The eCrozier

We gave up cable TV years ago, not for any other reason than we weren’t watching it. So, on Wednesday morning while getting ready to fly from northern Virginia to Tennessee for church and seminary gatherings, I turned on the Weather Channel in my hotel room to see coverage of Hurricane Michael. I had no idea how many things of which I needed to be afraid. Fortunately, cable TV was there to help me be afraid.

To be sure, a hurricane the strength of Michael should make us all exercise prudence and all of us should pray for and help, as we’re able, those in harm’s way. But the ginning up of the storm and the drama of the cable “presenters” (some of whom are real scientists, I assume) would certainly scare the heck out of people watching who were even only slightly inclined to phobias. The irony of this coverage is that most people who are in harm’s way weren’t watching cable TV like I was. They were too busy evacuating.

And that’s just the actual coverage of severe weather. The advertisers who pay to have their commercials run during media coverage of hurricanes certainly know their “marks.” In an hour of my “off and on” watching the Weather Channel, I learned about all sorts of ailments and diseases I could have (or a loved one of mine could have!) and the pharmaceutical treatment that would save the day. Everything from skin rashes to bladder leakage to high cholesterol should send me running to my doctor to allay my fears.

And then there was the commercial for home generators that’ll give me “peace of mind” in case of “severe weather or terrorist attack.” The commercial showed older couples (all of whom were white, by the way) who looked content and peaceful knowing they had their generator when the worse (whatever that may be) would happen. One couple in the advertisement even claimed it would be their “saving grace.” That’s one, powerful generator! Who would have thought that any generator had that much power?

Now, I’m not suggesting we abandon prudence or caution in dealing with severe weather or medical needs. That would be silly. After all, we have a generator at Diocesan House and I hope all of us appropriately take the medicines our doctors prescribe for us (although many of our fellow citizens in rural Georgia increasingly can’t afford them or even have access to a doctor to prescribe them, but that’s a story for another time).

I am suggesting, however, that we be aware of the media manipulation in which we’re saturated for the express purpose of keeping us watching (so we can see all those ads addressing our fears ranging from body odor to heart attacks). I found myself being sucked into the TV coverage believing that if I just watched through the next set of commercials, then I’d learn something new and important about the coming hurricane. After about the third segment, when no new “news” was actually being conveyed, I turned off the TV. The hurricane was coming. It was going to be devastating. It was time to do two much more important things: Check in with my people in southwest Georgia and then to pray the Daily Office with special intention for those in the path of Michael.

+Scott

This power of memory is vast, my God. It’s a great and infinite mystery. Who has fathomed its depths? – St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10

Augustine believed our capacity to remember was a profound gift for our souls. After all our central act on the Lord’s Day is taking the bread and cup so we may remember the saving act of Jesus on the cross. And yet, Augustine’s own memory of his life made him a mystery even to himself, because he knew that we humans curate our memories. What do we choose to remember? What do we choose to forget? Are our choices of what we remember conscious or an exercise in self-deception? Augustine wondered about his memory and questioned his own capacity to remember the events of his life faithfully.

As I remember my life, I’m aware that my sin clouds my memory. But, there are some events that are seared into it, even though I don’t remember every detail: The time as a teenager, out of fear and shame, I denied being my father’s son; the time in college when I joined in, rather than stopped, the ugly, public ridicule of an unpopular fraternity brother; or the time as a young adult when I looked the other way as an acquaintance stole candy bars from a convenience store. The shame of each event is still with me even though I have confessed my sins and I know God has forgiven me. This is to say that such powerful memories stay with us as if they only happened yesterday.

Over the 35 years of my ordained ministry I’ve heard stories from female parishioners about the sexual indignities they’ve endured. Some didn’t make them deathly afraid, but those events still contributed to their suffering. Other stories shared with me were beyond indignity. Those were fearful, physical assaults where the man, exercising greater strength, made it clear who had the power. They ranged from a twisting of an arm to full-blown sexual assault. I’ve learned over the years to believe the women. In all my parish and now diocesan experience, I recall only one instance of a false accusation. Every other one was true. The data on false accusations of sexual misconduct or assault bear this out. Such false accusations, it turns out, are as rare as voter fraud.

