The eCrozier

Looking for love in all the wrong places
Johnny Lee on the soundtrack of the film, Urban Cowboy

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times this week, reports on growing religious practices that aren’t part of what’s been “the mainstream” in the U.S. He quotes a recent Pew survey showing that 29 percent of Americans claim a belief in astrology. As Brooks points out, “that’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.” My hunch is there’s some overlap with people coming to church for the Eucharist while also trusting in their daily horoscope (covering their bets, as it were). Brooks documents similar growth in Wicca practices as well as quasi-Buddhist “mindfulness” exercises.

This trend, that Brooks is just now discovering, is hardly new. It’s been going on for more than a generation. Over 30 years ago, Robert Bellah and his team published Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Back in 1985, Bellah’s team documented what they saw happening with people’s religious practices. The trend was and is a type of “utilitarian individualism,” which seeks a connection to the divine (some form of religion), while being unencumbered by institutions or any dependency outside oneself. It’s an effort to have “religion” without all the messy relationships present when people are in community. The most telling section of Bellah’s book was about “Sheilaism.” It was the religion practiced, not surprisingly, by a woman named Sheila. She claimed she’d been so hurt and wounded by her relationships in “organized religion” that she now saw her religion as being good and kind to herself, a religion she called “Sheilaism.”

I hope we avoid snarky reactions to Sheila or to those who follow their zodiac signs or make magic potions or who are just trying to be more “mindful.” They’re just trying to make sense of their lives. They’re grasping for the transcendent while being most human (AKA, sinners like us), that is, seeking to control their lives and the world around them. Each of these religious practices promises adherents some connection to the divine (or something spiritual) while also providing a sense of agency over their lives, or so they believe. They see what we see: A world becoming more anonymous and less neighborly, and they’re responding in a way that makes sense to them. But it’s a fool’s errand. Left to our own devices, we can’t have a connection to the divine (if you think about it, it’s pretty arrogant and presumptuous of us to think we can do so by our own power).

We should be compassionate toward such folk for they’re just like us in the longing of their hearts. Like them, we get religion wrong when we try to turn Christianity into our means to reach our desired end. Christianity isn’t about us finding God. It’s actually about God finding us, most particularly when God opened his eyes in Bethlehem. He finished (“It is finished,” Jesus said) finding us on the Cross. None of this was our doing. Like our astrological, wiccan, and mindfulness neighbors, we’re just as susceptible to “looking for love in all the wrong places.” We should stop looking for what we can’t on our own find and trust that God has found us in Jesus Christ.

+Scott

The recent signing into law of the so-called “heartbeat bill” by the Governor of Georgia has brought the issue of abortion rights back into our moral reflection. Abortion is one of those moral issues that’s complex with no easy solutions, no matter how some on the extremes of the discourse might want it to be otherwise. For example, people who favor abortion rights are often unwilling to acknowledge that abortion ends a life. Scientists and theologians will debate whether it’s a “human life” or a “potential human life,” but still a life is ending when an abortion occurs. If we don’t acknowledge that, then we’re not being honest. Ending a life on purpose should be above the pay-grade of human beings. That’s true at the beginning of life or in the prison execution room.

Those who are opposed to abortion rights are equally unwilling to have, it seems, any empathy for the significant struggle women have when trying to make such a decision. Ironically, these are often the same people who are stridently opposed to the state infringing on their 2nd Amendment rights. They’re quite willing, however, to have the state criminalize abortion with threatened prison sentences and infringe upon a woman’s right to decide about her own body. Neither side seems willing to grant even a small point to the other. They’re afraid that if they do so, then the whole basis for their moral argument will collapse. I don’t think that’s true, but that’s what they fear. And that’s what’s preventing us from having a compassionate and merciful conversation about this deeply complex moral dilemma. I can think of no other contemporary moral dilemma that’s more difficult to discern.

As I see it, there are no “totally good” choices on any side of this issue. So what do we do? I don’t know, but I try to think about it from the “least bad” end desired and then work back from there to start reflecting morally. Can we really have a just society where women are forced to bear children they don’t want or can’t care for? I know Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, is fiction, but that kind of state control of women’s bodies is frightening to imagine. It’s demeaning and degrading to their personhood and their citizenship and could never be seen as just. And yet, that seems to be the logical consequence of the recent legislation. From the other perspective, do we really want a society where human life (or potential human life) can be disposed of? We say we don’t, but we already buy into such a disposable view of life through our toleration of gun violence, thinking that mass murder is the price we all must pay in order to justify a particular, narrow reading of the 2nd Amendment.

