Snow At Night

What a glorious, perfect night it was tonight!

I went out to shovel the snow off our driveway, steps and sidewalks. Wrapped in snow boots, snow pants, and all the other winter accoutrements, I didn't feel the slightest bit cold. There was no breeze at all. The lightest of snowflakes were steadily falling. The village was quiet on a Sunday evening. I was disappointed when I found myself with nothing else to shovel.

I walked across to the empty lot on the other side of the street, and flopped down on my back. The snowflakes showered my face and I found myself saying aloud, "This is like heaven!" Somehow all the snowflakes seemed to be singing Gloria. It reminded me of Robert Frost and Robert Browning, all at the same time.

"Whose woods these are, I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

and

"God's in His Heaven -
All's right with the world!"

At moments like that I want nothing more than to please my God in every way.

Quitting Jail

Well, I did it. After seven years of going to jail every Sunday to preach to the women in the Work Release Center, I up and quit. I made two phone calls and sent one email, and just like that, I was free of what has been a weekly obligation for so long I don't remember what it's like to go to church regularly on Sunday and be preached to.

It was easy to slip into the ministry unnoticed. I just showed up one Sunday and it became a habit to be there. Now I slipped back out equally unnoticed - I just stopped showing up one Sunday. And in between lies seven years of Sundays, and a lot of women who have come and gone, and in some cases, come again. I even had a mother who came prayed for her daughter, and then later, the daughter came and prayed for her mother. I came in every Sunday empty, begging the Lord to give me some bread to feed them. And I left every Sunday full.

I really don't know what difference I made to most, but I guess it doesn't really make any difference whether I know or not. One thing I've learned - God always lets me know what He wants me to do, but He very rarely tells me why. Usually when I think I know why, I find out later I was wrong. Maybe He's storing up all those why's until eternity. Or maybe He's answering all the time, but like my dog who is completely incapable of understanding the newspaper on any meaningful level, I'm too dense to get it.

In any case, thus ends a chapter of my life.

Faith and Reason

Here's an excerpt of another great article which I didn't write. It's actually from the Pope and got him into hot water with the Muslim community during Sept. 2006, if you recall that tempest in a teapot. It's good stuff, even if it's on the dry, scholarly side. I've left in the paragraph which got him in trouble for historical interest, but the original article is too long to post. You can read it in it's entirety at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/
september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html

LECTURE OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

Here's the part that got him in trouble...

"In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that Surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...". The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry."

These three paragraphs sum up his point about Faith and Reason.

"This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university."

Not hardly in most American universities today! But it is a great task for us as the Church too in this post-modern culture. When subjectivity is questioned, Faith becomes legalistic or marginalized. When objectivity is questioned, Faith can become ungrounded or even loony. I've seen it more than once in the Pentecostal world. So I agree with the Pope - Faith and Reason can't be divorced from each other. The Anglican church speaks of the three-legged stool of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as guides to Christian understanding. By tradition they mean the historic understanding of the Church about Scripture and Doctrine. (I like to take it back even further to traditional Jewish thought predating Christ.) That's what I love about my Vineyard Church (www.adullamvineyard.com) - the blend of openness to Spirit with groundedness in practice.

Authenticity vs. Sincerity

Here is a great article sent to me by a friend. Read it and let me know what you think about this distinction. Please - no comments about Hillary - remember, I didn't write this. I would once have chosen the word "authentic" above the word "sincere" but the author has convinced me to change my stripes.

Our Overrated Inner Self
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Published: December 26, 2006

In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.

Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group's true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.

It also undermines good government. James Nolan, in his book ''The Therapeutic State,'' has shown how the emphasis on the primacy of the self has penetrated major areas of government: emotivist arguments trump reasoned discourse in Congressional hearings and criminal justice; and in public education, self-esteem vies with basic literacy in evaluating students. The cult of authenticity partly accounts for our poor choice of leaders. We prefer leaders who feel our pain, or born-again frat boys who claim that they can stare into the empty eyes of an ex-K.G.B. agent and see inside his soul. On the other hand we hear, ad nauseam, that Hillary Clinton, arguably one of the nation's most capable senators, is ''fake'' and therefore not electable as president.

But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds. Social scientists and pollsters routinely belittle results showing growing tolerance; they argue that Americans have simply learned how to conceal their deeply ingrained prejudices. A hot new subfield of psychology claims to validate such skepticism. The Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborators claim to have evidence, based on more than three million self-administered Web-based tests, that nearly all of us are authentically bigoted to the core with hidden ''implicit prejudices'' -- about race, gender, age, homosexuality and appearance -- that we deny, sometimes with consciously tolerant views. The police shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, they argue, are simply dramatic examples of how ''implicit prejudice'' influences the behavior of us all.

However well meaning these researchers, their gotcha psychology is morally invasive and, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has cogently argued, of questionable validity and use. It cannot distinguish between legitimate apprehension and hateful bigotry as responses to identical social problems. A fearful young black woman living in a high-crime neighborhood could easily end up with a racist score. An army of diversity trainers now use Banaji's test to promote touchy-feely bias awareness in companies, which my colleague Frank Dobbin has shown to be a devious substitute for minority promotions.

I couldn't care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?

Scholars like Richard Sennett and the late Philip Rieff attribute the rise of authenticity to the influence of psychoanalysis, but America's protestant ethos and its growing intrusion in public life may be equally to blame. Whatever the cause, for centuries the norm of sincerity presented an alternate model of selfhood and judgment that was especially appropriate for non-intimate and secular relations. Its iconic expression is the celebrated passage from Shakespeare: ''All the world's a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players./They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts.''

Shakespeare's ''self'' is inescapably public, fashioned in interaction with others and by the roles we play -- what sociologists, building on his insight, call the looking-glass self. This allows for change. Sincerity rests in reconciling our performance of tolerance with the people we become. And what it means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.