole separation of church and state thing, and the fact that given the polarized and polarizing state of current political discourse, the whole process of being a public figure in that way might collide rather sharply with the way in which I have become accustomed to being a public figure. And then there’s the liberal/conservative label matrix. I should say a few things about that.

Politically, I’m a liberal, and have registered as a Democrat in every election since 1992. That year I found to my dismay that I could not, registered as an Independent, vote in the presidential primary in the state of New York. In penance for that shortfall, I made the first political donation of my life, to then-candidate Jerry Brown of California. I can’t remember if I sent him $15 or $25. In any case, I’m a political liberal in large measure as a result of being a particular brand of theological conservative. Issues like the dignity and equality of women and men and of all races (ethnoi), the responsibility of government (that meant kings, in the Old Testament; but it means “we the people” in our peculiar system) to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the alien, loom large for me in my reading of scripture; as does an unwavering commitment to nonviolence, which it seems to me is inseparable from the most radical teachings of Jesus.

I take my theological conservatism directly from a tradition that is fed by several streams: there is the Lutheran (salvation by faith, sola scriptori), the Wesleyan/Holiness, and the Anabaptist, and to a lesser extent by the wider Evangelical/Fundamentalist tradition (whose heroes are less Luther and Wesley and more Calvin and Zwingli). Mostly though, and in keeping with each of these traditions, I get it from the Bible itself, and my own reading and experiencing of the words, stories, teachings found in it. I’m a Jesus person. I take the words in red very seriously, and try to get others to do so as well.

It was the Anabaptists, by and large, who bequeathed to subsequent generations on both sides of the Atlantic the notion of separation of church and state. No such separation existed in 16th-century Europe, and as a result these folks, who thought that one becomes a Christian by deciding to follow Jesus, and thus joins a church by deciding to associate with others of like mind, were persecuted harshly by Catholics and Protestants alike, who all thought you were a (certain brand of) Christian because you lived in a land governed by a (particular brand of) Christian ruler. The idea that a church is a voluntary association of responsible adults, and not co-extensive with the state, was very much an Anabaptist idea. Because of this idea they baptized adults, most of whom had already been baptized once as infants; hence the name, Anabaptists, or Rebaptizers.  Because this procedure was seen as subversive, unpatriotic, and other nasty things, some of the leaders of this movement were, fittingly enough, executed by drowning. Many others of these folks, to escape such persecution, ultimately came to these shores, and rubbed elbows with Protestants who had come to escape the Catholics, or (as in Maryland) Catholics who came to escape the Protestants. While all of the 13 original states had established churches of one kind or another, the founding fathers were wise enough to remember what had happened in Christian Europe over the issue of whose religion should prevail (hint: 30 years’ war; look it up), and decided that there would be no argument about that issue on the federal level, enshrining in the first amendment a prohibition on establishing an official Federal religion. This idea of non-state-sponsored churches gained official acceptance slowly and erratically, starting with Rhode Island (not Massachusetts) and Pennsylvania (not Maryland or Virginia).

All that said, I also agree with something I have heard more than once from my Congressman, Steny Hoyer: “I believe in the separation of church and state; but I do not believe in separating the values my faith has taught me from the decisions I make in public or private life.” (This may not be a verbatim quote, but I have heard words very much like this from him at least twice this year as he spoke to constituents).

Now my Anabaptist forebears tended to prefer to withdraw from politics into separate societies of their own. Certain of my Holiness forebears, likewise, would warn me not to risk my sanctified soul with such worldly pursuits. As a non-confrontational sort of fellow, I would be departing from my own comfort zone if I were to buck both those traditions and start speaking out on political issues. Trouble is, I do find, in that meddlesome document, the Bible, plenty of examples of prophets and apostles, and, yes, our Lord himself, being quite vocal on the issues of the day.

There are some issues I am interested in. Housing, jobs, responsible budgeting, education, long range planning that balances environmental preservation with the provision of services and infrastructure that meet human needs. I’ve worked on some of these issues already.

