Rejoice, for the End of Repentance is Near!

Repent…what is that all about?  I’ve been hearing it a lot lately, between my Intro to Hebrew Bible class and my Intro to Christian History class.  I went to a Sufi teaching last night hoping for talk of Divine Love, and instead heard more about repentance.  All this talk about repentance is bringing me down.  Is God trying to tell me something?  If so, why would she choose a word that makes me stop listening? 

My reaction when I hear that word is to wonder if the speaker/author has the slightest idea what he or she is talking about.  There seems to be an implication that if we sufficiently “repented” then all of our problems would be solved, and if our problems aren’t solved then we haven’t repented sufficiently.  This seems somewhat circular, a bit uncompassionate, and I have my doubts that it’s a correct interpretation of reality.

I looked up the etymology of the word repent, and it turns out that it means “feel sorrow for what you’ve done” and in early usage was synonymous with “regret.” How on earth can you feel enough regret to get yourself happy again?  At some point, don’t you have to stop regretting and move on? 

Furthermore, it is true that negative life situations reflect a lack of regret and people with good life situation have done nothing worthy of repentance? Really?  Some of the people who should be the most repentant, like for example the CEO’s involved in the banking scandals that have punctuated the past 20 years, are living the good life while hard working people have been outsourced and their IRA’s devalued. How will regret on the part of the average citizen who is suffering in our current economy make his or her situation better? 

The idea of repentance is nice, though, to the extent that it’s empowering.  If  you can do something—anything—to bring about an improvement in your painful life circumstances, you feel more control over your life.  If I just feel sorry enough, and adhere to this dogma, it all gets better.  Ok, I can do that.  Or can I?

What if, instead of repenting we rejoice?  What if we stop feeling regret about everything we’ve done wrong and start noticing what we’ve done right?  What if instead of looking for evidence of our unworthiness and we look at the many ways we bless, and are blessed by, the world around us?  Is it possible that we might find evidence that we are the love we wish to see in the world?  Could the feeling that comes along with that recognition motivate us toward more lovingkindness toward one another?

All I can say for sure is that when I focus my attention on the many ways in which I have been blessed, and the ways in which I bring blessings into the world, I am much more likely to keep up the good works.  What about you?

The Religious Relevance of Secular Feminism

How is it that we fail to see one another’s humanity due to racial, gender or other differences which seem superficial in relation to our common humanity?  Walker says “It is true that if the living human body, rightly taken or read, permits the soul to be recognized…it is also possible for a body misread, unread or illegible to occlude or distort the state, even the presence of a human person” (2007, p. 194). These readings imply a sense of the soul—a soul either valued or devalued, fully human or something less.  These images permeate our culture and inform us about others—images of woman in hijab, men in business suits, starving third world (and always brown) children.  We depict and envision different groups of people with different kinds of humanity, and rank order the kinds, so not only are they different, some are better than others. 

Walker goes on to say that stereotyped reading of the identity may cause us to overlook “the pain, shame, suffering, or humiliation of others (or their pleasure, joy, pride, or self-respect), or may be unmoved or differently moved by its recognition there” (2007, p. 203).  Zora Neale Hurston artfully portrays this phenomenon in her short story The Gilded Six Bits (1979).  Joe and Missy Mae, citizens of African American Eatonville, Florida, have a playful and idyllic marriage until he catches her in flagrante delicto with a con artist traveling through town.  Joe is crushed and their marriage in jeopardy.  As their relationship is beginning to mend, Joe goes to market in Orlando where he is clearly a regular customer.  He leaves after some casual chat with the white clerk, who remarks to the next customer “Wisht I could be like these darkies.  Laughin’ all the time.  Nothin’ worries ‘em.” 

