FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, WHAT’S WRONG WITH SINGING “KUM BA YAH”?

Posted on June 17, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

There are times in life when about all we can do is cry out our needs and hope that, somehow, somewhere, someone will help us. When I was a teen-ager, what drove this home especially powerfully was a song that my church group sang together every Sunday evening.

And yes, all you debunkers and cynics out there, we sang it in a big circle, holding hands.

It went like this: Someone’s praying … crying … singing … Lord, come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here. It’s about desperate need, and about calling on God in praise and hope.

For reasons I cannot fathom, this poignant song has become in some circles an object of ridicule. Disenchanted justice-seekers and peace-makers are now fond of asking, sneeringly, “What do you want us to do — just stand around, hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah?”

Well, yes, every last verse of it. And don’t be afraid to shed a tear while you’re doing it.

Who would have thought that Kum Ba Yah would ever be looked upon as a call to passivity in the face of confrontations, conflicts, and demands for courageous action? Or as a phony expression of solidarity that nobody who is real really feels?

Certainly not Pete Seeger, or Joan Baez, or Peter/Paul/and Mary, or The Seekers, or Raffi, or civil rights marchers, or church campers, or … In those circles, the song got sung with meaning, and it raised spirits, time and time again. And in my circles, it still does. It is number 494 in my denomination’s hymnbook, praise the Lord.

The faith which Kum Ba Yah expresses has a stark simplicity about it: Lord, we need you. Come to us quickly. Please.  If you’re uncomfortable acknowledging that this is the rock-bottom situation that every human being on earth eventually must face, then you probably won’t sing it.

Maybe it is because the song’s message is so unmistakable that singing it gets to some people the wrong way. At least, to those who still believe that the world can be bent to their own will and that people who doubt this should be shoved aside.

What Kum Ba Yah expresses from first to last is the trust to ask things of God, and the expectation of being heard, understood, and responded to with compassion. Who doesn’t need a faith like that?

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THE CULTURE OF COVETOUSNESS

Posted on June 9, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

A man just released from prison said to me, “You know, it’s bad enough that I took whatever I wanted from whoever had it. But what’s worse is that I still have the want.” He expressed well what coveting has come to mean today, in polite society as well as in lock-ups.

Basically, what the Tenth Commandment tries to get people over is yearning for things they don’t need and shouldn’t have. Coveting is a spiritually deadly mixture of greed, envy, and lust, with gluttony thrown in for good measure. What makes it deadly is that it compromises the ability to think clearly about what people have the right to expect of themselves and others.

Coveting is not a failing just of individuals. It can become the besetting defect of whole societies, especially when they teach that success in life is there for the taking, that everyone begins the quest as equals, and that failure is the just dessert of not working hard enough.

In our own society, covetousness is eroding both our passion and our ability to ensure that resources, opportunities, and wealth are distributed fairly to all. In some quarters, it has already hardened into a mind-set that when scarcity looms, the truly wise should take care of themselves first.

The signs of a culture of covetousness are all around us. One is the escalating rhetoric about what others are not doing about the world’s poor, sick, demoralized, and despairing. This rhetoric turns especially vicious when it links up with the increasingly widespread attitude that it is the responsibility of “ these people” to improve their condition all on their own.

A more blatant sign of our covetousness is the increasing reluctance of the wealthier among us to do more to enhance the well-being of the not-so-wealthy. The “city set on a hill” once envisioned as our rightful place in the world has all but become a high rent district closed to all but the most privileged.

Is it society’s fault that the man I mentioned at the beginning of this essay came to look at everything so despairingly? Of course it isn’t. His cynical perspective is one that he has carefully nurtured all on his own. But it just may be society’s fault that he lacks a vision inspiring enough to make him want something better for himself and everybody else.

 

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MORALITY, FAITH, AND THE EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTIVE PILL

Posted on June 2, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

I wish we could all somehow forget the phrase, “morning after pill.” It always calls to mind the what of the after, which is nobody else’s business.

Sometimes, though, it becomes a lot of peoples’ business. One time, I heard a pharmacist tell a young woman, within earshot of everyone in his department, that his conscience prohibited his filling her prescription for it.

Three things were very disturbing to me about what this pharmacist did. The first was his throwing his customer’s privacy rights under the bus.

The second, I later determined, was what his “conscience” told him about the “emergency contraceptive pill” (ECP). For him, it was an abortion pill, like Mifeprex, which causes the uterus to contract and expel a fertilized egg. He should have known better.

ECPs act only to delay ovulation and fertilization, or to block the implantation of a fertilized egg in the wall of the uterus. Since, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a woman is considered pregnant only after implantation, blocking the implantation serves the purpose of contraception, not of abortion.