And yet, most incidents like the ones described above have gone untold (and unreported to law enforcement). And this is where, I believe, Augustine’s complex appreciation of memory comes in. Victims don’t trust their own memories. The behavior perpetrated on them is so reprehensible that they think they must be mistaken. Or, in some women’s minds, they somehow think it’s their fault. And even worse, when their memories are clear, there’s a fear and resignation that those in power, whether ecclesial or political, are incapable of exercising empathy and will shamefully protect their own. Sadly, that has been all too true. The women who overcome such fear, face those in power, and speak the truth about what happened to them leave me in awe of their courage.

Our memories are vast, full of joy, pain, and sometimes fear. We should hold on to each memory, because in doing so, we can lay each one at the foot of the cross so our memories, like our lives, can be redeemed by the wide embrace of Jesus.

In Augustine’s Confessions, he prays to God:
Noverim me. Noverim te. Let me know myself. Let me know you.

Augustine is right when he connects our self-knowledge and self-awareness with our capacity to know God. And getting to know ourselves in all our complexities is a necessary precursor for the faithful exercise of our vocations in the church. Without self-awareness and self-knowledge, we can’t know God and we can’t really know the Good News of Jesus. And to honestly know ourselves, we must embrace both our accomplishments and our failures, which is to say our humanity in all its truthfulness, glory, and defeat. Frederick Buechner writes: Our lives are full of moments in which for better or for worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us, and around us, and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God, too.

If you don’t regularly read Mockingbird on the Interweb, I hope you will because it’ll help you connect the Good News of Jesus with the reality of our human experience in this culture. Recently, Duo Dickinson, who’s been an architect for 40 years, wrote an agonizingly honest piece simply entitled, Failure. He writes: I know that I am owed nothing. If you play, sometimes you lose. What is harder to accept is that for all living things, physical failure is inevitable. We die. And the good and bad “things” that result from all the efforts are not around much after us. Our children will die, too, and their children. Everything I have written will be forgotten. Most architects can’t relate to the truth that everything built gets scraped off this earth in the next Ice Age. So, Dickinson continues, nothing really counts, so chill. Have another drink. Binge watch. Eat the bacon…. No. Stuff matters beyond failure. Even beyond success. I just wish I felt the love of Jesus so deeply that I could know that grace was all that really mattered, and that love is the only thing that lived beyond my death. But, like Groucho [Marx], I am not sure I could join any club that would have me [as a member].

As I listen to the voices in our culture right now, I hear a collective longing for a story that lifts us up above our divisions and self-deceptions helps us imagine something we long to become. Some in our culture feel trapped in stories of nostalgia that glorify the past and demonize the people who they perceive are bringing us down. Others feel left out of optimistic tales that imagine things will be “great again.” People want, it seems, a better story than the one in which they currently live. We have that story in the Good News of Jesus, which both confesses our deep brokenness while envisioning what Dr. King called the “beloved community.”

To lead the church in such times, we need to pray to God:
Noverim me. Noverim te. “Let me know myself. Let me know you.”

Johnny Cash was one of the most self-aware people we’ve had the privilege to witness on the public stage in our lifetimes. If you don’t read The Bitter Southerner, you should. Our own John Hayes, history professor at Augusta University and sometime vestryman at St Augustine’s Augusta, wrote a brilliant piece recently on how Cash expressed a deep theology of self-knowledge and self-awareness in his music. It’s at once hopeful as well as honest. In his music, Cash explored the darker side of our humanity while always hoping for God’s redemption. Hayes writes: Cash approached the American experience and Christianity from the darker side. He was a Southerner who wrestled publicly with national and religious identity. His music presented the American story from the rough underside and Christian faith from the ragged margins… He was a Christian who didn’t cast stones, a patriot who didn’t play the flag card…The “ordinary” people in [Cash’s] story-songs are heroic: Their hard, desperate struggles and human longings have dignity and honor. But they don’t win. Cash honors them and puts their stories at the center of the national experience, but there is no victory celebration. The rough reality is heroic defeat, not the American dream.

