Epiphany Church, seen from the grounds of Transfiguration Monastery
War memorial
Above and below: Mayolika ceramics factory
Irony happens when you compare what is claimed as certain with what is actually true; it's the bittersweet, understated commentary on that discrepancy.
One of the gifts of Russian spirituality is its capacity for paradox and irony, its unwillingness to substitute happy-talk for reality. Older people here endured many years of having to live in two realities at once: the official certainty ("Life is getting better, comrades, life is sweeter") and what they saw in their Soviet reality. Without a sense of humor, as many tell me, "we would have shriveled up and died." Instead of dying, they invented Radio Yerevan, the sarcastic ditties known as chastushki, and many other ways of laughing through tears.
Faith itself implies irony, being "...the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1, my emphases) We live by God's promises that the faithful will never be abandoned, and we work to build a community around those promises. At the same time we know that, in this life, some of those faithful will become martyrs. And others claiming to be faithful will contribute toward their martyrdom. Can't say we weren't warned:
"I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life. [Mark 10:29-30, NIV.]
Having experienced the "hundred times as much"--the global church has literally become my family--it's easy for me to forget about "... and with them, persecution...." But if I pretend that all will be perfect sweetness and light, will my evangelism have integrity? Or will my glowing words be repeated back to me, ironically, by those experiencing inner attacks of doubt, or outer attacks of persecution?
Sometimes Eastern Orthodox commentators criticize Western Christians, perhaps especially Protestants, for a thin, over-familiar Jesus-and-me presentation of Christianity, insufficiently grounded in earthy, contradictory, messy reality on one end, and insufficiently resting in the fullness of the Trinity on the other.
The Bible shows that a warm certainty and a sharp sense of irony are mutually compatible. My favorite example is a passage I've mentioned before, one that I often used in talking about Right Sharing: the story of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:19-31. At the end of the story, I can almost hear Jesus daring us to prove him wrong: "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
An even more deadpan delivery, perhaps, here, as Jesus talks to Nicodemus: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life." (John 3:14-15, NIV; see Numbers 21:4-9.)
How am I "lifting up" Jesus? Hopefully in a way that exalts, not in a way that continues the work of his executioners. But who can doubt that the spirit of "execution" dominates much of the way things work in this world. Even those who don't kill are tempted to consign each other to rhetorical oblivion.
You're familiar with the command to the ancients, "Do not murder." I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother "idiot!" and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell "stupid!" at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill. [Matthew 5:21-22 in Eugene Peterson's interpretation.]
It's wonderful to be certain! But I hope we can remember--certainty is not a license to kill, even rhetorically.
Michael Cunningham, "Found in Translation"-- "... translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well."
"On the 10th of October this year (10.10.10) Micah Challenge are calling Christians all over the world to join them in a dedicated day of prayer and promise for the poor. The hope is for 100 million Christians to pray and for 10 million to become actively involved in reminding their leaders of the promises they made to the worlds poorest 10 years ago." More here.
As Israel rubbishes Gaza and blockades Lebanon, I'm in the middle of reading the book of Isaiah. I'm bewildered by the Israeli government's behavior these days. Has either God or humanity given the nation of Israel impunity to declare a holy ban wherever it chooses, whatever the disproportionality, regardless of the loss of innocent lives? Is Israel's current behavior more like the holy obedience of Joshua at Jericho? ("Shout!—God has given you the city! The city and everything in it is under a holy curse and offered up to God.") Or more like Isaiah's first chapter, vv15-17?—
When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even if you offer many prayers,
I will not listen.
Your hands are full of blood;
wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds
out of my sight!
Stop doing wrong,
learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the fatherless,
plead the case of the widow.
These verses must not be quoted without adding the very next:
"Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD.
"Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool...." (v. 18; NIV)
In other words, repent!
Repentance is not self-flagellation, self-minimizing, or groveling. It's a change of heart and mind, a willingness to look at one's behavior and one's orientation relative to God, and to change that orientation Godwards. It doesn't require public humiliation—
Rend your heart
and not your garments.
Return to the LORD your God,
for God is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and relents from sending calamity. (Joel 2:13 NIV, adapted)
—but it does require a change in direction. However universal God's grace might be in our carefully calibrated self-oriented theologies, I do not believe there is impunity for causing misery to others. Not for Israel, nor for Dick Cheney, nor for us.
Last week I wrote in some heat, defending doctrine. The closer a doctrine can be traced to Jesus, the more I'm bound to take it seriously, and it doesn't get any closer than this: "'The time has come,' he [Jesus] said. 'The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!'" (Mark 1:15.) I'm so grateful that the two requirements are paired: the deliberate, clear-eyed moral examination and redirection of heart/mind, and the acceptance of a joyful invitation of reconciliation with God made possible by that redirection.
Once I was a member of a meeting of ministry and counsel, and we were encouraging a thoughtful seeker to consider membership. I was startled by her response: "You don't require enough of me. You need to have a deeper and more challenging dialogue with me, or I might not believe either you or I are worth it." Since one of the ministry and counsel members at the time was uncomfortable with even the minor threshold we already had, her objection led to some interesting discussions! To risk a bit of overinterpretation (I believe I'm on solid ground), I heard her saying that invitation without repentance either demeans membership or demeans the member. Don't take me for granted!
The same is true of the church itself. I recall a biting commentary by Charles McCarthy on the Christian church's complicity in violence (from memory, can't find it anywhere): "Being church means never having to say you're sorry." Not true, as Pope John Paul II well knew. But most churches and meetings I know are better at identifying villains outside their own systems, and perhaps scapegoats within, and not so good at organizational repentance.
Step 4 of Alcoholics Anonymous's 12 Steps involves a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself in preparation for becoming entirely willing to have my shortcomings removed and make amends. Repentance is nothing more or less than this honesty and this willingness. As for the next steps, I believe that Jesus might be a lot more tender than AA.
The more recent doctrines of the church may be helpful in warding off power plays, elitism, mystical tangents, works-righteousness, and other exaggerations to which we're prone both as reformers and as traditionalists. The more we want to grow intellectually or spiritually in the faith, the more interesting those doctrines can be, both in what they say and what they don't say. But if someone presents me a doctrine or a book or a theology and calls it indispensable, I have to ask, "But what of those people who simply heard Jesus say Repent and believe the Good News, without benefit of your new doctrine or book? What if they can't follow the subtle intricacies of your reasoning, or are innocent of the distortions your doctrine seeks to correct?"