I don’t know what the definitive answer is about abortion. I do know, however, that it has to begin with compassion and mercy to the women who face this dilemma. Criminalizing this difficult and complex moral issue will do nothing to support women who face a decision that doesn’t have a perfect option. At best, women have only a “least bad” choice. A compassionate and merciful response would avoid coercive tactics by the state and rather begin with fully respecting a woman’s personhood and then supporting those who face this dilemma with substantial medical and emotional care. I hope that’s where we end up when have worked through all this.

+Scott

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. – Acts 17:22

With observations by researchers about the growing “religion-less-ness” of our culture, one thing obvious (at least to me) has been lost: It’s not happening. Yes, folk aren’t participating in traditional religious groups as they once did. The recent data on Millennials indicate that only about 11% of them have some form of traditional spiritual practice connected to a church, synagogue, or mosque. And we’re seeing similar lower percentages across all age and demographic groups. That, however, doesn’t mean we’re not religious. We are, just not in the same way previous generations have been.

Everyone is religious. Many evolutionary scientists now contend it’s baked into our genes. So, the question shouldn’t be about whether humans are religious. It should rather be about how humans express their religious practices. St. Paul’s observation 2000 years ago is still relevant today. We might now say: “Secularists, I see how extremely religious you are in every way!” Andrew Sullivan recently wrote that religion “exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.” The 1987 film Moonstruck has Olympia Dukakis playing the aging Rose who’s trying to understand why her husband is cheating on her. She concludes it’s because he fears death. Some men, she surmises, cheat trying to reconcile, or cheat, their inevitable deaths.

So, we all practice religion in different ways. The great theologian Paul Tillich called religion our “ultimate concern.” Whatever that concern is then becomes our religion. For some people, work is their religion (hitting me close). Their devotion to their jobs dominates their waking hours (and sometimes their dreams) so much so it becomes their religion. Once we understand religion’s role, we’ll see its pervasive presence. For example, some people express their religious practice through diet and exercise. They believe that if they get both of those right, then their lives will be righteous. For others, managing their desired image through Twitter is their religion, curating that image carefully so they’ll get their imagined lives righteous.

What all these religious practices have in common is an effort at self-justification. They presume that if a person can just be successful at their job, finish that marathon, avoid the wrong kind of foods, or appear in the right way to followers on Twitter, then their lives will be justified. All these efforts merely replace the worship of God with different forms of self-worship in a vain attempt at self-justification. But as the Collect for the 3rd Sunday in Lent reminds us: “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” And yet, we persist because we’re drawn to religion, especially the self-justifying kind. But we can’t reconcile ourselves. And that’s what makes Christianity different from all other faith traditions. It’s grounded in God’s justification of us, not in our efforts to justify ourselves. As that old hymn reminds us: “All other ground is sinking sand.”

+Scott

“If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.” – Yogi Berra

“If we are to make our lives meaningful, we must live for values beyond happiness, values that may conflict with happiness. Sometimes suffering can be beneficial, not because it may make us capable of greater pleasures, but because it may deepen the soul.” – Gary Saul Morson, in The Athenaeum Review (Summer 2019)

For much of my life I tried to make my life meaningful, as Professor Morson implies we should (and presumably thinks we can). Making my life meaningful hasn’t worked out so well. When I worked hard at it, I failed to remember that we humans have a propensity to mess things up when trying to “make” things happen. Sometimes we get it right, but just as often we don’t. So, I’m more inclined to follow the wisdom of that great metaphysical philosopher, Yogi Berra. Professor Morson, however, does make an important point. Life, if it’s to be meaningful, has to be more than chasing happiness, which is like being on a hamster-wheel to nowhere and leads us to always ask: “How much is enough?”

In the film, Tender Mercies, Mac Sledge is a washed-up, alcoholic country singer who finds recovery, redemption, and grace through sobriety, marriage to Rosa Lee, and his adopted son. At the film’s end, Mac is silently working in the family garden. Much has occurred since his sobriety and marriage, specifically the tragic car-accident death of his 18-year old daughter from a previous marriage. As he’s working in the garden trying to fathom his grief, Rosa Lee comes out to see how he’s doing. He tells her he doesn’t understand why this has happened. By all rights, he should’ve been dead due to his reckless, self-centered life, yet he’s alive and his daughter is dead. He can’t understand why his life is now redeemed and whole. He ends by saying to her, “You see, I don’t trust happiness. I never did. I never will.” Even in his profound grief, he has a soul wellness more vital than happiness. He has received love and grace from his wife, his adopted son, and the new friends he has made. The film’s epilogue shows Mac tossing a football with his adopted son. The look on Mac’s face says it all. His grief isn’t gone. His past isn’t forgotten. His suffering isn’t over. But, his soul is well.