The third disturbing thing about the pharmacist’s very public action was that it cast aside a physician’s treatment decision (writing a prescription) for the sake of a personal belief about when human life begins, viz., at conception. About this opinion, he should have known that it is not the only one on the subject.

Many people believe, instead, that human life begins with either the first movement, or with the attainment of viability, in utero. Others believe that it begins with the first breath after delivery. And still others hold that it begins when a fertilized egg becomes definitively one embryo or more, a number of days following conception.

Still and all, there are important moral and religious questions posed by ECP technology. For surely the circumstances under which conception may occur are relevant to the moral and religious significance of decisions about making use of it.

Is a feared conception, for example, an outcome of a long-standing pattern of indifference to the consequences of sexual behavior at all? Or is it rather the result of a loving encounter between faithful lovers whose momentary passion overrode their usual cautions and preparations? What if it is evoked by a horrific experience of rape?

Appealing to religious dogmas will not get us far with questions like these.

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CHRISTIANS AND THE MAKING OF A JEWISH HOMELAND

Posted on May 26, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

Why is it that so many Christians support Jews’ returning to Israel to stay? And why would any Jew seek these Christians’ support for doing it?

I don’t have a good answer to the second question, because of the answer I have to give to the first. That answer goes like this: according to some Christians, when Jews the world over complete their journeys back to Israel, Jesus will meet them on the Mount of Olives. There, he will give them one final opportunity to confess him as their Messiah, and then God will bring the world to its long-prophesied, catastrophic end.

In other words, God has something very different in store for the Jewish people from what He has been promising them for millennia. This God is as much of a deceiver as the Christians are who are telling the Jews about him.

As I read the Bible, annihilation is precisely what God promised never to do again. However, we still have the freedom to do it ourselves.

If we do it, most likely it will be by inadvertently activating the law of unintended consequences. For example, we might bring it about by continuing to encourage Jewish settlements across a land, whose resources cannot possibly supply them.

For decades now, American foreign policy has included massive financial support of  Israel in the interest of maintaining a democratic presence in the Middle East. This makes at least a little better sense than supporting Israel in the interest of preparing ground for a coming world-destroyer.

Moments after I finished reading Simon Montefiore’s unforgettable book on Jerusalem, I conjured up a vision. In it, there were no walls between the now mutually respected states of Israel and Palestine. I walked through the Old City, now Palestine’s capital, to the Muslim-controlled Temple Mount, and then with Jewish friends there, I looked eastward to the Mount of Olives. On it were still more friends: Orthodox and secular Jews; Greek, Latin, Armenian, Ethiopian, and Coptic Christians; Sunni and Shiite Muslims; and religious inquirers I knew from all over the world.

They were all sharing food, hugs, scriptures, stories, hopes, and dreams. With a broad smile, a man standing next to me on the Temple Mount burst out that he couldn’t wait to join them. I introduced myself. Then, he told me his name was Jesus.

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GOD, WAL-MART, AND OUR SHOPPING CARTS

Posted on May 20, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

If God is on the side of big businesses, then Wal-Mart may be the most divinely favored among all of them. It’s now the nation’s largest company, having just surpassed Exxon.

But God, I think, isn’t on the side of big businesses, any more than he is on the side of making his followers rich. This is why Wal-Mart’s successes trouble me. As do those of the oil industry, but that’s a story for another time.

If you are looking for a good example of what is right and wrong about a consumption-driven society, you won’t find a better one than Wal-Mart. Once, the company was a prodigious creator of jobs. But it exploits those who struggle to stay in them. Once, it was a welcome addition to many declining communities. But it destroyed many of the small businesses that helped to make them communities in the first place.

For the past five years, Wal-Mart has opened an average of 90 stores per year. But it has reduced its work force almost 25%, underpays the ones who stay because they lack meaningful alternatives, and tells its customers to take what’s left on the shelves or go elsewhere. For customers in outlying areas, there may be no elsewhere. Wal-Mart has seen to that, too.

There are many questions worth asking about how Wal-Mart’s owners and leaders have achieved their successes over the years. One is whether the need for an economic jump- start in many of the communities which welcomed them justified subsidizing their stores by bartering away their future tax revenues. Too many community leaders began asking this question too late.

Another question is why workers, who help generate Wal-Mart’s profits, should continue to subsidize the company’s investors by accepting lower wages and benefits than they deserve? The company’s answer is that they do it to have a job at all. Should this answer be satisfactory to men and women of faith? I don’t think so.