On the other hand, as Patti Crane reminds us writers, "Know your knowables." The things I don't know, and can be excused for not knowing, whether through historical accident or my own limited capacities, will not alienate me from God. But once I do know something and choose to act defiantly, I need to repent. Often conservative Christians emphasize personal—particularly sexual—sin as the prime example of the need for repentance. (In some cultures, any sin not known to be practiced by the speaker will do!) In contrast, many Friends resist being asked to repent on matters of personal behavior—but are we then sacrificing the certainty that we also have about not killing? Or are we safe from making the parallel case because we've arranged our affluent lives so that, in fact, we are so unlikely to be confronted by the dilemma? Charles McCarthy warns of the consequence of "moral laxism" in the Catholic context:
According to Catholic just war norms, which only have validity for Catholics within the acceptable moral systems of Catholic moral theology, if there is not strict moral certitude that a war is just and is being conducted justly—then the killing in it is unjust. In Catholic moral theology, intentional unjust killing is always intrinsically and gravely evil—it is always murder. It is never morally permissible. A laxist interpetation of the standards of Catholic just war theory employed in order to achieve a pseudo moral certainty that supports the unjust destruction of human life is itself a grave evil, which if participated in at any stage with full knowledge and full consent is mortal sin. [from "Christian Just War Theory and Moral Laxism: A Chronically Misleading Episcopal Witness"; pdf here.]
I don't have the expertise to present the Jewish parallel, but I'm utterly convinced that there is great moral danger in Israel's crushing the innocent and wrecking their lives in the search for national security. But with equal certainty, I know there is great danger for me in exercising a moral righteousness that is only externally directed, never internal.
Tangaroa is at Raroia, having arrived last week. To see the position of the raft, go to this page; and visit the English-language weblog of the expedition, which followed the wake of the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition.
Recent posts in Robin M's "What canst thou say" weblog chronicles her recent explorations of converging Quaker dialogues, including sessions at the General Conference gathering in Tacoma and our own little gathering of bloggers in Newberg, Oregon, last Saturday.
Friends Committee on National Legislation issued this press release on the Pentagon's declaration of intent to treat all detainees by Geneva Convention standards. The release includes a link to the Defense Department's memo on the subject. Please be vigilant: the administration continues to look for ways to undermine the spirit of Geneva. (Example. Example 2, added Friday.)
As the U.S. president-elect Barack Obama prepares himself and his leadership team for the tasks ahead, I find my optimism tempered by these sober words from Chris Hedges' elegant rant against fundamentalisms*, both religious and atheist, entitled I Don't Believe in Atheists:
The prospects for the human race are bleak. The worse things get in human societies, the more powerful the yearning for illusion and false hope. The reality of what we face as a species is increasingly frightening. We cannot stop the destructive forces we have unleashed. We can hope only to lessen the disasters looming before us. This will require a sober, dispassionate response, one that accepts the severe limitations of humanity and gives up utopian fantasies. It will require empathy, the ability to see the world from the perspective of those outside our culture and our nation. Dreams of fantastic miracles and collective salvation, whether through science or God, will accelerate our doom, for they permit us to ignore reality. Our survival as a species depends on accelerating our narrowing possibilities, doing what we can to mitigate disaster, and reaching out to the rest of the planet in ways that promote cooperation rather than conflict.
As Christians, we do have incredibly good news, but it is not the "Good News (TM)" the rest of the world sourly thinks we are peddling. (Why do they think that? Because the heretical celebrities who claim to exemplify Christian certainty indeed peddle it.)
Our good news is, first of all, that we love this planet and its inhabitants with Godly love; and that passionate love fuels our search for ways to meet the challenges and dilemmas listed by Hedges.
Secondly, God has not just granted us, through the Holy Spirit, a share in the divine Love that flows throughout creation. (I envision it as a universal subatomic weak force, never coercing a particular outcome in any case but always drawing us toward ultimate reconciliation.) God has also arranged for us to have (at least!) two awesome resources for discernment: the Bible and each other. The Bible's utter realism about sin (as Hedges points out more than once) inoculates us against destructive certainty. Biblical faithfulness and Christian arrogance are completely incompatible!! And our capacity for relationship, for dialogue, with people inside and outside our communities of faith, means we can draw on a planetary web of observers, thinkers, doers, to study and act. The scientist and the steward need each other; the activist and the contemplative need each other; and who would be better able to point out the mystic's blind spots than the sympathetic cynic?
As much as I resist looking toward larger-than-life heroes to catalyze the global social resources we need to face the future, I do have high hopes for Barack Obama. I hope that he can help us commit ourselves, not to false certainties, utopian fantasies, or a fatal dependence on hero-figures, but to overcoming what Obama himself called our "empathy deficit." May we experience new patterns of dialogue and collaboration in national and global stewardship--and may Quakers, whose values would seem to be completely consistent with this hope, be joyfully in the mix.
......................... * I continue to protest that the word "fundamentalist" once referred to a specific stream of Christianity, many of whose proponents did not (and still do not) display any of the arrogance and meanness now often associated with the word.
Quaker Friends and Readers Voting Poll: If you are an American Friend (Quaker), Wess Daniels would like to know whether and how you voted in the November 4 elections. He's researching an article for The Friend. The anonymous survey is here; the poll closes on the morning of November 10.
If all goes well, my next post will be from back home in Elektrostal, Russia. We met hundreds of Friends during these six weeks in Oregon and Washington. You gave us so much encouragement--we'll take some of your warmth and energy back with us. Special thanks to Northwest Yearly Meeting staff and the Global Outreach board; Eugene Friends; Metolius Friends; Newberg Friends; Spokane Friends; Ministerios Restauración (Portland); Reedwood Friends.
More election links: From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: "How the Faithful Voted." ~~ The experience of one Friendly voter. ~~ And another. ~~ Thanks to Carol Holmes for referring this election commentary from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ~~ And here's a Kenyan commentary on the substance of Obama-hope, as distinguished from hypocritical hoopla. ~~ Office of the President-Elect: change.gov.
