Further reflections on rethinking General Convention

Responses to my three part August series at the Episcopal Café on rethinking General Convention generally disappointed but did not surprise me (I, II, and III). I anticipated the lack of energy for discussing possible revisions to the Episcopal Church’s governance processes and structures. I must confess that I too lack energy for that project.

However, the comments posted at the Café largely ignored that the problems I identified. Of course, much of the disappointing response may stem from a lack of clarity on my part. Notable exceptions to the disappointing response included Marshall Scott’s extended comment and subsequent column. Meaningful lay participation in the Episcopal Church’s governance demands processes and structures that afford all communicants fair and reasonable opportunity for meaningful participation. Nobody challenged my analysis that the status quo unintentionally excludes many communicants from serving as deputies and dis-empowers many inexperienced deputies.

Similarly, the Episcopal Church has long valued having an educated clergy. If the clergy, and bishops in particular, lack the theological wisdom to teach in an inspiring rather than non-authoritative manner, then we desperately need to rethink how to educate our clergy and who we elect as bishops. Suggesting that bishops’ teaching role is superfluous because of an exceptional lay theologian like William Stringfellow (or any of the relative handful of other influential lay theologians) relies on a syllogistic error, i.e., since not all theologians are bishops, bishops should surrender their biblical and traditional role as teachers.

Indeed, the responses to my proposal that the House of Bishops (HOB) Theology Committee adopt a broader, more active role prompted me to wonder if some dissatisfied Episcopalians are correct: the Church has begun to follow secular culture rather than work to transform that culture in Christ's image. They allege, for example, that the Church has moved to include GLBT people because secular society has. From a Christian perspective, GBLT inclusion is not a matter of human rights (an ethical concept foreign to biblical thought), but a consequence of believing that God created all people, regardless of gender orientation or sexuality, in God's image.

Whether the HOB tends to be more liberal or conservative than the rest of the Church is irrelevant. Our goal must be to discern the mind of Christ. Theology – thinking about God – is what seminary should prepare the clergy to do and what parish education/formation programs should aim to help the laity achieve. Other skills are important for ordained and lay ministry. Nothing, however, is more important than thinking about God, especially for people who reject both a naïve prima facie reading of Scripture and rigid adherence to tradition. If our bishops are not up to the challenges of substantive, faithful thinking about God in light of Scripture and tradition, then the Episcopal Church desperately needs to act. If seminary is more about academic preparation than forming and educating (both are necessary) seminarians to think theologically, then our seminaries require significant change. Theological discourse invites disagreement; we are, after all, a people who pray together, not a people who pretend to hold common beliefs.

The intent of my proposal to expand the function and prominence of the HOB Theology Committee was to enlarge the scope and volume of theological discourse within the Episcopal Church. How that enlarging happens is unimportant – at least to me. That it happens is essential. The Church does many good things: we feed the hungry, we love the unloved, we administer buildings and programs, etc. Other people and groups do all those things, sometimes better than the Church does. The Church’s unique focus on God in worship, the interior life, and the formation of people makes it unique. Theology, explicitly or implicitly, shapes and informs how we perform all of those tasks. The Episcopal Church, like our larger society, needs more, not less theology. In fact, the underlying motive for my proposals to restructure the House of Deputies was to facilitate more substantive, theological discourse within that House by limiting the agenda and by involving more people, more organizational elements in the governance process.

Some thoughts on Thanksgiving

Jean Chatzky in her book, The Difference (New York: Crown Business, 2009) was reviewed in USA Today (3/30/09). Chatzky argues that the rich are different from other people: “Yes, in fact, the rich are different than you and me, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald. They are different in their attitudes, behaviors (financial and non-financial), personalities, and goals. They are more passionate, more optimistic, more resilient, more visionary, more connected to others, have greater confidence in their relationships and their overall life, and they are grateful for their good fortune.”