The real problem with Wal-Mart is not just its own philosophy. It’s also with our demands that its stores supply us the goods we want from them at rock bottom prices, no matter what the costs are to the people who make them, ship them, stock them, rack them, and check them out for us. That’s a lot of bad philosophy for God to have to deal with.

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THE FUTURE WE WANTED FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN

Posted on May 12, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

All we ever wanted for them, we often said, was the freedom to pursue their own dreams. Or at least, our dreams, e.g.: education, meaningful work, a home, opportunities to get ahead, a safety net, a comfortable retirement — stuff like that.

In retrospect, it is easy to see what was wrong about what we wanted. For one thing, the value system on which it was based puts comfort rather than contribution first. What people get for themselves is valued more highly than what people give of themselves.

Most of the world’s religions and philosophies have had much to say about the futility of valuing things this way, but we went ahead and did it anyway. We still do.

Another thing that was wrong about wanting what we did was that it required heaps of self-delusion to give it even the appearance of being morally defensible. The overarching delusion was that we were as committed to ensuring other families’ comfort as we were to ensuring our own. If not the Good Society, ours would at least be a Nice Society in which we would help each other become more hedonistic than any of us could become all on our own.

Instead of either of these, however, the society we helped bring about was an apartheid-like society whose fault lines once ran between whites, native Americans, and blacks and now between the wages-deprived and the equities-surfeited.

Is there any way out of this morally degraded state into which we have allowed ourselves to fall? Not short of experiencing something like a conversion, I think.

Does this mean that changing things for the better is for all practical purposes forever beyond our reach? Not at all: what we need to do will be much easier on the far side of conversion than it can ever be in our present unregenerate state as a society.

Literally, the word “conversion” means a turning away from one set of values, toward another and better one. The values I have especially in mind call for a society whose last can become first and whose least are never lost. To build it, we will have to do some of the turning around ourselves. But we will also have to be open to being-turned-around. By what or by whom is one of the most important questions we can now ask.

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WHY “NATURAL” EVIL? THE BEGINNINGS OF AN ANSWER

Posted on May 5, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

Early in my faith-seeking, I realized how attractive the idea had become to me that the world was created with human beings especially in mind. Later on, my take on the sciences suggested giving up on the idea altogether. Contemplating doing so left me feeling angry and sad.

Then theology came along, and with it the encouragement to look at the idea a little differently. With the help of the eighth Psalm, I began to see that God can still be God and be “mindful” of human beings without being especially mindful of them. God’s mind is on the whole of things, in which we can have an important place without having to be at the center of it all.

This accommodation comes with difficulties, however. For one thing, it can leave people deeply troubled whenever they get a feeling of living in an order of nature whose center is not holding. For another, there is a lot about nature that seems anything but a fit habitat for human beings. She “wrongs” us too often, whether from earthquakes, sunamis, famine, disease, or errant asteroids.

It just may be, though, that her seeming wrongdoing — “natural evil,” as philosophers talk about it — is not in fact something intrinsic to the working out of her natural laws. Our positing of it may stem more from a stubborn refusal to accept her either on her own terms or God’s.

By taking issue with the earth and the universe being just what they are and doing just what they do, we can all too easily lose the capacity to take wonder and delight from them. Instead, we demand participation in the natural order on our own terms, and become mired in feelings of anxiety, and loss when nature fails us.

With all due respect to the Priestly writer’s account of creation in Genesis 1, striving to “subdue” the earth is not the most fruitful way to relate to it. The Jahwist understood the relationship more in terms of “caring” for the earth, tenderly. (Genesis 2) I like his idea better.

Natural evil does not lie in natural things and processes themselves. Like feelings, these are neither good nor bad. They just “are.” When we acknowledge and respect them in their own right, and not for what we want from them,  the “evil” attributed to them goes away.

 

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WHY EVIL? THE RIGHT TO ASK

Posted on April 29, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

There is pervasive evil in the human spirit. It helps me to think of it the way many theologians do, as an absence of good. But the devastation that human beings inflict on one another also makes me wonder whether the evil in us is a permanent presence rather than a remediable deprivation.

“Moral” evil, as philosophers refer to it, is the result of human freedom’s running amok. There is surely enough of it around to account for a large amount of undeserved suffering in the world. But it cannot account for all such suffering.

“Natural” phenomena such as earthquakes, sunamis, famine, and disease offer a surfeit of reasons to question whether evil is wholly the result of human beings’ less than humane acts of omission and commission. It is nature, and not a misguided humanity, which is at the heart of the problem that evil poses for faith.