“Heroic defeat.” Might we be willing to name that in ourselves and embrace it as our vocation? What separates “heroic defeat” from the extremes of self-pity and self-righteousness is our spiritual practice of staying near Jesus on his cross and trusting him to grab us by the wrists and yank us into the new life of his resurrection. Such a spiritual practice guards against our tendency to wallow in the self-pity, you know what I mean, how we’re not properly appreciated for all our hard work for the church; that we’re over-worked and under-paid, etc. Or, our tendency toward self-righteousness, when we simply can’t believe other people don’t rightly see the injustice and sins of the world just the way we do. My favorite New Yorker cartoon of all time has a clergy person in clericals sitting at the breakfast table and saying to their spouse: “Last night I had the most wonderful dream. I dreamt God agreed with me on everything!”

Lord knows, we need one another for such a spiritual practice. If we’re not regularly meeting in colleague relationships, then we’re the wrong kind of fool. If we’re not availing ourselves of the support of a coach who will hold us accountable for what we say we wish to do, then we’re the wrong kind of fool. If we’re not reflecting on our lives with a seasoned therapist or spiritual director, then we’re the wrong kind of fool.

But what’s the right kind of fool? To answer that, we return to Brother Buechner. Speaking to a seminary graduating class about their call to parish ministry, he said this:
It’s a queer business that you have chosen or that has chosen you. It’s a business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart. It’s a hard and chancy business whose risks are as great even as its rewards. Above all else, perhaps, it is a crazy business. It is a foolish business. It is a crazy and foolish business to work for Christ in a world where most people most of the time don’t give a hoot in hell whether you work for him or not. It is crazy and foolish to offer a service that most people most of the time think they need like a hole in the head. As long as there are bones to set and drains to unclog and children to tame and boredom to survive, we need doctors and plumbers and teachers and people who play the musical saw; but when it comes to the business of Christ and his church, how unreal and irrelevant a service that seems even, and at times especially, to the ones who are called to work at it.

Noverim me. Noverim te. God, let me know myself. Let me know you.And let us embrace our heroic defeat together for that’s the way of our Great High Priest, Jesus.

+Scott

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup. ― Wendell Berry

It turns out that our experience of God’s natural world boosts our immune system, reduces our anxiety, and makes us less likely to engage in anti-social behavior. Smart people have been studying these correlations for years and each new study replicates these positive results. One study of residents in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, a series of public housing units, showed significant social breakdown in buildings without trees and grass around them. In residential units with lots of greenery around them, just the opposite occurred. Residents reported, and police records confirmed, much more social cohesion and less crime.

Other researchers have studied urban vacant lots. Some were left “as is” with junk, garbage, and no greenery. These showed no change in the crime statistics in that block. Others were spruced up, trees were planted, grass was grown, etc. When the researchers tracked the difference, they discovered that in the block with the spruced-up lots police records showed violent crime dropped 9.1 percent. So, for very little expense and intervention, crime drops considerably when people are exposed to creation’s beauty.

Another study in London concerned neighborhood-based pharmacies. They scored each pharmacy based on how green it was around the pharmacy, how many people lived in that neighborhood, and how many people each pharmacy served. They then looked into the kinds of prescriptions, such as anxiety disorder and depression medications each pharmacy filled. Then the study compared people of the same economic class who received such prescriptions. They discovered a consistent, inverse pattern: Less greenery in the neighborhood equaled more anxiety disorder and depression prescriptions filled.
We have something in our bodies that biologists call “natural killer cells,” which are really a good thing. They kill bad cells and serve to boost our body’s immune system. Further research shows that after spending a three-day weekend in a forest preserve our natural killer cells are boosted on average by 50 percent. A similar three-day weekend in a nice urban area doesn’t do anything for our natural killer cells. Even a month after that nature weekend our natural killer cells are still boosted by 24-25% above our baseline. And here’s another interesting finding: it seems such a boost (albeit a more modest one) even occurs when people simply view videos of God’s natural world.