Along with dismissing the very real emotional lives of people defined as “other,” responses to believing in one’s superiority “reveal a curious oscillation between callous or arrogant disregard, and self-congratulatory emphasis on paternalistically described “burdens”” (p. 204).  Going back to the woman in the hijab, the tendency is to assume that she wears it because she is oppressed, possibly ignorant of this fact or afraid to acknowledge it, and we Westerners are obliged to liberate her from this tyranny.  We don’t assume that she is wearing the hijab as a political statement about her identity, or an act of rebellion against a world she views as antagonistic to her faith and kin (S.R., 2006).  And we don’t ask.  We don’t need to, we already know, or think we know, something about who she is based on our reading of the hijab.

In spite of the fact that religious differences may lead to such things as some women wearing a hijab while others do not, and in spite of the fact that these differences have been used in the past to reinforce stereotypes and legitimize social inequalities, even our sacred texts advise us to look beyond surface appearance to the deeper commonalities.  The Hebrew Bible emphasizes hospitality to the stranger in recognition that the ancient Israelites were once strangers in a strange land, too.  The parable of the Good Samaritan shows Jesus’ efforts to simultaneously reveal and undermine cultural biases and hierarchies, as do his actions in several other Gospel stories as well.  Even Paul, who is held in low regard due to his alleged sexism, explicitly says that God does not see particulars, including the “particular” of gender.   These scriptural sources clarify from a religious perspective what Walker clarifies from a secular stance: Biology does not create the differences we perceive between races, classes or genders; nor does God rank people based on these differences. 

How can we engage the world differently in light of the fact that these stratifications are increasingly revealed to be man-made rather than God-given, even according to our scriptural sources?  Hopefully I’ll have some answers, or at least better questions, after Community Day on Tuesday…stay tuned J

Teach Your Children Well, or, What I Learned At Sukkot

A. C. Grayling writes that religious instruction is a “serious form of child abuse” and goes on to say that there is no greater cause of evil than religion.  Now let’s ponder that for a moment. Surely one can point to the many factual errors in scriptural texts as evidence that such texts should not be relied upon for biology or history class.  And a review of history will show that many wars have been carried out in the name of God and religious difference, particularly since the Christianization of the West.  But let us not forget that great empires of antiquity were formed via hostile conquests even prior to the Christianization of the West, so religion is hardly the only cause of human warfare. 

In fact, it was the tremendous turmoil and warfare in the Axial Age that resulted in the major world religions as we know them, in an effort to imbue life with sufficient meaning that people would be less willing to risk their own or take another’s as old gods proved themselves inadequate to the task of ordering life and ensuring safety.  Each of these religious responses was a localized response to deep questions of human worth and the meaning of life. 

Could we be at the beginning of, or in the midst of, another Axial Age?  If so, how might we view religion and spirituality in ways that are adequate to our current scientific understanding of the world while being life affirming?

Yesterday I went to a Sukkot celebration.  For those of you who don’t know, as I didn’t until recently, Sukkot is a Jewish harvest festival held in a sukkah, or temporary shelter constructed in such a way that it is very permeable to the environment.  This shelter is a reminder of God’s sheltering the Isrealites as they journeyed through the wilderness.  While the sukkah is open to the environment, it must also be structured because without structure of some type, there is too much vulnerability and no protection to survive the wilderness. 

Rabbi Or Rose shared an interpretation of the sukkah, or tent, in relation to the permanent home that I think may shed some light on the issues at hand.  The permanent home is designed to eliminate contact with the outside world, and can be seen to represent the religious tradition of the parents.  The sukkah is created to be open to the outside world, and can be seen to represent the new religious insights of the child. 

Every generation reinterprets the traditions inherited from the parents in response to the demands of the present.  You should not pass on everything you learned in church, because a great deal of it is irrelevant even to you.  But the parts you feel have guided you and helped you make sense of the mess that life is—pass those along intentionally!  And, going back to yesterday’s blog, if we were to worship as the children do, we would be singing songs that make us happy, forgiving each other’s goof ups, starting over when we goof up, building community, and laughing instead of trying to answer unanswerable questions or worrying about creed, dogma, or damnation.  And anyway, your children will not believe everything they hear whether or not you take them to church, whether or not you say it, or whether or not it’s true; feel free to share and even to make mistakes because they will sort it out for themselves just like you did. 