None of that is necessarily bad news, according to Chatzky. "The good news: These are all things you can learn," she enthuses.

Chatzky’s reporting and advice is based on a 2008 study of more than 5,000 individuals in the United States, conducted by Harris Interactive in cooperation with Merrill Lynch. The research revealed four distinct groups of people: the wealthy, the financially comfortable, the paycheck-to-paychecks, and the further-in-debtors. Unfortunately, the breakdown shows that most Americans are still struggling, she concludes. A whopping 54% of those surveyed fell into the paycheck-to-paycheck category; while only 3% were wealthy, i.e., $2 million in assets apart from their principal residence.

The percentages of wealthy and financially comfortable likely decreased in 2009. The number of hungry people in the U.S., for example, increased this past year. Personal bankruptcies and foreclosures also hit new highs in 2009. Charities, meanwhile, struggle to meet the greater demands on their services this year.

Information is power. This Thanksgiving many individuals may feel strongly tempted to wallow in self-pity, regretting financial conditions over which they perceive they have little control. The loss of a job when one’s company lays off employees because of the recession, for example, can trigger a cascading series of events that include foreclosure, personal bankruptcy, relationship difficulties, and health problems. How does one – anyone – break that spiral? What prevents everyone in that situation from committing suicide?

Chatzky’s research on what sets the rich apart from the rest of us highlights important aspects of why not not everyone trapped in a downward spiral commits suicide. Passion, degree of optimism, resilience, vision, degree of connection with others, and confidence are all critical factors. My thirty plus years of ministry provides ample anecdotal evidence to confirm what her research showed.

But that’s not the entire answer. Openness to God also makes a difference. A higher power permeates the universe, including each person’s life. That power offers strength for the day, courage to face the next moment, wisdom for the next step, and hope that not everything ends in brokenness and defeat.

This higher power – God – is not like an electric outlet, easily identified and easily accessed. No words are adequate to describe God, no symbol fully expressive of God. God is not a commodity that the Church, another organization, or anybody can distribute to others.

At best, humans can increase their awareness of God. Multiple paths exist for nurturing this awareness. Christianity teaches that a variety of techniques – regular prayer, meditation, reflection on Scripture, acts of love for others, appreciation of God's handiwork in nature, music, conversation with a spiritual director, the sacraments, to name but a few – can help a person can grow in their ability to discern God's presence and activity. Nobody finds every technique helpful, much less has time to pursue every technique. Instead, one important aspect of spiritual wisdom is for each individual to select, perhaps with the assistance of a spiritual guide, the technique(s) most appropriate to her or his spiritual journey.

This Thanksgiving, if life is good for you, give thanks. If you find yourself struggling or depressed, remember Chatzky’s research about the differences between the rich and the rest of us. Work at developing those skills and attitudes. Next year will be different.

In either case, whether life is good or difficult, remember God. The ability to relate to that higher power we call God, the creator of the cosmos, is truly a precious gift well worth cultivating. For this, I say, Thanks be to God!

The nature of faith

Karen Armstrong in her newest tome, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 87), suggests that “loyalty” is the original, New Testament meaning of the Greek words for “faith” and “belief.” That historical analysis coheres well with my definition of “faith” as the trajectory of one’s life. In other words, faith in God denotes aiming to move, to grow, toward God.

Defining “faith” or “belief” in terms of assent or alleged adherence to propositional statements ignores that assent or adherence constitute an action while implicitly presuming that human experience of a transcendent sacred reality can be accurately described in finite, human language. In the case of the former, words that lack any substantive follow-through ring hollow. In the latter case, humans have fashioned an idol using words rather than clay, stone, or wood. Yet the idols are equally vacuous. Prominent twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich once said, “Even orthodox theology is nothing but idolatry.” (Armstrong, 281-2)

The trajectory of a person’s life – the person’s progress toward explicitly identified goals or goals that discernible only with the benefit of hindsight – reveals a person’s true loyalties, i.e., that person’s true faith or beliefs.