So, it seems, our emotional, physical, and social health is directly correlated to being in and/or exposed to the beauty of God’s natural world. That has led me to another insight that might explain things more. Congress does its work in a chamber that has no view of nature. I propose we relocate these anti-social, anxious, and dysfunctional people to the middle of Rock Creek Park, which is a huge, beautiful park smack dab in the middle of our nation’s capital. Problem solved. Soon our national anxiety and social dysfunction will be over, naturally.

+Scott

I love baseball for many reasons, but mainly because baseball is binary. You’re either “out” or “safe.” The ball is either “fair” or “foul.” The pitch is either a “strike” or a “ball.” You either “win” or “lose,” unless it rains, which I’ve been praying for every day this summer on the city where my Cincinnati Reds have a game. You simply can’t lose if it’s a “rain-out.” There’s something oddly comforting to the human psyche about all things binary. There’s no gray area. It’s either one or the other. Or is it? To quote Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham, summing up the deep mysteries of life: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” So, there’s a third possibility. It’s trinary.

Now I realize that one of baseball’s great enjoyments is disagreeing with the umpire’s call, like with balls and strikes or with a runner’s attempt to steal a base. “How could that be a strike? It was too low!” or, “there’s no way he was out, the 2nd baseman tagged him after his foot was already on the bag!” That’s been part of the game since my Cincinnati Reds (the first professional baseball team, by the way) began playing in 1869. With the advent of advanced technology, we can now have our arguments slowed down videoframe by videoframe so we can be outraged over an umpire’s questionable call. But, of course, it’s all questionable, isn’t it? Still, the umpire makes the call. And it’s the umpire’s call to make, not ours. Baseball fans take that for granted even as we conclude a person with significant vision impairment could’ve made a better call than that umpire. Yet, we still take it for granted because it would be impossible for baseball to work any other way. Someone, like an umpire, has to declare what “is.”

It occurs to me that even non-baseball fans like to argue with God the same way baseball nuts like me argue with umpires. We question God’s judgment on a host of topics simply by asking questions like: “Why did this happen?” or, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” or, “Why do the evil (Yankees) prosper?” As Hurricane Florence does her damage to the Carolinas and beyond, inevitably those “why” questions are asked. In our worst moments, we like to think we’d be a better umpire than God. We all long for the clarity of the binary (good vs. evil, Reds vs. Cubs, etc.), insisting one either is saved (safe!) or damned (out!). It’s how we envision the game of life should be played, at least if we made the rules of the game.

God, however, doesn’t play our little games. In Jesus, in his life, on his cross, and in his resurrection, God has made it clear who the umpire is (hint: not us) and what the eternal “call” is (“Grace,” the merciful forgiveness of the world’s sins). God isn’t binary, and yet we continuingly project our need for binary clarity on to God as if God were just like us (another hint: God isn’t, read Psalm 50:21). Rather, God’s modus operendi in Jesus takes our agency to win or lose “the game” out of our hands and places it on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross. So, God’s grace is something we should “take for granted.” When we “take for granted” what God’s done in Jesus, we’re not trivializing his atoning work. On the contrary, we’re receiving and honoring God’s “call” on the “play” and we’re humbly acknowledging that “sometimes it rains” grace even on the Cubs. God has declared a trinary “rain-out” for us all through the deluge of God’s grace.

Psychologist Mina Cikara at Harvard recruited baseball fans of the Red Sox and Yankees for an experiment. She had them watch videos of both teams while they were lying in an activated MRI scanner. Her results showed that fans of each team experienced pleasure when their team did well, which isn’t surprising. But the results also showed they experienced just as much pleasure when their rival team did poorly. The part of the brain called the ventral striatum lit up equally in both scenarios. In explaining these results, Dr. Cikara said: “You (the baseball fan) haven’t benefited materially in any way. You only feel pleasure because it feels good to watch your rival fail.” Oh my! What about SEC football, could it possibly apply there as well? All I can say is: “Go Dawgs!”