In specific, it is natural catastrophes and not human actions, which raise the deeper questions about (a) whether we live in a created order at all, and (b) whether its Sovereign is powerful and benevolent enough to overcome their destructive consequences. Sadly, religious authorities all too frequently respond to questions like these with denunciations for asking them in the first place.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?, God is reported once to have asked. (Job 38:4) Although the question may have been meant only to be humbling, it also comes across as insulting. It strongly implies a discounting of every believer’s right — and in my view, calling — to ask questions in the interest of separating the wheat of truth from the chaff of opinion.

To be sure, believers, inquirers, and sceptics alike are at a disadvantage, when the issue is reconciling nature’s occasional rampages with the idea of a powerful and benevolent deity. The author of the Book of Job was right. We must never forget that we were not present at creation.

We do not even yet see things as a whole. This means that we can neither claim nor deny that were we to see “the big picture,” we would somehow know how and why natural catstrophes are not really “evils” at all.

Even so, because we cannot help asking, we have the right to ask a still deeper faith-question: is this world the best that God could have created?

 

 

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THREE SEXUAL ROADS LESS TRAVELED

Posted on April 21, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

An increasingly old fashioned sexual road is the road of dating before having sex. If social commentator Donna Freitas is right, it has been plowed under by a “hook-up culture” devoted to sex that’s fast, uncaring, unthinking, and perfunctory.

And yet, Freitas also says, hook-up sex is a road that two-thirds of its travelers would like to leave behind. If courtship, focused on romance and commitment as well as on sex, is no longer a viable alternative for some of these harried travelers, there is another that may be worth looking at.

This is the road followed in every generation by a small number of humble and inspired men and woman whose spiritual journeys include a sense of calling to celibacy in singleness. The calling can be to singleness, and it can also be to celibacy for the duration of the singleness.

Commitment to the celibate life in no way need pose as a higher sexual ideal than that of relationships based on physical intimacy. It does not have to denigrate sex in marriage, as many religious communities do, by viewing it as an instrument for procreation only. Nor does it have to view marriage as a regretful compromise with desires of the flesh.

Celibacy while single can also become a means to a graced life, however short or long may be the struggle to overcome present yearning for a sexual partner. However, it is not for everyone. It’s a second sexual road even less traveled than the road of romantic, committed love.

Trying to be celibate, when you are not genuinely called to it, is one way to end up as the manipulative, abusive, or downright dangerous kind of human being that all too many overly scrupulous, sex-disparaging religious people end up being.

But trying to be a self-giving and faithful sexual partner is not much of an alternative, when you are neither called nor equipped for that task either. Our too high divorce rate signals both a decreasing readiness for, and the loss of a sense of calling to, the marital estate.

The third less traveled sexual road today is the road of gay and lesbian sexuality. Like celibacy, it, too, isn’t for everyone. But there is much joy being experienced on this road. It’s the joy that comes from living out a commitment to permanence and fidelity in a mutually-fulfilling sexual relationship among equals.

 

 

 

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ALL GOD’S CHILLUN GOT…GREEN CARDS?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by LEROY HOWE

One word that should be evoking compassion and hope is now driving people to hateful acts of self-protectiveness and persecution. It has lost almost all of its power to point out a solution to one of America’s most pressing social problems.

The social problem is thoughtless rejection of the tired and the poor who are in this country illegally. The solution to the problem, tweaked as it must be by the legislative process, is “amnesty.” The typical reaction to this solution, and to the word for it, is outrage.

The anger, even if not the outrage, is understandable. If you are not native born, and if you are living and working here without a Permanent Resident Card, then you are an illegal. You don’t belong here. That’s the bottom line of your political status. But you are also branded an alien. And that cannot be the bottom line of your spiritual worth.

The intensity of the emotional charge that “amnesty” now carries is directly proportional to the importance of the attitude it represents to this nation’s moral well-being. Even so, it may be time to consider another word for it: “forgiveness.”

Granting amnesty is a political act which people have the right both to debate and oppose. Offering forgiveness is a spiritual act whose ultimate warrant, for people of faith at least, is the divine will. Freely, freely you have received; freely, freely give.

Humane treatment of aliens — legal and illegal — usually goes awry at the first hint that any of “those people”  might receive some form of amnesty and, worse still, welcome. We will be much better off to stop denying that immigration reform must include some form of amnesty, and fudging that real reform really won’t involve amnesty at all.

Basically, we need to say what we should mean: forgiveness. I hope that one day soon this will include forgiving those who have entered the country illegally, but for worthy purposes — survival, for one. And while we are at it, it should also include forgiving those who have hired them illegally.

Legally, of course, we have the right not to cut any illegal immigrant any break ever. But then, from a faith perspective, we will still have to figure out how else to tender the forgiveness that God has made it clear we owe all of his “chillun” everywhere.

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