None of us will have soul wellness by chasing happiness. The happiness chase is a lie of American mythology. It ignores the truth of our human condition. Such a chase becomes a “law” we must follow; a categorical imperative that, ironically enough, condemns us to unhappiness. But when we accept that the world isn’t perfect and we aren’t as well, then we can let go of our self-imposed pressure (with our culture’s help) to make ourselves happy. We then can begin to accept that what has been done for us is far more crucial than what we can try to make ourselves do. That’s the grace given us in Jesus. You see, we need not try to find meaning (or even happiness) in the world. Meaning has found us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And that meaning is incarnated for us in the forgiving love found in the people and circumstances of our lives; the kind Mac Sledge found from his wife and new son. Such are the tender mercies of grace.

+Scott

For months on end, we had a broken wooden HVAC floor register in our kitchen. It was a real safety hazard. Because the wooden slats were shattered, one of our dogs could’ve had her paw go through and get stuck, or even worse, severely damage her leg. It was also a trip hazard for humans. So, I’d be in the kitchen, see the broken register and say to myself: “I should do something about that.” You see, in the division of labor in our household, I’m the “fixit guy” (no one wants me cooking, trust me on that). Kelly never complained I wasn’t doing my job. She just took a flat plastic pot holder and placed it over the broken register. That worked except when the HVAC kicked in, the air coming out of the register would blow the pot holder off the gaping hole. But I never got around to replacing the register for well over six months. It was hardly a big deal to fix it. All I had to do was measure the opening, go to Home Depot, buy a new one, and install it. It was classic “work avoidance,” the kind psychologists write about.

White people (like me) in our country are suffering from classic work avoidance when it comes to racism. We see it in the incarceration rates and the police shootings. We see it in the inequality of our schools. We hear it, most disturbingly, coming out of the mouths of some of our most prominent elected leaders. And when we do, we cringe and say: “I should do something about that.” But then we don’t. When psychologists address work avoidance, they see it as a problem rooted in anxiety. We see the work we have to do, but since it makes us anxious, we just avoid doing it. Of course, that doesn’t work. We even know it won’t work, yet we avoid addressing the problem anyway. This avoidance behavior actually makes matters worse, raising our anxiety even more, not to mention our feelings of guilt and shame for our avoidance behavior.

That explains why so many white people don’t do anything about our racism. And it also explains why racism is so persistent. It just won’t go away as long as we avoid actually addressing it for the problem it is. Some of the avoidance behavior I hear sounds like this: “I don’t see people’s color” or “my family didn’t own slaves so it’s not my problem” or “growing up, I never learned to hate.” While each of these may be partially true for some of us (although I’m skeptical), we live in a culture inbred with policies and practices that assume white superiority. When we refuse to recognize this inherent reality, we give ourselves permission to avoid our work.

I admit waking up to the reality of my complicity in racism isn’t a pleasant experience. When our work avoidance on this finally hits home, we can still become paralyzed by the enormity of the problem, so we do things to make us feel better. We read books about racism. We watch documentaries describing racism. We go to a Civil Rights museum. We vote for people who speak against racism. We do these things hoping we can feel better about ourselves. But racism isn’t about how we feel. It’s about how our social, political, and economic systems maintain racial inequality. Psychologists tell us that to overcome work avoidance we have to learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, recognize the real cost of avoidance, and then act. Covering the gaping hole of racism won’t solve the problem. That’s just work avoidance. We have to act.

+Scott

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. – President Lyndon B. Johnson

This past week the clergy of the Diocese of Georgia met for our semi-annual clergy conference. As has become our custom, we kept the discipline of the full Daily Office, hearing meditations offered at each liturgy by one of our colleagues. We met in plenary three times with Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta. Dr. Meeks, an Episcopalian and retired university professor, led us through important conversations around the long history of racism and the continued, persistent lie of white supremacy. As a white man that wasn’t easy to hear, but history is what it is. There’s no denying it happened (although some persist in denial just as others insist the Holocaust never happened). To be sure, we’ve made great strides, but the work of racial healing is far from complete. It can’t be until we end the continued injustices that African-Americans experience. When I was a boy, I was sure we’d have done so by the time I was an old man. Now I can only hope my children will see the day.