Dr. Cikara’s research didn’t end there. Two weeks later she sent the study participants a survey inquiring how likely it’d be that they’d engage in different aggressive behaviors. She described the results from that survey this way: “And the thing that we found that was really exciting for us as academics, but probably bad for the world, was that those people who exhibited that much more ventral striatal activity when watching their rival fail two weeks earlier in the scanner were the same people who then told us they would be that much more likely to threaten, heckle and hit a rival fan.” Uh oh!

But still, that’s only about sport’s rivalries. It’s all just good fun, right? Only a little schadenfreude being exercised. Well, in turns out, the same behavior patterns are exhibited beyond sports. Once a rival is identified in any context and the ventral striatal is activated, threatening and violent behavior often results. We’ve seen when at political rallies journalists are branded “the enemy of the people,” they become targets for violence. Many now have to have a full-time security detail. We witnessed that in Charlottesville a year ago when a white-supremacist, his ventral striatal raging from the hateful words spewed out, drove his car into the enemy (actually his fellow citizens) crowd. And a few years ago in Israel and Gaza, as rockets were fired in both directions, I saw video of people sitting in their homes watching it on TV. Both Israelis and Gazans were cheering the death and destruction inflicted on the other side. War as spectator sport, so it goes.

For us to address this personally, we must first name it as a reality, not only for other people, but for ourselves. It’s fine when it’s light-hearted as in when the Stupid Cubs lose to my Reds (“stupid” isn’t really in their official name, which I imagine you knew already), but beyond such fun it can become deadly. How are we participating in, or maybe just condoning, such behavior in ourselves or in others? Like in AA, the first step is to acknowledge we have a problem and then turn it over to a ‘higher power.” We can’t expect to help others change their behavior until we address it in ourselves. So, how are our words and actions directed at people with whom we disagree (maybe significantly) leading us to behavior that might turn violent in ourselves or in others? This isn’t just a practical concern for our common life. It’s also about our soul-wellness as we address it in our daily prayers. We should ask God to calm our ventral striatal. If you can’t remember that neuro-science term, then that’s OK. God knows exactly where it is.

Charles Mann’s insightful book, The Wizard and the Prophet, recalls two historical figures that early-on addressed the environmental crisis we’re now facing. These two people, William Vogt and Norman Bourlag, both saw the impending crisis and worked from different perspectives to address it. Vogt was a prophet sounding the alarm of environmental degradation, and like Jeremiah of old, warned us to turn back before it was too late. Bourlag saw the crisis of insufficient agricultural yields, and due to climate change, knew they wouldn’t be enough to feed the growing population of the earth. So, he found a way through technological “wizardry” to dramatically increase yields, thus forestalling what would’ve been massive starvation throughout the world.

In looking at these two historical figures and the movements they led and the work they accomplished, we might reach conclusions based on what we currently prefer as the right way to go. But I hope we won’t jump to such conclusions too quickly. We need both voices and movements if we’re to address faithfully the numerous challenges facing the human family. We need “prophets” who wake us up to the realities we face, even shock us so we move out of our lethargy and take action. And, we also need “wizards” who will see that same reality and then work to discover what specifically needs changing to make a difference for the common good.

This is important not just for the environment, but for the Church as well. In the last generation we’ve had various “prophets” calling us to wake up. Some told us that we needed to abandon core tenets of the Christian faith if we were ever going to connect with modern people. Other “prophets” said we needed to “double down” on “old time religion,” which would lead today’s people back to church. Both prophetic voices have a word for us, but our failure to heed the wisdom coming from each voice has diminished our ability to act faithfully. There’s a similar dynamic among the Church’s “wizards” over the last generation. They’ve called us to change our techniques for evangelism, church growth, and congregational development. They each claim that if we’d just make their preferred changes, then we’d see positive outcomes. Each of these “wizards” have a word for us as well. But like with the “prophets,” many of these “wizards” get locked into their own silos and can’t learn from or appreciate the wisdom in what others, coming from a different point of view, are saying.