Persons who wish to travel the Jesus path do well to intentionally reflect upon the question: does the trajectory of my life emulate the trajectory of Jesus’ life? Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the Christian liturgical year, is an especially appropriate time for such reflections.

The God beyond

Karen Armstrong in her newest tome, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 75), notes that the Jewish theologian Philo, an Alexandrian contemporary of Jesus, argued that knowing God's essence was impossible. However, one could know God's power by observing God's actions in the world.

She then traces two thousand years of human attempts to describe, to define, the sacred reality that transcends human existence. Reason, faith, and science all fail in their attempts to define that transcendent, sacred reality.

Some moderns have reached a point where anything that defies exact definition, direct observation, and precise measurement lacks credibility. Such views embody a form of scientism, belief in the scientific method to answer all questions and to provide all knowledge. Scientism, as with all forms of belief, relies on unproven assumptions. For scientism, the most important unproved foundational presumption is that the scientific method can in fact answer all questions and provide all knowledge.

In contrast, Armstrong’s journey from nun to popular theologian seems to have brought her full circle: from believer to agnostic to one who proclaims the existence of an indefinable, transcendent sacred reality.

A group that I lead in the parish I serve is studying Bishop John Shelby Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). Spong, in his own inimitable, attention grabbing style, tries to give voice to a God beyond any human construct, a God known in love rather than in God's aseity, i.e., existence originating from and having no source other than itself. Spong contends that the Jesus experience became normative for Christians because people experienced the transcendent sacred reality through their encounter with Jesus, for first generation disciples through the historical Jesus and for successive generation disciples through previous disciples. The god whom humans can define is necessarily an idol of human fabrication and not the elusive transcendent reality known through its actions rather than in its aseity.

Recognizing that language about God is necessarily and inherently metaphorical (or mythical) may shatter treasured idols and creedal formulations. However, that recognition marks passing beyond those idols and formulations to move closer to the transcendent sacred reality that mysteriously and unconditionally embraces us with life-giving love.

Social networking

Several articles social networking have caught my attention recently.

First, a British court sentenced a twenty-two year old woman to twenty one months in a high security prison for frequent texting while driving. She had sent twenty text messages in the hour before the crash. (Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Driven to Distraction - Britain Sets Tough New Laws for Texting While Driving,” New York Times, November 1, 2009)

Second, new businesses such as Factery and branches of existing businesses such as Orkut are now competing to become the dominant social networking search engine. Each hopes to achieve the same spectacular success that Yahoo and Google have achieved as internet search engines.

Third, how much work or learning can a person really do while concurrently engaged in social networking? Researchers divide over the answer. Some stress that the current generation of young people excel at multitasking and summarizing issues in a single sentence for which older colleagues require a paragraph or even an entire page. Other researchers argue that constant social interaction translates into superficiality and poor face-to-face skills. Indicative of the scale of social networking, almost a quarter of today’s teens check Facebook at least ten times per day. (Jeffrey Zaslow, “Can Obsessive Networking Make You a Good Employee?” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2009)

Obviously, social networking has become an integral element of modern society. The phenomenon poses some risks. Over involvement in social networking may jeopardize one’s ability to perform on the job or in school; social networking at the wrong time may also turn one into a hazard for others, e.g., in the case of texting while driving.

I wonder how introverted teens and college students feel about social networking. As an introvert who values private time, social networking feels very intrusive. Much of life is boring; why inflict on that others? Much of life is mundane; why would anyone else care about the mundane in another person’s life? A compulsive need to know what another person is doing seems more akin to stalking or in appropriate control than a healthy human relationship.

I wonder to what extent the brevity of social networking is an attempt to compensate for information overload. More information bombards me daily than I can process. Reducing some of that flow to a few brief words or a sentence at most is one way to attempt to reassert control.

