It’s the Same but Different

Some developmental psychologists consider ages three to five as the most formatively critical. This makes sense when you stop to consider that it is during these years that the sense of self as contrasted with all that is outside the self begins to evolve from the concrete to the abstract. The mind begins to develop a conservation of matter that enables the toddler to realize that something still exists even when it can’t be seen (an important thing to understand when Mom leaves the room). These were the years that Platteville, Colorado was home for me, and so the memories may take a bit longer to recount. Home still meant Mom and Dad and a parsonage next door to the church, but other entities were broadening my mental horizon.

Be It Ever So Humble

Limited to the second half-hour of my lunch, I’m not having any success finding out what the population of Erie, Colorado was in 1950, but I can assure you that it wasn’t very big. My memories of that home can easily be summarized in this paragraph. The parsonage was an old white frame house right next door to the church. A gas stove with a transparent front was installed after we moved in. The church had a stage with recessed lights. “Walker” (my adult friend) made me a cardboard Santa Claus that stood as tall as me. There were older kids, I think a brother and sister, but I don’t remember their names. I sliced open my elbow on an empty typewriter ribbon can and had to have stitches. Uncle Dale and his crew moved our furniture in one of his grain trucks when Dad was appointed to Platteville. That’s when I discovered that home moves even when houses don’t.

That Seems Normal

We humans have a penchant for normalcy. It provides the baseline from which we can discern the abnormal. There is a great variety of norms, but the first we perceive is understandably egocentric. To paraphrase, home is where it’s normal. In my instance, normal was initially being the only child of a mother and father who were married. Normal was a turn of the century parsonage which housed the three of us. Normal was white people. Normal was belonging to a church. Normal was everything I experienced while safely protected from any deviance. With maturity, however, comes an increasing awareness of the abnormal. That kid lives in a different house. That kid has only a mother. That man over there is alone. There are brown people who talk funny at the Post Office. Early on, the human objective becomes maintaining the norm, sometimes to the point of a conservatism that is counter to reality. When that desire to maintain the status quo is confronted by what Andrew Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University professor of public policy, describes as “more turbulence in our family lives, more changes of partners and parents, than any other nation;” tension and conflict are generated. What seemed so normal then turns out to be the home to which Thomas Wolfe says I can’t go again.

Finally, a Good Report Card

I have been so quick in the past to vent about some of the shenanigans where I work that I am simply duty-bound to report the most positive experience I’ve had since being employed here. Our Assistant District Attorney, Teresa Lowry, has—like President Obama—inherited a mess. Nevada ranks dead last in national performance measures of child support enforcement, and Ms. Lowry has proclaimed this unacceptable. The breath of fresh air that swept me up today was Ms. Lowry’s willingness to listen, I mean really listen, to some ideas I have about the way our division accepts applications, etc; nothing profound, mind you, but recognizing the benefits to be derived from employing the ethic of mutual reciprocity. Naturally, I am feeling good because it was me that Ms. Lowry took the time to listen to, but I have observed that she is doing the same with others throughout the division and that’s what really impresses me. There is a better day ahead for all of us when our leaders—from Brack Obama to Teresa Lowry—are willing and able to listen.

Oh, You Better Watch Out!

I was born just in time to be included in the 1950 Census which reported Denver’s population as 415,786. That’s not a lot less than the 557,917 that’s being reported today, but since 1950 the suburbs have mushroomed around the landlocked Mile High City. Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital is no more, a fact for which I hope I deserve no credit. Christmas was on a Sunday in 1949, which probably caused additional stress for my seminarian father. Mom tells me that her physician had celebrated the Christ’s birth to the extent that an intern had to pinch hit, which in hindsight may explain many things. This was home: a mother and a father. It’s quaint, I know, but this was my introduction to life.

Where the Heart Is

Planet Earth became my home Christmas day, 1949 C.E. I have no recollection of anything before that. Indeed, my earliest memory is of the Methodist parsonage in Erie, Colorado, where we moved when I was about two. I was an atomic child born into the legacy of the greatest destructive power known to humankind. The sky was blue. The snow was white. The grass was green. Mom and Dad were my world, and their world was composed of brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. Denver, Erie, Platteville, Arvada, Lincoln, Wheat Ridge, Coral Springs, Westminster, Flagstaff, Omaha, Burwell, Oakland and Las Vegas have each taken their turn as the home where my anatomical heart was, but my spiritual heart is forever ensconced in the home of family and love.

Home Is Where the Heart Is

I wonder sometimes how fundamentalists who claim to take every word of the Bible literally interpret non-biblical idioms. Does the sentiment “home is where the heart is” require anatomical correctness? Is there a difference between a house and a home? Such quirky questions may be quickly tossed aside, I’m guessing, because that specific phrase does not appear in Scripture and therefore God did not say it. Anyway, to embark upon the venture of “going home” does require some definition, and to say that it is “where the heart is” works for me. Alas, I’m not all that sure where my heart is.

Going Home

I know what Thomas Wolfe said. In the static sense of returning to an already passed point in space and time, he is correct. But the process paradigm puts an existential twist on just what “home” is. Admittedly, as our plans to return to Colorado in the next year or so have taken on a more definitive shape, it has given rise to thinking about whence we came. To a theological worldview, however, that is but a step away from contextualizing the ultimate. We are all, then, going home.