If we’re wise, we won’t choose one voice over the other. We’ll recognize the need for the voices and wisdom of the “prophets” and “wizards” as we grope forward in these highly confusing times. As a Church, we haven’t been wholeheartedly open to and generously curious of the voices that don’t readily agree with what we think, so we’ve remained stuck in the false, binary choice of the tired (and tiring) liberal and conservative tribalism. Rather than immediately formulating a rebuttal to a “prophet” or a “wizard” who has a message with which we disagree, might we listen to what they’re saying and take the time needed to test its wisdom? With such an open stance and approach, we’ll also be a role model for all who are living in our harried, confused, and anxious larger culture. That would be a much-needed gift for us to offer.

+Scott

Scientists are studying the nature of morality more and more these days even as our culture moves farther away from morality’s former theological grounding. A recent study in the journal “Social Psychology and Personality Science” bears this out. Even though Ben Tappin & Ryan McKay, researchers at the University of London, entitled their study “The Illusion of Moral Superiority,” the study revealed less about how we view ourselves as morally superior to others (and we do, by the way) and more about how unmoored we are from any sense of a “Higher Power” when it comes to determining what constitutes moral behavior, whether in ourselves or in others.

Tappin & McKay write: “Most people consider themselves paragons of virtue; yet few individuals perceive this abundance of virtue in others.” Ok, but I knew that already. I actually that learned years ago…from Jesus. He said we’re all hypocrites about morality. To wit: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5). So, the study results were hardly revelatory. The question is: Why was that news to Tappin & McKay and other researchers studying morality? They claim the results of their study show there’s an evolutionary basis for this behavior; that it’s evolutionarily advantageous to perceive others as acting less morally than we do. They say it’s about group self-protection. Our Church’s catechism tells us that such ignorant behavior is simply part of our fallen human nature. In some ways, I don’t think it matters if we discover evolution is the source of this behavior. It’s hypocritical nonetheless.

And, here’s a further rub, as the morally-compromised Hamlet might say. Tappin & McKay also argue morality itself is a vague concept. They contend: “You can have one person who cares very deeply for their friends and family and would go to the ends of the earth for these people. And yet they don’t give a dime to foreign charity. And then you’ve got another person who spends their entire life donating money overseas, yet in their interpersonal life, they don’t treat their family members very well. In those cases, how do you compare who’s more moral? It seems quite impossible to judge and it’s just at the mercy of people’s preferences.”

I find their statement absurd. The first person they reference is behaving morally when she shows care for her friends and family and not when she shows disregard for others. Likewise, the other person is behaving morally when he donates money to those in need, but not when he treats his family poorly. In this example, why is it so hard to see neither one as “more moral” than the other? Not one of us is consistently moral or immoral. We’re “mixed bags” who regularly prove ourselves to be the hypocrites we are. That’s self-evident simply by reading the news each day. Some of us struggle with that obvious truth because we no longer live in a culture that’s even remotely grounded in a sense of what’s moral. We were never grounded in it deeply and the news this week exposes our ongoing inability to recognize immorality when we see it.

When it comes to sharing the Good News of God’s mercy and forgiveness through the merits and mediation of Jesus, we may be up against more than just our own hesitancy or lethargy. We may have cultural and evolutionary headwinds against us. Put simply: we may have the wrong kind of God. Ongoing research now shows that fealty to a religion is more related to the fear of a wrathful God than it is to the Triune God we worship who abounds in grace and steadfast love.

Let me explain. According to evolutionary biologists, as humans evolved we lived in extended, tribal families. In that context, there was wide knowledge of everyone else. If someone broke a group norm, like theft, then the group would mete out consequences. As humans developed larger societies, this intimate justice was no longer possible, so social psychologists like Azim Shariff argue that humans invented a divine punisher, namely, God, who would enforce the social norms. “It’s an effective stick to deter people from immoral behavior,” says Shariff. Religion, seen this way, is a cultural innovation that was used to norm behavior, limit immorality, and help humans survive as a species.