Finally, deep appreciation for Aj Schwanz's moving post. I can't help meditating on the cathartic element in Tuesday's election of Barack Obama--very evidently cathartic for many black people and many white people, but often for different reasons. What would my late mother think?--she of the Germanic "master race" mythology, mother of a murder victim and unable to consider any feature of the murderer of her daughter other than his race? --She who put Swastikas up on our Skokie lawn when the Nazis wanted to march? One common element in many people's Tuesday stories (mine included) is tears. My prayer is that they are tears unto life.
"Uncertainty," sings Isaac Slade, "is killing me." (The Fray, "Uncertainty.") And, not for the first time, uncertainty rates a mention in this blog simply because of the times we're living in. Will the Gaza truce hold and some semblance of recovery begin? What will happen with the Russian aid caravan to eastern Ukraine? (And what about the apparent Russian military convoy also spotted entering Ukraine?) Will truth prevail in Ferguson, Missouri? What will happen to Iraq's minorities? Can local quarantines finally stop the ravages of the Ebola virus?
All this goes on while Judy and I are in a retreat center in Fresno, California, where neither the floods to the west nor the forest fires to the north are a threat. (However, a long-standing drought makes water supplies uncertain.) To be honest, I'm very grateful for this respite from the tensions and information wars of our recent past. But I also feel frustratingly far from being able to keep company with our more directly affected friends and neighbors.
For now, I've decided not to search for an artificial certainty to proclaim, in the midst of all this global instability. If I feel any certainty at all, this doesn't feel like a time for a glib display of it. It feels like a time to hold this uncertainty in the light, to walk with uncertain people, to pray through the uncertainty, to honor the anxious questions we see in people's faces, and to remember the power of silence. Maybe for now that's as good a way as I have of sharing the Cross.
Caption in red box: "The mayor of Bucha: Almost 90% of those killed in the city were shot." Kyiv Region. Caption, white letters in black box: "In Hostomel, over 400 people are listed as missing."
The source is currenttime.tv, a Web site and online video channel of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in cooperation with the Voice of America. Both organizations are funded by the U.S. government.
In The fog of war, part one, I asked what we knew with reasonable certainty about Russia's war on Ukraine. This question has taken on even more urgency with the war crimes and wanton cruelties that are being revealed as Ukrainian authorities re-establish control of towns evacuated by Russian troops. These revelations have provoked world-wide revulsion along with concrete political reactions, such as additional sanctions, on the part of Ukraine's allies. Today, by vote of the United Nations General Assembly, Russia's membership of the UN's Human Rights Council was suspended.
Spokespeople for the Russian Federation, including Dmitri Peskov as Vladimir Putin's press secretary, claimed that the photos and videos of these victims are fake. Some of their analyses are posted on the waronfakes.com Web site. (More about this site and its cousins.) In addition, some Western media have published accounts of Ukrainian abuse of Russian prisoners of war -- here's one horrifying example from earlier today.
What do we know with reasonable certainty? Violent deaths have occurred in the places in Ukraine that have been under Russian soldiers' occupation. The bodies display marks of individual, intimate cruelty that can be distinguished from the arguably accidental and random deaths (as terrible as they also are) that are happening in places damaged or destroyed by artillery and air strikes. Viewing the evidence, we come face to face with evil, whoever committed these crimes.
Almost as certainly true: these individual deaths are distinguishable from urban warfare conducted between soldiers fighting each other. Conventional battles between soldiers have also occurred, but any theory that Bucha-like evidence of deliberate killing of civilians has been staged by taking soldiers' corpses' uniforms off and dressing them in civilian clothes, and making the resulting scene convincing to investigators and journalists alike, is incredibly far-fetched.
Other improbable theories: Ukrainian operatives took bodies from morgues or burial places and distributed them in Bucha, Borodyanka, and other sites for the sake of generating propaganda. Or perhaps the Ukrainians (the Ukrainian Nazis?) themselves killed their fellow citizens for the sake of staging these scandals, either during or immediately after the Russian soldiers' occupation of these towns. We are to believe that the logistical requirements of such elaborate fakes could be carried out without detection by outsiders and with the collusion of any local people who might have seen the deceptions being arranged. Those weeping relatives we have seen in photos and videos are in on the conspiracy, or they are just lying when they report witnessing the acts of Russian soldiers.
Furthermore, if such theories are to be believed, we must assume that the Ukrainians involved are incredibly wicked while Russian soldiers, in contrast, have behaved in all of these locations with discipline and restraint, despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary. In any case, we are in the presence of extraordinary evil. We know that soldiers come in all degrees of ethical sensitivity and a great variety of responses to the chaos of war. Right now I'm remembering Scott Peck's case study of My Lai, Viet Nam, in People of the Lie and Alice Lynd's work on moral injury in combat. Can Russian spokespeople assert with a straight face that they already know that discipline never broke down with fatal consequences in these Ukrainian locations?
What can we say about the motivations behind all these reports? We are not surprised to hear that Ukrainians and their allies are working all-out to get these scandals widely reported. Obviously they hope it draws the world's sympathy and strengthens commitments to assist Ukraine's defenders. Ukraine's government claims to want a thorough and transparent investigation of these apparent war crimes, which is what we would expect them to say whether or not all of the crimes are 100% verified in due time.
They have not waited, however, for such investigations to analyze and assess guilt for what they have already found, and they have not prevented independent journalists from publishing their own shocking interviews and photos. To me, this eagerness to get words and images out to the world is not an argument against the likelihood that something awful actually happened that would not have happened if Russian forces had not invaded. Nor does it require us to suspend our grief and shock. It simply requires us to be hesitant to draw all the conclusions now that would be more appropriate after those investigations are complete.
Are Russian journalists and investigators on the scene, helping uncover facts? If not, why not? This is not a rhetorical question -- it is possible that a Russian citizen with honest intentions and genuine Russian credentials would find it difficult to conduct journalism or investigations on the spot. What we do know is that he or she would not be allowed to publish any report in Russian media that would "discredit" the Russian army. Presumably this would include reports that the Russian army in fact discredited itself by its own actions.
Is there a "Christian" way to look at this situation? I believe there is, and I summarize it as "shocked, but not surprised."