My main concern is that we are inadvertently making a God of Economics (or more precisely, the free market), and I fear what we may do in the name of that god more than anything else, because that god reduces the worth of our lives to our net worth and by the time we figure out where we went wrong it may be too late.  We deserve better than that.

Worship as Children

            For my Children's Ministry class we were asked to complete several readings, then reflect on the view of children in today's society and today's church.  Here's my reflection paper:

          As Bakke describes in chapter three of When Children Became People, the church fathers heavily debated Jesus’ precise meaning when advising his followers to be as children.  The context in which the church emerged was brutal toward children, on the whole. While the church fathers were milder in comparison they had limited understanding of child development and a rigid understanding of sin, both of which influenced their understanding of Jesus’ encouragement to be as children.  In general these men hypothesized that Jesus was referring to infants as worthy of emulation due to infants' lack of sexual (or any other type of) desire and lack of pretense (both of which resulted from a lack of reason).  When the child developed the capacity for reason, the child developed the capacity for sin.  Although children were viewed as more likely to sin, they were perceived as still moldable into adults of good character by religious and other instruction and held the parents responsible for assuring this education occurred.

           In both my last congregation and the one in which I currently serve, children are given a great deal of authority over their own lives.  The majority of parents don’t force their children to attend RE, and even those that mandate RE for children usually allow the child to decide for him or herself by age 13 or so. This would indicate an underlying agreement with the church fathers that even children as young as seven are capable of reason.  However, it extends this belief further, implying that children are fully capable of determining which experiences are or are not beneficial for their present lives and future development.  This radical egalitarianism seems part and parcel of being a Unitarian Universalists. 

             Reflecting on the successful RE experiences I have witnessed or facilitated, they have in common an emphasis on the experiential and a minimization of the rational.  Children seem to engage more with an experience, such as the ritual of worship, singing, liturgical drama, or nature excursions.  They come into these experiences with a sense of curiosity and emerge with a sense of reverence.  These, it seems, are the forms of worship children view as worthy of their time, as life enhancing and soul enriching.

             I would agree with the church fathers that children require religious instruction, and can’t help but wonder whether the families that allow their children not to attend religious education are doing them a disservice.  We would all agree that children don’t have the cognitive capacity to make decisions in many areas of their lives, and I believe church is one of those areas.  At the same time, as I reflect on my experiences of successful RE in light of the readings, what strikes me is the ideas that children are “not only to be formed but to be imitated.”  Maybe the point isn’t to allow children to decide whether or not to come to church, nor is the point to force them to attend, but possibly the point is to create worship services that children would want to attend by making them more lively and experiential.

           That said, there is another reality with which to contend: children and their secular activities are now the focal point of modern family life.  Soccer supersedes not only family dinners, but participation in religious life as well.  In The Gift of Faith, by Jean Nieuwejaar, this problem is discussed as ubiquitous in America, affecting people of all religions. 

           She tells a story of a Rabbi who asks his congregation how many of them want their children to grow up to be professional athletes and few hands go up.  He then asks how many people want their children to grow up to be people of moral character and everyone raises their hands.  He asks why then the parents bring their children to soccer practice instead of synagogue.  

           Our culture has become so obsessed with children’s sports that children who don’t play feel (and get) left out.  But when adults set “fitting in” as the priority, we’re saying that fitting in is of utmost importance, and that somehow soccer alone will provide sufficient moral instruction and a guiding light during life’s challenging times.  I’m not suggesting children stop playing sports; I value athleticism greatly.  I’m suggesting that we pause for reflection and deep conversation about where athleticism fits in with the rest of our priorities.

           In a religiously plural society there are no easy answers about when to schedule sports, because every religion has its own Sabbaths, holidays, and observances.  But maybe we can put more pressure on sports leagues to accommodate religious practices, and less on churches to accommodate sports practice.    Even if we create the lively, engaging types of worship experiences that children would want to attend, they will sometimes need adults to remind them of the importance of spiritual practice, and the priority such practices play in maintaining wholeness in this crazy world.