Shariff and his research team tested to see whether believing in a punitive God versus believing in a forgiving God made a difference in the likelihood that someone would cheat. They had students take a math task where they made it tempting to cheat. They also collected data on each participant’s view of God. Their study showed that the more a participant believed God was punitive, then the less likely they were to cheat. The opposite was also true: the more a participant believed God was forgiving, the more likely it was that they would cheat. Shariff summarizes his contention this way: “The societies that have been able to grow largest with the religions that they believe in have had this idea of supernatural punishment at their core because it is an effective deterrent. It does compel people rationally to act in ways which will avoid the wrath of a punitive God who can punish you quite severely.”

That’s the evangelistic dilemma. If Shariff is right, then in order to lead people to God and grow the church we’ll need to literally scare the Hell out of them. It seems people need to have their behavior controlled by a divine authority figure (and probably a human one as well) and, without such, they’ll think God is a pushover, an easy sucker for a forgiveness story. Or, seeing it from another way: Could it be that people now widely believe God is merciful, so why bother with church or faith because it won’t help them avoid eternal damnation since God is so forgiving? Naw. I don’t buy it. While I grant these researchers their point, using religion as a means of controlling bad behavior isn’t the truth revealed in Jesus. In fact, the truth of Jesus reveals that God meets us where we are (and just the way we are) in our bad behavior, our sin, and chooses on the cross to forgive us anyway. That’s the most amazing, counter-cultural news ever told and most people I run into don’t believe this Good News. We just need to keep telling that story no matter how popular or how well/not well it shapes people’s behavior. It may go against what psychology and group theory tells us, but all we have is that truth.

+Scott

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. – Niels Bohr

I’ve always loved this Niels Bohr quote, not only because it’s amusingly true, but because it sounds like something Yogi Berra would’ve said and not Bohr, who was a famous theoretical physicist. The future, indeed, is hard to predict, as is most anything dealing with human beings. We humans are complicated creatures and our choices (and the motives behind them) aren’t always easily understood or explained. It’s tempting for us to describe another person in over-simplistic terms or reduce an explanation of that person to one that’s purely binary: good or evil. Our own human experience, if we’re paying attention to ourselves, should caution us about such an over simplification of any other person (or ourselves!) and we should be equally cautious in reducing their whole life to just one descriptor.

Enter Paul Manafort. As I have read various news sources about his current trial on charges of tax evasion, money laundering, and working for a hostile government, I’ve wondered about his childhood. Did his mother and father love him? Did he feel and experience their love? As an adult, has he had friends or just people with whom he does business (there’s a difference)? How did he get to this place sitting in a courtroom facing such charges? Was it a series of small, moral shortcuts with each one making the next one easier? He’s been a lobbyist for 38 years working for many Republican candidates, but also regularly working for foreign leaders many of whom have (or had) unsavory reputations for serious human rights abuses (e.g., Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and most recently, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine). When he was representing and promoting these foreign leaders to our government, did he not care about the way they treated their own people? Was it only about his paycheck regardless of the human consequences? Is his morality only based on a ruthless social Darwinism? I’m really curious about him.

The Washington Post writer Robin Givhan isn’t curious. She’s clearly made up her mind. In the Post’s Arts & Entertainment section on August 2, her headline read: “Paul Manafort’s ostrich jacket pretty much sums up Paul Manafort.” In that opinion piece she wrote: “The jacket is an atrocity — both literal and symbolic. It’s a garment thick with hubris and intent.” Now, I realize this is an opinion piece and not news coverage, but Ms. Givhan has reduced Paul Manafort’s life to one gaudy jacket. He has apparently done a lot of unsavory, repugnant things in his life, but a tacky jacket alone, no matter how atrocious, can’t sum up a person. (Full Disclosure: I once purchased a new pair of shoes my children still believe to this day are an “atrocity”).

Paul Manafort is an easy target for those who need to feel moral superiority. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending his behavior. If he’s guilty of what he’s accused of, then he should spend significant time in prison. But he’s more than an ostrich jacket. He’s still a human being, albeit one with whom I have significant moral differences. And yet, Jesus died for his sins as he died for ours. Let’s not forget that.

+Scott