First of all, sad to say, there is nothing new about wanton cruelty and systematic cruelty in wartime. Degrees may vary from country to country, from army to army, but have we ever witnessed a war between 100% angels on one side and 100% demon-possessed soldiers on the other?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (from Thomas P. Whitney's translation of The Gulag Archipelago, pronouns in original):
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
The Bible is blunt: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9; context.) "As it is written: 'There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.'" (Romans 3:10-12; see footnotes.) "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (Ephesians 6:12.)
The Bible does not leave us without hope! "For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Corinthians 4:6, my italics.)
Sidebar: Early Quakers were utterly realistic about the universal human capacity for evil. However, they rebelled against any abstract doctrine of total depravity. Robert Barclay carefully describes the implications of "the fall" in his Apology, Proposition IV, Section II. All of us are direct descendants of Adam and Eve, thus we are like them in our natural propensity to disobey and our inability, in ourselves, to overcome this propensity. However, Adam and Eve sinned in committing their disobedient acts, not by simply existing, and the same is true of their descendants: We may be weak and subject to temptation, but we are not sinful until we actually sin. In Barclay’s words, “... This seed [of disobedience, sown by the Serpent] is not imputed to infants, until by transgression they actually join themselves therewith....”
Among the implications for Quakers and others today:
Refuse to close your eyes to the crimes of anyone, whether or not they are in your community or make a prior claim on your loyalty.
Refuse to generalize about a whole community or country based on the crimes of a minority, but be willing to examine systemic causes embedded within their/our situation.
Seek to direct anyone, guilty or innocent, to their own inner witness to the love of their Creator, Who has the power to free them from bondage to violence and temptation.
This blunt biblical description of the human condition is why I say "shocked but not surprised." I was shocked but not surprised by the Salvadoran death squads, by the violence in Sudan and Yemen, by the 52 millions killed by Hitler's war, by all the attempts we've made to objectify each other from Cain on.
The whole history of human violence is, as Vernard Eller has said, a direct line of escalation from Cain's murder to modern warfare. In any particular instance, we grieve according to what we learn about that instance, preserving our own humanity in our continuing capacity to be shocked yet again. But we already know what we humans are capable of, and how we are required to respond: according to 2 Corinthians 5:19, God has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation. There is no crime, no scandal so shocking that we are released from this commitment.
Dale Aukerman on curse and doom: (Darkening Valley)
When with decisiveness I set myself against a person or a group, I curse. Doom in many forms hangs over me, and that doom has such an ominous quality, not so much because of the particular shape it may take, but because others are the promoters of that doom. In varying degrees their cursing me, their "Away with him," registers in me. I counter by promoting their doom with my secret cursing even as they in turn counter again with theirs. It is from this fearful escalating reciprocal cursing that Jesus brings deliverance.
Hydrogen bombs and their missile carriers can be seen as an extraordinary concretization of human cursing. ...
In blessing we ask that the mercy of God and the goodness of life rest upon others. In cursing we seek to exclude them from that, and thus slip into a fateful error: for only by God's mercy can the doom thus unleashed be held back from any of us. It is possible to forgive the person who makes life hard for me if I see that each of us desperately needs God's mercy and the other's compassion and that each of us, frail as we are, needs least of all any promoter of doom.
Another examination of Russian government disinformation. (Again, it's quite fair to ask about the motivation behind this analysis.)
Update:Timothy Snyder on Russia's "genocide handbook" for Ukraine.
As a historian of mass killing, I am hard pressed to think of many examples where states explicitly advertise the genocidal character of their own actions right at at the moment those actions become public knowledge.
How the Internet platform Telegram embraces contradiction. (Disclosure: it has become my primary way to aggregate channels carrying news of the war in Ukraine.)
Is the Gospel of John a forgery? (In which our friend Paul Anderson is referred to as a Johannine guru.)
Charlie Musselwhite's rendition of Albert E. Brumley's gospel song "Rank Strangers to Me" suits my mood. I used it several times in my Elektrostal classroom.
One of our old friends at the Tretyakov gallery: Nikolai Yaroshenko's "There's Life Everywhere."
Hello from an apartment on Bolshaya Dmitrovka in Moscow. We're having a wonderful time serving as hosts and tour guides to a group of our friends from Northwest Yearly Meeting. Today was the start of our Moscow adventures as we visited the Cosmas and Damian Church just off Tverskaya Street, then Red Square, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the Friends House Moscow office. We had plenty to discuss this evening before starting to rest up for tomorrow's new adventures.
During our discussion in the FHM office, the subject of silence came up, which reminded me of this post, which I decided to rerun here. Just one correction: The "Thursday group" now meets on Wednesdays.
Fritz Eichenberg, Christ of the Breadlines.
The "Thursday group," a circle of Friends who meet on two Thursdays a month, invited me to speak on Friends' understanding of silence, which I did this evening. I was so delighted by the invitation, since for me silence is like spiritual oxygen.
I started by telling about an incident that happened to me at the age of 19, when I was living in rural Pennsylvania and had to walk an hour every workday in the early morning, sometimes starting in darkness, to meet my ride the rest of the way to the Western Electric factory at King of Prussia. I spent the day on the assembly line. At the end of the day, I had the same four-mile walk in reverse, back home. One day, walking in silence as always, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that I was not an observer, separate from the landscape around me, but that I was the observed one, with the whole visible reality around me was doing the observing.
I fast-forwarded a few years to Ottawa Friends Meeting, within whose community I lived for three years, 1974-77, from the time I became a Christian until the moment I left Canada. I talked about my spiritual mentor, Deborah Haight, and the sense of centeredness I felt in her presence. Deborah was born into a Conservative Friends family in Norwich, Ontario. There were some in our Friends meeting who seemed to aim for an ideal of perfect silence in the meetingroom--street noises and even the sound of children could be a problem. But I had this feeling that Deborah held silence within her.
The rest of my comments this evening were based on Swiss Friend Pierre Lacout's booklet God Is Silence, which is available online in Russian, translated by Natasha Zhuravenkova. I organized my thoughts around some quotations from that booklet, which I had put in a handout along with discussion questions. Since I don't have an English-language copy, the italicized excerpts that follow are from the Russian text. I also drew from J. Brent Bill's Holy Silence and Anthony Bloom's conversations on prayer entitled "Let's Try Praying in Truth." (PDF, Russian.)