It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do. I’m just thinking, that’s all. Just thinking. I’ll let you know.

Addendum, added 5/20/10:

Here’s where I let you know. This internal debate having reached its conclusion, one of me seems to have won by a narrow margin, and the conflicting pundits in my head are drafting their respective columns arguing whether the decision to proceed represents a bold step or a foolish venture.  I’m ignoring them both, for now, while considering that they both may be right.  What actually happened was that I went on a previously scheduled three-day spiritual retreat in mid-May, thinking that by the end of that I’d have gained some clarity; which I did not, if by clarity is meant “now I know what God wants me to do with this.”  I did, however, come away with a calmness and clearness of mind which allowed me to notice that I was equally undisturbed by either prospect.  The curious and surprising fact that the thought of entering the political process at this late date in my life did not scare the willies out of me was just enough of a nudge that it tipped the scale in that direction.  It was my decision, and the consequences to me, my family, my community are my responsibility.  Isn’t that what we are spiritually called to do, grow up, make actual decisions, and become responsible for our own decisions?  So…. I filed.

Taking Charge, Seeking help

(a fragment:  notes on the iphone)

So here’s a pretty thing. The interface between the spiritual and the mundane is well exemplified in the experience of Elijah, patron saint of the bipolar. His highest highs, in which he confronted kings and prophets, were brief in duration and separated by his lowest lows, during which he sought solitude, fled for his life, slept too much, and complained of being left all alone.

The great lesson to be learned there is that the divine presence, provision, protection and direction were just as manifest in those low points as they were in the moments of certainty and power. The second lesson is that the movement toward wholeness and balance, which did come, involved establishing a new, intentional relationship with another human being: in this case his successor, Elisha.

Eight years later

I was in my office on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the phone rang. It was one of my leading church members, who said: “Go home and turn on the TV, something has happened.” The urgency in her voice was enough that I dropped what I was doing, and a short time later I was standing by the television with my teenage children, watching the news unfold on CNBC: smoke rising from the North tower, news reporters not sure what they were reporting on yet. Watching the screen, at one point I saw something, an airplane flying low, and followed it across the screen with my finger. Then an angry plume of flame burst out the other side of the second tower.

Journal entry: a dream

A fragment, really.

My brain is always active through the night, and as is true with most people, most of the dreams are forgotten before I awake. The few bits that are left, however, would make for amazing cinematography if they could be captured or reproduced. There is also the matter of multiple layers of meaning hovering around the images and events in the dream, something nearly impossible to capture in few words. With those observations to serve as disclaimers, here’s what I found myself remembering this morning, as the eggs were in the pan:

I am somewhere, in a large building, perhaps to attend a convention or other large gathering. It’s a hotel, I think. I’m many stories up, a dozen or more at least, and appear to be alone in the room when the shaking starts.  After a few moments, it is clear that the whole building is unstable, and is about to come down.  The room begins to rotate around me, furniture sliding, the ceiling soon to be a wall.  It occurs to me that I may only have a few more seconds to live.  It also comes across my mind that the same may be true of friends and loved ones, elsewhere in the same building.  As those few remaining seconds become fewer, in my ongoing conversation with God (online all the time; kind of like broadband) I express these concerns, along with just a hint of curiosity about what, if anything, lies beyond.  There is no memory of anything after that.

As has been the case with other such things, there is no sense of fear, or panic associated here.  Not exactly detachment, either; somewhere in the mix was a complex of concerns about unfinished business elsewhere, whether anyone would ever know my passwords or even what-all I have passwords to, with attendant mild anxiety about those things.  But personal fear?  Not really.  Disappointment at the idea of not getting to do anything else?  Yeah.

Ok, that’s it.  A dream fragment, nothing more.  A snapshot. One person, dealing with the question of mortality and the fragility of personal existence.