I wonder to what extent the seeming omnipresence of social networking is an attempt to compensate for too busy lives that do not allow time for healthy human relationships. People, especially in the face of recession driven job losses, now work longer hours than ever before, often desperate to demonstrate the employee’s indispensability. Parents feel pressure to attend events and activities in which a child participates, increasing demands on their time.

New patterns of human interaction are not inherently bad. Social networking can afford people opportunity to meet others whom they would probably not encounter apart from social networking. I certainly know of healthy monogamous unions that social networking birthed. Social networking can also promote the sharing of ideas, enhance project collaboration, and create an awareness of new opportunities.

In other words, social networking is a relational tool. As is true for any tool, a person may improve or diminish the quality of life through using social networking. The challenges are to employ social networking for those tasks for which it is especially well suited while maintaining a healthy balance in one’s life by developing and employing a multiplicity of relational tools.

Perceptions

In personal reflections about her reporting on the Iraq war, Alissa Rubin emphasizes the principal lesson she has learned from her eight years of experience in Iraq is not to underestimate the complex history or hatreds of alien places. (Alissa J. Rubin, “From Iraq, Lessons for the Next War,” New York Times, November 1, 2009).

Human perception operates according to patterns established in the brain. Americans tend to look for the best, both in people and in outcomes. This can be a positive attribute when on familiar ground. But in a foreign context rife with unknown hazards, trying to recognize patterns that presume the best can lead one to observe what one expects and to miss dangerous realities.

In Iraq, Americans wanted to believe that the Iraqi sectarian and ethnic hatreds were not as deep or pervasive as the years of occupation have revealed them to be. Americans also wanted to believe that the Iraqis, freed from Saddam’s nightmarish rule, would warmly embrace democracy, another hope that has proven to be more of an illusionary hope than having any factual basis.

Similar self-deluding processes have been at work in the American perceptions about Afghanistan. Americans wanted to believe that the invasion succeeded beyond expectations and that Afghans appreciated liberation from the Taliban’s oppressive rule. Many Americans heralded the election that brought President Hamid Karzai to power as marking a transition to genuine democracy. Time has proven those perceptions sadly wrong. Afghans do not want any outsider – regardless of ideology or motivation – to rule them. Indeed, Afghans do not want to live with a strong central government but continue to find their identity through tribe, ethnicity, and religion. The Karzai regime is corrupt and unable able to govern most of Afghanistan. The Taliban are now resurgent.

Pattern recognition shaped by expectations causes not only foreign policy difficulties but also personal problem. One partner expects the other to have an equal degree of loyalty to their relationship. News of an affair or statement that the relationship is ending comes as an unbelievable shock. A parent sees one aspect of a child’s personality; the parent is unable to believe in the existence of another side, uncontrolled and disrespectful, that teachers see daily at school.

Research by cognitive scientists indicates that changing the patterns by which a person’s brain interprets data from the world requires repeated confrontation with data that, at best, fits an existing pattern very poorly. This cognitive dissonance eventually leads to the emergence of a new pattern, a pattern that better fits the available data.

Selective perception is one way in which people colloquially refer to brain patterns. A person continually hears, sees, or smells an immense amount of data, more data that the brain can process. Brain patterns help to filter out data that the person has learned to consider irrelevant. For example, a person who lives near a busy road, under the approach pattern for an airport, or adjacent to a train track may quickly to filter out those noises as unimportant. Conversely, a person almost asleep may instantly come to a state of alertness when she or he hears an unexpected noise. Alertness to sensory stimuli and recognition of important inputs help to keep a person safe while allowing routine functioning that would be impossible if the person sought to attend every sensory stimulus.

Mentally connecting disparate data related to more complex matters such as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq occurs in much the same way as selective perception except that the brain patterns involved are far more complex. Understanding how the brain functions and being alert to the inherent risks of applying the wrong expectations and patterns to new situations, whether national or personal, represents the best safeguard, though far from an infallible one, against making similar errors in the future.