Lacout, after extolling the advantage of silence:
And if, even so, I speak, it's just to communicate with those whose silence resonates with mine and who hear the Silence of God in my words. And if I speak again after that, it's to encourage silence among those ready to receive it. And a bit further on, It's important to practice silence regularly. The Spirit blows where the Spirit wishes, but fills only those sails which are already raised.
Here I emphasized the inner discipline implicit in Lacout's words, and asked if this was any different from what Katherine Evans was talking about among early Friends when she said, "...we had thousands at our meetings, but none (of us) dare speak a word, but as they are eternally moved of the Lord...."
And when our Friend Jan Wood encourages us to "tell the stories of God's power among us," as we might experience it in worship, is this the same kind of talking that Pierre Lacout advocates among those who would otherwise prefer silence? As we discussed how to bring the gift of silence to those for whom deliberate silence is a wholly new idea, Friends mentioned how important it is to demystify it for newcomers to our worship, and not to let Quaker "culture" repel the tender visitor.
More from Lacout on the discipline of silence:
The life of silence is always a deliberate attentiveness [as contrasted with spontaneous attentiveness to an external distraction]. ... The fully-developed religious life becomes the life of a mystic. For some, "mystical" is synonymous with "not normal," bringing to mind visions, trances, levitation... This kind of approach focuses on secondary aspects instead of the main point. For Paul, the mystic is an individual who has come into the fullness of Christ, whose life is filled by the Holy Spirit: "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." [Galatians 2:20; context.] And "For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God." [Romans 8:14; context.]
We spent some time on the question of whether devotional literature, as some have suggested, tends to be written by introverts for introverts, and to what extent Lacout's insights apply equally to those of other temperaments. (Several Friends laughingly took issue with my self-description as an introvert, but I assured them it was a valid label!)
Lacout asserts that
contemplative silence is visioning that doesn't require an objective, a target. It can only be designated as a direction. It involves looking in the direction of something, rather than looking right at something. Conceptions of God are fine as long as I quickly move beyond them.
But those conceptions, or representations, have a use:
As a starting point [for the practice of silence] we choose an object that can gather together our spiritual strengths, rather than letting them dissipate. This kind of preparation can be endlessly varied according to individual inclinations, character, vocation, and religious experience.
Here I mentioned the role of pictures (Eichenberg, for example, or Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son) in my own life, as well as music, books, and so on. I wish we had spent longer on gathering ideas from the other participants this evening.
I mentioned that lot of spiritual literature, including that written by and about Friends, reminds me of socialist realism--it's so upbeat and aspirational that we can wonder whether we'll ever have such wonderfully angelic and serene inner lives. Lacout writes honestly about two main obstacles to growth in silence--firstly, distractions and dissipation, and, secondly, the inner demons of the subconscious.
The one who doesn't stop along the way, but goes on past the joys of reflection, and arrives at genuine silence--in other words, the one who seeks the deepest Center, the very heart of existence--cannot avoid encounters with the subconscious and its phantoms.
Unfortunately, we barely had time to touch on this important aspect, and the related topic of inner healing, during this evening's session.
One of the topics of our lively discussion afterwards was this question: was there a difference between what we know as Christian prayer and the sort of objectless, contemplative silence that Lacout seems to describe? In the material I distributed, I mentioned Brent Bill's comparison of the Eucharist and Quaker worship, particularly his insight that "We become the liturgist, priest, penitent, and communicant." None of these roles are the end point of silence, but to me they are crucial movements on the path. I talked about the villages in my head (now there are four!) in trying to describe why, for me, intercession is one of the central "objects" of silent prayer. I may cherish the experience of absolute self-abandonment to the Holy Spirit, but first I have to stay rooted enough to keep my promises!
It's also vitally important to remember that Pierre Lacout's definition of a mystic implies that the practitioner of contemplative silence may be "objectless" but is far from empty. I remembered the biblically resonant comments of my Dagestani conversation partner last week--"If God isn't there, something else will fill that space."
I'm so grateful to the Thursday group for giving me the chance to put these thoughts together and to hear their experiences. Including our own time of silent worship, three hours flew by too quickly.
Today's links:
There's a lot of online comment on Morgan Freeman's participation in the Committee to Investigate Russia and its "War" video. Two responses caught my attention: one calm and balanced, and one that is not so calm but still balanced.... Judge for yourself!
Children line up for photos at the Atomic Dome, Hiroshima.
It's been exactly a month today since we returned from Japan. I have already written about my two visits to Kobe (my mother's school and the search for her home address); now I'm adding a couple of final highlights.
First, as background, here are two more links to earlier blog posts. In 2014, at Judy's urging, I made my first visit back to Stuttgart, Germany, since 1966, when I was a teenager and my mother's parents were both still alive. There, among other things, I saw the high school my mother attended after she and her family were deported from Japan in 1948, and I saw the location of the home I lived in as a toddler in my grandparents' care as my parents finished grad school in Chicago. Fast-forwarding to this summer, after our retirement from teaching at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, we took the opportunity to make my first-ever visit to Japan, where my mother was born and raised.
(In passing, I have a few important comments to make below about the Institute in Elektrostal.)
Hiroshima. We made a far-too-brief visit to Hiroshima on October 4. It had been rescheduled to that day because of a typhoon earlier in the week, and it was cut short by another typhoon that threatened to disrupt rail travel back to our host's home in Osaka. We ended up having just four hours, all of which we spent at the Peace Memorial Park and Museum, easily accessible from the train station on a convenient streetcar line.
Examining the Dome's scars.
I've explained before why I avoid indulging in emotionalism over the events of August 6, 1945, but (whatever the chain of evil decisions leading to that awful moment) at Hiroshima it is impossible to avoid the evidence of the high cost that tens of thousands of ordinary people paid for those decisions. My eyes simply had to examine obsessively every visible surface of the iconic Atomic Dome building to see the scars left by the bomb's destructiveness.
The most moving exhibits within the museum were the clothing and personal effects of those caught within the zone of greatest destruction, along with the letters and diaries documenting the final hours of loved ones. We can argue endlessly about the scientists and politicians who set up that destruction, and who were themselves trapped in the supposed logic of total war. It's much harder to justify the suffering of innocent people who were seared, irradiated, and in some cases vaporized by what really amounted to a weapons test made on human subjects.
