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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh
I recently read a book on leadership. The book can remain nameless, mostly because it was bunk. To be more exact, it was pushing the sort of “get ahead at all costs,” “the guy who dies with the most toys wins” sort of mentality that is so prevalent today. The good news is it got me to thinking about what makes a good leader. What does he/she look like, what lifestyle do they exhibit and so on. All of which posed the following question:
What did Jesus do with all that gold, frankincense, and myrrh? There’s no record at all. Probably, Joseph took it and just kept carpentering until it was all gone. (Poor folks didn’t do so well in those days.) At any rate, Jesus apparently didn’t have much use for the fame, wealth, and power that comes from being “number one.” He would have made a lousy king. That’s probably why he disappeared once when his followers decided to make him king.
Jesus’ values, as opposed to those of a great number of our current religious and political bloviaters, were compassion, frugality, and modesty. (in the sense of not trying to get yourself elected king, etc.). Those values do not require the addition of much wealth, power, or fame to make them work. As a matter of fact, fame, power, and wealth tend to get in the way.
On the other hand, it does occur to me that if you need to be a wealthy, powerful blowhard to be an effective king, and if we can’t find any kingdoms that have outlived His kingdom, maybe this whole modern “leadership” game is not worth the candle. Could be that’s why our founder said that if we want to be leaders, we should become servants of all. Just a thought.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Dog and the Car
So what does your dog do when he actually catches the car? I used to stop my car from time to time, just to watch the expression on the dog’s face when he realized, “good Lord, I’ve caught it, now what do I do with it?” Before he caught the car he was a dog with a mission. Now that he’d caught it, everything he did to make his capture, (and presumably everything he thought he was going to do after the capture) was suddenly irrelevant.
It strikes me that religion is like that a lot of the time. The function of any religion is to lead you to God. I’m convinced that all big time religions do that, if well and properly practiced. But once you’re there, what’s the religion for? Doctrines, dogmas, and sacred writings pale more than just a little when put alongside an ongoing relationship with the creator and sustainer of all there is.
That being the case, you’d think religious types would get along a lot better than they do. After all, they all claim to bring their practitioners into a vital relationship with God, the gods, ultimate reality or whatever they conceive of as “all there is”. Since there can only be one “ultimate reality,” you’d think most religions would be “on the same page,” so to speak.
Apparently not. Here in Christendom, the Protestants don’t get along that well with the Catholics. Come to think of it, the Protestants don’t get along that well with each other, or much of anybody. Let’s not even think about relations with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. (To be fair, they don’t get along all that well with us either) So what’s going on?
I think that most of these religious practitioners have never “caught the car.” Those that have (we generally call them mystics) get along with each other just fine, no matter what religion they spring from. Here’s the thing. Our religions – all their doctrines, laws, taboos, practices, metaphysics and theologies are only sign posts on the way to God. They are not God. My advice when confronted with the fundamentalist type who insists you’ve got to believe one from column A and at least two from column B in order to get to heaven is to smile benignly and wish him good luck in his chase. Please God, let more of them catch the car before they blow us all away.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
If the world is wrong
When I was just old enough to know that there is a big world of ideas out there, I stumbled upon a comedian. He was from Jackson Tennessee, I think, and he billed himself as “Brother Dave Gardner”. There was much about Brother Dave that was profound and all of it was funny. He was like a southern Lenny Bruce, minus the vulgarity. Among the really profound sayings I picked up from him was, “if the world is wrong, then right your own self”.
You can take that as an invitation to conform and go along with the crowd, even though the crowd may be crazy. Or you can take the more profound point that the best, (only?) way to impact a world gone wrong is to go right in spite of it all. The latter is a better way of looking at it.
I believe a few things about the world. I believe that things as they exist are the result of millions of choices and decisions made every day, all the time, by all of us. For that reason the choices we make are of extreme importance. When most of us choose to “right our own selves” the will of God gets done. When not, then not. I also believe that things (including us) are always changing. Change is simply, all there is. For that reason the most important question to ask about our choices is, where are they leading us?
We are tempted to think that we don’t count in all this because there are so many “choosers”. After all, what could it matter if I “right my own self”? Who would care? Well, you could ask Gandhi, or Buddha or Moses or Christ, or any number of others. They all thought’ righting their own selves’ was worth the trouble, and they were all absolutely right about that. All of this gives me great hope. If you look at where we were as a species 2000 years ago, and where we are today, the trends (neo fascists, residual communists and religious fanatics aside) are in the right direction.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Sick and tired
I always get antsy when working to help the hungry leads to taking positions on political questions. The fact of the matter is I don’t like the way politics is done very much. It seems to me that there is a far right element (‘yes, the earth is flat, says so right here in the sacred scroll’) and a far left element (‘here, have some more pie with that sky’) and not much in the middle anymore.
Health care is a case in point. I don’t know how stupid Americans really are, but it seems we are the only modern nation on the planet that just can’t figure out how to get all our people to the doctor when they get sick. And now we can’t even figure out how to hold the line on insurance for poor kids. There’s a wonderful presidential legacy, don’t you think?
But hey! I’m really not writing this to bash Bush. Where would be the challenge in that? The point is that this whole health care mess is fixable. After all the British, Germans, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Danes, Poles, Italians, Canadians, and yes Rush, even the French have figured it out. So can we. But we can’t figure anything out if our so called leaders spend most of their time sticking their tongues out at each other. So please people, for the sake of the poor sick children, put your hands in your pockets, step away from the microphone and just “git ‘er done”. I’ll bet Larry the cable guy could figure it out.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Talk is cheap
Some days I think I read too much. Too much information can make your head hurt. But it can also lead to some significant insights, which, in turn, can make your head hurt. For instance I recently read two polls on American’s attitude toward taking care of the poor. One was the product of a fairly conservative polling and research outfit called “The Barna Group”. The other was the product of the more liberal group, the “Alliance to end Hunger”. These polls were fascinating and I encourage you to look up their respective websites (barna.org; and alliancetoendhunger.org) and check them out in detail.
What struck me was their common finding that American’s attitude toward the poor was basically not influenced at all by their religious convictions. This, it seems to me, is good news and bad news. The good news is that our people seem to be decent enough so that the majority of them consider taking care of the poor to be of serious importance just because it’s the right thing to do. In fact they consider taking care of the poor to be much more important than do our so called “leaders”.
The bad news is that being a self professed “Christian” doesn’t seem to change the attitude of anybody where poverty is concerned. You’d think with all the hype about Christianity, especially the “born again” variety that more religious folks would care about the hungry than do non-religious folks. Apparently not.
The lesson to me in all of this is that religion is much better practiced than talked about. Theology really doesn’t impress me much. If really practicing a particular religion makes you more Christ-like, that impresses me a lot. Maybe if we had more practice and less blather the poor folks would get fed more often.