After the white supremacist mob and march in Charlottesville in August 2017, I wrote about how I had seen other white people look uncomfortable when they saw those messengers of white supremacy, but also nodding their heads affirmatively to much of their political message about immigrants and other non-white people. And I asked then: Can we really separate the message from the messenger?” I concluded that eCrozier with this: “It’s time for white people to look in the mirror and tell ourselves the truth. We don’t have a problem with religious or ethnic minorities in our culture. We have a white person problem. And white people, especially those of us who call ourselves by the name of Christ, must be determined and truthful enough to fix it.”

Many white people I encounter don’t want to see this as our problem. And that makes some sense from the perspective of evolutionary biology. Joshua Greene in his book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, points out that as human minds evolved over the millennia in tribal life, we became cognitively wired to defend our tribe from other tribes. As a result, we’ll accept the truth of new information about our tribe only if it’s consistent with what we already believe to be true. Likewise, we’ll see our positions as objective and accurate while labeling other positions as biased and false. In fact, Greene argues, we tend to dismiss such challenging information without giving it any due consideration.

Is it any wonder then that white people don’t want to admit what we have done and what we continue to do? We dismiss such knowledge without even considering it – it’s just too painful to contemplate. But we must if we want to be healed and if we want to see our communities healed. Facing the truth takes courage. It takes the willingness to be forgiven and to forgive ourselves. Fortunately, we’re blessed with a Savior who has shown us how to do just that. With God’s help, we can do this.

+Scott

We’re in the shadow of the Cross on Good Friday. So, we should have no lingering presumptions about our selfishness and self-centeredness. If we have presumptions, then they’re at best half-truths. To be sure, we aren’t always selfish and self-centered, but we are all too often to deny the truth. In our Prayer Book confession, we admit: “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” Thus, God’s decision for the Cross overturns any pretense we might have about justifying ourselves based on a claim of our own righteousness. And yet, we persist, don’t we?

We seek to prove to God, to others, and, maybe most of all, to ourselves that we’ve earned everything. Whatever we’ve achieved in the world, we’d like to believe it comes from our own hard work and cleverness. That’s the line we’re given by our culture and we put our faith in it. We work hard in school, start a career, and do all the things our culture expects. We strive for success, pursue the American Dream, all the while, as David Brooks points out, we’re engaged in “reputation management,” worried about what others think of us, how we rank among them, and try “to win the victories the ego enjoys.” All this striving operates under the mistaken notion, again as Brooks points out, that “I can make myself happy. If I achieve excellence, lose more weight, follow this self-improvement technique, fulfillment will follow.” Many people commit their entire lives to chasing this assumption, daily grinding away in this false promise, expecting they’ll receive an appropriate return on their investment.

For those of us, however, who’ve been given a bit of Divine Luck, we’ve learned that chasing after such applause, or seeking the approval of others, or achieving “success” is, as St Paul writes, nothing but “rubbish” (Philippians 3:8). Such an epiphany can come seemingly out of the blue or it can result from a hard experience: a huge professional failure, a personal humiliation, or a life-threatening illness. However it comes, if we’re divinely lucky enough to perceive it, then we’ll see it for the gift it truly is. Whatever illusions we had before about life’s purpose will seem so unimportant. We’ll recognize the promise our culture makes is false. It’s in this “breaking” of our illusions about what life is meant to be that we can then live the “abundant life” Jesus promises (John 10:10).

If grinding out success, seeking the applause of others, and needing to justify ourselves is about, as Brooks notes, “building up the ego and defining the self,” then this “breaking” I name is, again in Brooks words, about “shedding the ego and dissolving the self.” When that happens, when our life is turned upside down (see Jesus’s words to Peter in John 21:18), when our illusions about ourselves are mercifully shattered, then we’re finally ready to sit at the foot of the Cross, trust in Jesus, and see him as he truly is; the savior we so desperately need. That’s when we’ll know it’s also time to get up from the foot of the cross and bear our own (Matthew 16:24-26). We can do that, because even though it’s Friday, we know Sunday is coming when He is risen!

+Scott