It was inspiring to see the crowds of children visiting the Peace Memorial Park. I hope that each one of them will be part of a new generation worldwide who have no illusions about the capacity of warfare to resolve conflict.
Osaka Friends Meeting. Our last full day in Japan was Sunday, October 7. It was a great joy to attend meeting for worship with local Friends, some of whom we already knew from their kind attendance at the lecture I gave at Osaka University a few days earlier. That Sunday happened to coincide with World Quaker Day, so before our meeting for worship began, we were all part of an online video meeting with Friends in other parts of Friends World Committee's Asia and West Pacific Section.
After the exchanges of video greetings, our meeting for worship began. We centered ourselves in the welcoming silence. Almost immediately I knew that, for all the distances we'd traveled, all the newness of the location, we were in an utterly familiar place.
I remembered one of my favorite short prayers, "Lord, I want to dwell in you," and understood that once again that this prayer, this dwelling place, is real everywhere. It was also true that the scale of our gathering -- there were ten of us, including Judy and me -- was achingly familiar from our years at Moscow Meeting. I'm sure that the friendly facilities, a room in a Catholic retreat house, also contributed to the impression. But I arrived with a brain bubbling with clashing impressions and family mysteries, so these congenial outward factors don't tell the full story. There's nothing that equals the comfort of bringing these unsettling items into the meetingplace of the family of faith, and placing them at Jesus' feet.
Family quest, recap. One advantage of moving back from Russia to our Portland home was to be back in possession of our old papers and photos. With fresh eagerness, I looked at my family records. Once again the contrast is startling: for my Maurer family tree, I have abundant records going back to Johannes Maurer, who left Ulm for Copenhagen toward the end of the 1700's, and whose son Johan Fredrik Maurer emigrated from Denmark to Norway. Thanks to the Internet, I also know a lot about my grandmother Gerd's family. But I still know very little about the history of my mother's family.
However, thanks to our trip to Japan, and the advance research that our host Takayuki Yokota-Murakami had done for us, the Japanese gaps in that history are starting to be filled in. I visited my mother's school and learned a lot about its history. I learned that my family lived in Kobe since at least my mother's birth. I know where they lived, even though the house itself doesn't exist now. I know they had a summer house in the hills overlooking Kobe. My grandfather's engineering office was included in a list of German businesses in Osaka. I know a lot more about German-Japanese business and trade relationships in the years my grandparents lived there. I can guess that those relationships would help explain why my grandfather enrolled in the Nazi party in 1934, but I may never know the answer with certainty.
My mother was too young to enroll in the Nazi party, but I understand that she was in the German Girls' League. Her school's annual report for 1942 records total membership in the Hitler Youth and the Girls' League as 65 boys and girls. The Nazi party is also acknowledged in the report's section on contributors and collaborating organizations. Although I never caught any hint of Nazi ideology in my grandfather, my mother was another matter. However she may have conducted herself in her diverse workplace at Roosevelt University, at home she never hid her racist and anti-Semitic views from us. As I try to understand all this, I can't help wondering what kinds of Nazi influences reached her through school channels -- and at what age.
My grandmother wasn't on the Nazi membership list (and family lore says that she refused to join), so I don't have the details about her that the membership list gave me for my grandfather -- for example, I still don't know her birthdate and birthplace. I guess that research awaits my next trip to Germany. Also remaining in the realm of speculation: when and where my mother's parents got married; and when and why they moved to Japan.
Possibly in the "none of your business" category, except as social history, are questions about my German family's finances. I don't suppose everyone in Japan had a summer house. Having been deported to Germany in 1948, how did they come to have such a substantial home in Stuttgart by the time I was there in the mid-1950's? How did they come to be collectors of Japanese art? Even with all these remaining questions, pertinent and impertinent, I am grateful that the outlines of their lives, and of my mother's growing-up years, have become clearer.
Thank you, dear reader, for your patience with these family history posts. I'm not sure they're of any interest to anyone, but I personally love reading these kinds of stories on other people's blogs. I also have a certain amount of hope that someone somewhere with relevant experience or expertise will come across these stories and will help me fill in more of the gaps.
On Saturday, October 27, the New Humanities Institute (NGI) in Elektrostal, Russia, held its final classes. it formally closed its doors on October 30, when its official license expired. After a week-long re-accreditation audit, the Ministry of Education had refused to renew the Institute's accreditation, forcing all students to find new places in other colleges, and dispersing a truly remarkable faculty, some of whom had been teaching at NGI for its full quarter-century history.
In this public Web site, I will not potentially embarrass my wonderful former colleagues by speculating on the reasons for this sad development. I suspect that the Ministry examiners did not interview students or attend classes, and (as on the occasions when I was personally present during such audits) simply confined themselves to examining documents. I also know how carefully the institute prepared for such visits, going to great lengths to ensure that all papers, reports, and class journals were in correct order and conformed to the Ministry's expectations.
A business card I'll always cherish.
A previous Ministry order to close the institute had been successfully challenged in court, which secured a few more years' operation. Whatever the reality behind this most recent official decision, I grieve the outcome, but will be forever grateful for our years of working with those wonderful, curious, hardworking, creative, inspiring students, and for the rich collaboration we had with our dedicated colleagues.
The decision is all the more painful in that the last two years' recruitment had been on an upward trend. This followed years of declining enrollment linked partly to the low birthrate of the early post-Soviet period. Happily, the improving demographic situation will certainly help NGI's partner institution, the School of Foreign Languages (popularly known as the Kazantsev School), whose after-school language classes for schoolchildren, evening classes for adults, and preschool programs are thriving. N.B.! That school is not affected by the closure of the institute. Since I taught at both institutions during most of our years in Elektrostal, I take some comfort that half of this marvelous educational enterprise will continue.
Back in 2011, I began a blog, 32 Radio Street, for our students at both the school and the institute. I've not added much since we left, but I'm going to keep it online for old times' sake.
Saying goodbye to our conversation club at end of NGI's 2016-2017 academic year. Photo by Maria Kazantseva.