I Take This Personally

To Another Poet

Write. Just write. Write your heart, write your soul. Write volumes and reams and write without scissors. Write blindly, without looking. Write what you feel, write what you know. And if you feel nothing, if you know nothing, then write what you see. Write, write, if you must, about me. Write, write, write. Write until you drop. Next week you can edit. Don’t stop.

~XineAnn

 

I don’t know if this online friend had me in mind, or someone else —most likely someone else, she has many online friends, and not a few of them write poetry — but since she posted it in a place that she knows I read, I’ll take it as targeted in part, at least, to me. In any case, it’s good advice, and suggests something of the passion that is required for someone to undertake the foolish quest of turning the soul inside out, to reveal one’s heart to a cold and mostly unlistening world, or, more significantly, perhaps, to oneself.

Spiritual amphibians

About a year and a half ago, I stood at the graveside of a near relative and tried to provide some inspired words of comfort for the gathered family and friends. At such a moment, short on sleep and feeling quite vulnerable, it pays to look to Divine inspiration rather than one’s own genius (although anyone who has admired the works of William Blake might well argue that the two are indistinguishable: a discussion for another day). Be that as it may, one of those curious things that happen from time to time occurred on this occasion also. As I spoke, groping for words, what seemed an apt image appeared before my consciousness, and without any time to analyze or filter it out, I just let the words come. I hope my readers will not be offended at the result, in which I compare the likes of you and me to, well, frogs.

What I heard myself say was that we as humans are a sort of spiritual amphibian, belonging both to time and to eternity, in more traditional terms to earth and heaven, but because of that, exclusively to neither. It is that image that I’d like to expand upon for a moment or two here. Call it a parable, or an imaginative metaphor. Let’s see where it takes us.

We live in time, and we are destined to live in eternity.

Dreaming?

Disney Magic   Originally uploaded by therev3r.

Look…

Some people think I live in fantasyland…. but I just visited it for the first time this week.

The Magic Kingdom

Okay, here’s the whole beginning for this story. When I was quite young, maybe four, five, six years old, at some point there showed up at our house in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts an eight- or sixteen-page color brochure for Disneyland, the theme park in Orange County, California. Along with my brothers, all of whom were older (can’t count the younger brother yet, he was either not born or at least not yet reading), I pored over those pictures and read and re-read all about Main Street USA, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland; the fabulous Teacup Ride, the perfectly safe but utterly realistic Hippos and Elephants and on and on; and of course the lifesize Disney characters you could talk to.

waiting for United

Personal journal, 1/15/2008: a redundant recording of the date, to be sure.

My bride and I are going to board an airplane together for the first time, so we have discovered to mild mutual surprise, since the trip we took to England in 1978, just within a month of our wedding day. It’s been that long since we’ve really had a vacation (and that wasn’t a vacation, it was a college history class with assignments and mandated places to see in Ye Olde Countree) and here we are, set to go somewhere vaguely exotic for the express purpose of doing nothing, in terms of meeting anyone’s expectations, for ten days. I’ll try to keep a little record of how it goes.

No one has ever accused me (I think) of being what’s called a Type A personality. I’m pretty laid back, but it has been noticed recently that in a certain way I am driven. I surmise that it goes with the territory in my line of work. I’m always looking for the one that got away, the job undone, the parishioner unvisited, the meeting unattended, the notes not taken, the book (alas, the book!) not yet written. I preach a good game about observing the Sabbath, but my own sabbaths are as filled with toil as all my other days. Of course, I pass that off with a mystical slant: in the work of God all is rest and peace, etc., which is certainly true, but one must remember, musn’t one, that it’s best to begin with rest and peace, and use that as a foundation for peaceful (and peacemaking) action. In a world torn by war and conflict, it seems that bustling about in the name of promoting serenity among one’s fellow-creatures is de rigeur. No matter; this weekand next, we decompress, live with no agenda except our own. What will that be like?