Overwhelmed by the daily stream of Internet updates? For Russian readers, Alexei Navalny's foundation presents a new aggregator to select the most promising morsels from Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram: trrrending.today. Meanwhile, in English, here's a new Daily Beast interview with Navalny.
A teenage memory, not long after I first fell in love with the blues: My father caught me playing the album Chicago/The Blues/Today, vol. 1, in my basement hideout, and warned me: "Don't let your mother catch you listening to that music."
Back in September, I wrote about a book that affected me powerfully, Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People. Whether or not the author intended it, this book seems to me to be one of the most evangelistic I've seen in a long time.
The two books are very different: Sarah Ruden wrote about early Christian history, while Relentless Pursuit authors Richard Sagor and Deborah Rickey wrote about an Oregon educator who is still alive and active. They wrote a secular book for a secular audience, but they are clear that this educator, Dea Cox, and the philosophy behind his successful leadership in the school district they describe, are grounded in Quaker faith.
Right from the start, the authors make it clear that Dea Cox didn't pursue a model that is sometimes fashionable today in the high-stakes world of school superintendents—namely the charismatic authoritarian. Nor did he begin his 14-year tenure in the West Linn-Wilsonville school district with a sure-fire set of formulas or educational doctrines that could be replicated by someone else with the right instruction book or guru close at hand. Instead, he pursued and implemented a "people strategy" that became part of the culture of that school district to this day.
Dea summed up his strategy this way: "The secret of being a successful school administrator is to spend your energy and resources attracting and retaining good staff." It's a deceptively simple statement with deep implications, and the book spends most of its pages describing the implementation of this "secret" in recruiting and interviewing new educators, decisions about tenure, budgeting, superintendent-staff relations, relations with students and parents, drawing school boundaries, adopting new technologies, and other areas of educational administration--all of which are loaded with opportunities for conflict and fragmentation. In all of these areas, the three core values of the people strategy are immediately relevant:
No person has a monopoly on wisdom.
We all have things to learn.
Wiser decisions are made when we consider multiple perspectives.
Each chapter of the book is a case study, or set of cases, showing in practical terms how these values are applied. I particularly loved the description of how Dea and his colleagues handled the process of deciding what computer system to use for the district.
Other values important to Quakers are also recurring themes in this book, particularly truth and trustworthiness. The authors show how being truthful, instead of giving in to the constant organizational temptation to "feign certainty," had at least two very practical benefits: credibility with parents, and resistance to complacency within the organization.
Dea and Lois Cox have been a blessing to our meeting, Reedwood Friends Church, and to us personally. Over the years, we've heard Dea describe the values (and some of the wonderfully illustrative incidents) recorded in The Relentless Pursuit of Excellence. Thanks to Richard Sagor and Deborah Rickey, these rich insights have been thoughtfully organized and made accessible in this short, fascinating book.
Nursery of Truth: "We think the future of Friends depends on whether we can explain and translate the core of Quakerism to a new century and to those outside our standard constituencies. We won’t be able to do this if we can’t talk to each other, or talk about faith at all." Background story.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, here's an interactive online documentary. (Thanks to Open Culture.) And on the Friends Committee on National Legislation site, this post by Rachel Kent.
Somewere I read that the number of students of Russian language in the USA is about a quarter of its peak during the cold war. It's certainly true that Russian has not been offered at my Chicago-area high school for a long time, and the Russian-language faculty at my university is roughly a third of the size I remember.
The theme of a decline in Russian expertise in the West (in language, economics, politics, and so on) has been around a while. Controversy swirled, for instance, around the defunding of the USA's "Title VIII" program of support for Russian studies last fall. And now this deficit of experts is blamed as a factor behind the USA's recent supposedly inept handling of relations with Russia.
Sean Guillory's Facebook page just posted a link to The Moscow Times's article "Getting Russia Wrong" by Peter Rutland. The article itself offers three purported examples of botched policy resulting from "shallow and schematic misunderstanding of Russian politics...." Comments on Sean's post, taken together, provide a compact review of the things area experts can and cannot provide. Given experts' fondness for "nuance" and lack of practical policy guidance, Mark Schrad confesses that he's "just a little cynical about the role of 'expert knowledge' these days and in these circumstances." Andrew Gentes responds, in part, "... But the idea that we have to have an all or nothing approach (either we really know what's in Putin's head or we're just playing a random guessing game) seems to be an expression of frustration with the realities of geopolitics. Oh, and I will continue to defend nuance over mere insight or (gasp!) Ultimate Truth."
What should we reasonably expect from experts?
Facts and thoughtful interpretations of the past
A professional vocabulary adequate to communicate the details and nuances of their field
Concrete data about the correlation of forces in a given situation
Balanced sampling of participants' voices in all the constituencies involved
Linguistic and cultural context
Honesty about sources and methodology
Recommendations for action.
What are we unlikely to get from experts? (Surprise me!)
Exact predictions
Perfect ability to communicate their findings to nonspecialists
Mind-reading
Perfect objectivity
Total honesty about past errors; complete disinterest in career advancement
Fair descriptions of competing or opposing points of view.
What work is required of the experts' audience members (the end users of their expertise)? (Can you add to this list?)
Respect experts and support their work; they're part of the team, perhaps not as important as they might think, but as essential as our own five senses
Don't depend on just one expert, and take special care to identify contrasting viewpoints; discount snarky descriptions of rivals!
Don't expect experts to reveal all their biases
Make the effort to get an adequate command of their jargon, but don't be afraid to request plain English
Take their recommendations into account, but don't allow or expect them to do your priority-setting work for you
Ask whether they are at all invested in the well-being of the people they study (it's much easier to be glib about people and places you don't care about)
Beware of fashions and trends in the field
Be at least as honest as you expect your experts to be; don't feign certainty; don't hide behind your experts when you fail
Above all, know your own enduring goals and values, and apply expertise accordingly.
Russian and Ukrainian Baptist leaders meet in Kiev on April 8.
Christian stewardship: Quaker "Options" (part one--excellent!) and Basil the Great, "Woe to the Rich."
Martin E. Marty on the "End of Elite Denominational Headquarters." The article made me nostalgic for the "elite" offices of Friends United Meeting on Quaker Hill in Richmond, Indiana, USA. FUM's modest premises share a beautiful little campus with the Quaker Hill Conference Center, and now also serve the Right Sharing of World Resources program. In an odd coincidence, the Right Sharing program occupies the very same office I used in my time at FUM (1993-2000). My job before coming to FUM? Coordinator of Right Sharing! But then it was based in my home office in Wilmington, Ohio, from where it moved to Cincinnati for most of Roland Kreager's tenure.