What might it be like to live without an agenda? Impossible, of course: one must sleep, and eat, on some sort of schedule, and as the day and night follow one another, the circadian rhythm will to some extent conform. Much work awaits us when we return to our place; perhaps we will do so with a clear mind and fresh insights, ready to take on the challenges that will no doubt be beating at our door. But look, please notice: I got all the way to Paragraph Three before mentioning the work that awaits. A bit of progress, that, isn’t it?

Lately I’ve been trying to express to a few people how I think about big ideas: not in words, in the first instance (though the words come, eventually, on the best of days) nor even in pictures, though sometimes an image can be evoked; rather I think of, or rather look at, big ideas in terms of what I call their shape. Almost it’s like being a blind man in the presence of the proverbial elephant, don’t you know; and now look, I’ve put words and an image on this idea I have about big ideas, and have thus perhaps made it intelligible to some reader, to some degree, but have also limited and diminished it, just as the proverbial blind men do when they try to describe their piece of that elephant to one another. No, I look at, take the measure of, an idea by (not exactly this, but it’s another image) walking around it, perceiving dimly its general shape, too much to get my arms around (there I go again) and undefinable in terms of any single image or set of words, but there it is, an idea, something that can change how I perceive and think about many other things, something that if I can get hold of it, let its shape shape me in some way, will give me a better capacity for interacting with the world as I find it. A preacher’s or philosopher’s or storyteller’s task is to draw that shape around his audience, enfold them in it, so that they feel it themselves, see its outlines, share its space, and begin to articulate in their own ways the images and words that it calls forth.

All of life is poetry. It is the attempt to give expression to the inexpressible beauty and sadness inherent in all things.

First update: Arrived in Orlando a bit late, got the luggage alright, waited in line at the Alamo counter and talked the attendant, somehow, into upgrading us from an economy to a compact…. got the paperwork and walked over to the garage, picked a Chevy Cobalt (just what I wanted). Paid for a full tank of gas upfront, cheaper than paying four dollars and change for them to refill at the end of the rental. Then off we went, with the address of our first night’s hotel and the google map on the iPhone, only to find after a while that we left the airport going south where we should have gone north….. paid two dollars in tolls we didn’t need to, added some driving time, and got to our one-night stop at going on two a.m. The protocol here was to use the courtesy phone outside the door to get the attention of the night attendant. It took about five redials (going to voicemail each time) before he came on the phone. I guess we woke him up. However, now we are here, more or less settling, reading and writing and soon to turn out the lights.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 7:53 AM: It will take a while to get the two of us in sync. Free of all responsibility, I find myself well rested after just a few hours sleep, but best beloved roused up to worry out loud about my health. Not to worry. Did I say all responsibility? I’m thinking I do need to call the senior center where I would have normally had an event next Tuesday, to let them know I’m not coming. Will sneak off and do that sometime soon.

At the airport last evening, and on the plane, I got to reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of detailed analysis here of movements and events, with the basic premise being that much can be understood about changes in social behavior if we think of them as structured like epidemics of disease. Gives lots of meat and bones to the little “truth is a virus” meme — and even to the virus-like character of the concept of meme at all. I guess much of his target audience is marketers, people who want to influence behavior. However, the sorts of things he points out do seem to map pretty well onto the spread of ideas all beyond proportion to their beginnings. Got me to thinking of a fellow like St Paul as an infectious agent for Christianity. Methinks he had characteristics of all three of the special personality types —Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen — who contribute to the bringing about oflarge-scale change.

Notes on the visit to the Magic Kingdom to be continued in the next entry.

Time-wise

Time flies by without new posts, so here’s one just so both my fans will know I’m still here. 

Not sure what to do about the accelerating pace of modern life; in thought experiments about relativity, Einstein tells us that subjective time slows dramatically the faster we go, so that when we accelerate to close to the speed of light and approach the event horizon it seems more  and more like everything  else is slowing down.  

I don’t know about that.