Today's antidote to the scourge of false-witness-bearing: Big Daddy Wilson pleads, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes."
The USA's new president has not put to rest any of the concerns I mentioned two weeks ago. I'm not the only one who is alarmed by policies that don't conform to American ideals, a management style that I labeled "chaotic improvisation," a constant focus on his own image as a winner, a continuing refusal to be transparent about his personal financial interests, and his promotion of Steve Bannon into the very center of U.S. political power.
But aren't all of these complaints simply a matter of interpretation? Don't they in fact reveal my biases and my unhappiness with the election's outcome? Isn't the president simply doing what he promised? Isn't he simply being a businessman instead of a politician? Why haven't I included a single positive development in this sour list? What about the new Supreme Court nominee, for example? In short, why can't I give this brand-new president the benefit of the doubt?
It's this formula, "the benefit of the doubt," that I'd like to take a look at this week and the next week. How do we implement the same sort of fairness to Donald Trump that we would like to claim for ourselves if we (and our awesome policies) found ourselves at the top? How do we balance this benefit with that other national security rule of thumb beloved of the post-9/11 neocons, the "one percent doctrine"?
(The essence of the one percent doctrine, as summarized by Tom Engelhardt, "... was this: if there was even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, it must be dealt with as if it were a 95%-100% certainty." More about the wider applicability of the doctrine in this post. Question: does today's alleged danger of creeping authoritarianism in the USA qualify as an equivalent occasion of alarm and response?)
I see the principle of responding to doubt with grace as an important antidote to one very real danger, the abiding occupational hazard of political scientists and the spiritual poison of our time: cynicism. I've written before about my struggles with cynicism, both here in Russia and in the American context. For example, here's an entry I wrote back in 2010, slightly adapted:
The service in the stores is terrible, not like in America. Our government should decree that better service be provided in the stores. And they should also control the ads on TV; they all try to manipulate, deceive people. That should not be. In America, that's never the case. I never saw such lies when I was in America.
A week ago [now six years ago] I reported on the aftermath of a beautiful choral concert. Among the comments from students who had attended the concert and were still glowing the next day, one sentiment really struck me: "I had given up on Russia" -- until somehow the concert restored at least a little hope.
A few days later, the glow was much reduced. Several of our friends were insisting that there was no future for them in Russia. Too little creative freedom; too much corruption; in short, where's the exit? I have had countless conversations on this theme ever since my first visit to post-Soviet Russia in 1994.
Who are we to argue? If we claim to be here -- at least in part -- to listen, we must then listen, even if we're told things we don't want to hear. But the problem with such unrelieved negativity is that (1) negativity can always find a way to prove itself right, and (2) in the long run, it helps create the conditions for things to remain negative. As Nancy Ries says in the book cited above, "It is the irony of all societies, not just Russia, that strategies for coping with trouble, including the discursive mythification of trouble, may also cause or allow the toleration of more trouble."
When I came to Russia in 1994, large numbers of people were not getting their salaries on a regular basis. Four year later, I witnessed first-hand a few of the devastating ripple effects of the August "default." The situation for millions of Russians today is dramatically better. I can cite many examples of improved housing, improved infrastructure, even improved service by bureaucrats.
For every improvement, someone could undoubtedly cite something that remains neglected, or worse, that exhibits the legendary indifference of some Russian elites to those at the bottom. For every advantage gained by people in this new century, some would cite an advantage lost when the Soviet Union's ritualized idealism and centralized planning came to an end. Paradoxes abound -- the people who have no trust for government ("They lie to us; why shouldn't we lie to them?" says a friend of ours) and who find ways around any inconvenient rule are the same ones who urge the government to tighten regulations and apply a bigger stick -- citing their own functional anarchism as evidence!
Thus: causes of cynicism are not hard to find. What's an incorrigible optimist, who nevertheless acknowledges the need to take people's testimonies seriously, bound to do?
First, I think there's a difference between realism (particularly what we might call Christian realism) and cynicism. Biblically-rooted realism is not particularly shocked when people turn out to behave deviously, have hidden agendas, are motivated by greed or fear or lust, or are just plain ignorant. Luke's rich man, dressed in purple, is separated from Lazarus by much more than the gate in between.
But when we're faced with such evidence of cruelty or hypocrisy, it's the next step that is crucial in the fight against cynicism and its trusty ally, passivity. We can check it off as yet another example of the corruption we've already accepted (though we claim to be against corruption), whether that checking-off serves our ideology or simply our laziness. OR we can analyze the situation: what are the powers at work, who benefits, what does this reveal about structures and stresses, where is prayer needed and for whom, who else needs to know what is going on--and is there an alternate explanation? Is there a case to be made for "the benefit of the doubt"?
Whenever we see some policy or transaction that smells fishy, it's natural for us to ask, "Who benefits?" (Or in Deep Throat's variation, "Follow the money.") But it is important to ask the question analytically, not tendentiously! Every time we surrender to the temptation to say "After all, what else did we expect?" we actually fudge that analysis. Worse, we marginalize every person in that supposedly corrupt system who is trying to do a good job.... Yes, some of them are compromised (and some of us criticizing them are far from 100% pure, too!), but let's make our skepticism work for us rather than for the Author of Confusion.
Two thousand years ago, in a time of rampant tyranny and corruption, God intervened in the form of a tiny Baby -- a Baby who quickly became a political hot potato and a refugee. Three decades later, his earthly fate was supposedly in the hands of a minor potentate, Pontius Pilate, himself caught in that imperial tyranny. There is no power or principality so entrenched that Jesus and his disciples cannot look directly at it and tell the truth -- about the system, and about the souls trapped in it. That included Rome (note past tense!); it includes Russia; it certainly includes the USA. Thank you, Jesus.
What does the Trump-Putin partnership really mean? Jim Kovpak's interpretation (and as usual, he doesn't mince words). And ... for what it's worth ... this just in: U.S. Treasury reportedly eases sanctions on the FSB.
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, Nancy Ries.