It is in this spirit that I look forward to probing further just what “home” means. It will be a journey of retrospect and prospect converging in the fleetingly elusive now, and of trying—in exemplary Socratic fashion—to make sense of it all. I thank you in advance, dear reader, for your company along the way.

No We Can’t! Yes We Can!

The older I get, the more I wonder who “they” are. For instance, with a Democrat in the White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, why are “we” concerned about what “they” think about economic stimulus, gun control, reproductive rights, stem cell research…the list goes on and on. We seem to be in the crisis mode at almost every level these days, and yet “we” continue to defer to the mindsets that created the crises. My own workplace is working its way through a crisis of sorts right now, the fact that we have been rated dead last in the nation with regard to child support enforcement. The plea has been sounded by our top administrator to start thinking outside the box, and yet I doubt that we will make any more progress than in the past because “they” are still telling us how things must be done. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone yet that “they” are obviously wrong. “They” are wrong about gun control in the nation with the highest per capita murder rate in the industrialized world. “They” are wrong about denying women the right to choose. “They” are wrong about placing ideology above reason and science. “They” are wrong about funneling billions of dollars into institutions that greedily abused every precept of common sense known. And in my own little world, “they” are wrong that we must abdicate to and placate “customers” who many times employ the reproductive sensibilities of vermin. Our country, and in turn the world, turned a corner when we elected Barack Obama our President. Now it is time for us to move forward, doing what is right, effecting the change that will benefit everyone, while “they” need to shutup and apologize for being so very, very wrong.

What Would Jesus Do?

The question is a sincere albeit elementary way of attempting to determine the morality of something. Equating Jesus to God justifies his thoughts and actions as the moral way. We, of course, have no empirical means of knowing what Jesus would have done in any number of situations and are left with scriptural accounts that were not written as factual reports but rather as apologetic treatises. On this day of tea parties in protest of taxation, the “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” response found in Matthew 22:21 would seem reasonably clear, until we stop to consider what is truly being proposed. It is difficult to imagine that Jesus was in a high tax bracket, even though he lived in an empire that perhaps exceeded even the United States in its taxation. Indeed, if taken seriously, the latter part of Jesus’ answer points in the direction of owing nothing to Ceasar if everything is understood to belong to God. But to render “unto God the things that are God’s” doesn’t allow for the hording of that which is not given to the State. I have no objections to paying the taxes I paid today, but I have serious arguments with how they are being used. To truly give to God what is God’s is tantamount to a vow of poverty, a revolutionary new understanding of submitting my all in confidence that I will be cared for as are the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. The next time you hear a “Christian” protesting taxes, ask why it didn’t go to God in the first place.

For Our Children’s Sake

Have we forgotten how to stand up for ourselves? I wonder when I watch trillions of dollars being pumped every which way except the taxpayer. I continue to marvel at how Barack Obama has taken the horrible situation he inherited in hand, but even he can do only so much with the institutionalized greed of Washington, D.C. We have essentially become the Corporations of America, and We the People find ourselves—as we did over two-centuries ago—serfs subject to corporate (instead of monarchical) excess and greed. We are losing our jobs, our health insurance, our futures…and yet we passively wait to see which way our corporate masters are going to next twist the knife they stab us with. On March 27, Bill Moyers Journal interviewed journalist Willaim Greider who had just written an Op-Ed in the Sunday Washington Post which suggested that public rage “has great potential for restoring a functioning democracy. Timely intervention by the people could save the country from some truly bad ideas now circulating in Washington and on Wall Street.” There is a strong argument, I believe, for We the People to take to the streets and take our government and country back. Perhaps it is too much to hope for, but I’d like to think that we’ve moved beyond violent revolution to rational change. I picked up a magnet while we were in Flagstaff last week which is right beside my monitor here at work: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” -Gandhi

It’s Easter Monday in Canada

I returned to work from our Holy Week trek only to learn that a coworker’s child had committed suicide. I had spent last week reveling in the joyful love of family while someone else found life to be desperately hopeless. For those who have tired of my theological ramblings, I suppose there was the hope that post-Easter musings might turn a different direction. But there is no escaping the life-changing consciousness of the something that is everything or the life-destroying lack of that awareness. Is there anything more real than pain? As John Lennon put it, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” A poorly developed theology may lead one to believe that the presence of God absents pain. The shortcoming of this worldview is when it follows that where pain is present, God is absent. Not long ago, Bill Moyers interviewed Karen Armstrong on the subject of compassion as the universal Truth which threads its way through “all major religious, spiritual and ethical traditions.” Literally meaning “to suffer with” may have been what led the great process thinker, Alfred North Whitehead, to refer to God as our “suffering companion.” God is in the pain as well as the joy, and we will all be the better for it to remember this.

Easter Sundae in Las Vegas

The forty is finished.  What a magnificent experience!  I made some progress cleaning up the interference and distortion, and though the reception is still far from perfect it is better than it was.  Rejoined from the heartland westward with those we love and who love us, our Holy Week pilgrimage returns us to Sin City, the truest test of the bountiful blessings that are ours.  The connection remains as available as our awareness of it, powerful enough to penetrate our inattentiveness whenever its guard is down.  The something that is everything receives us as we are and loves us even unto death.  I’ll take the works on mine.

The Thirty-third Day of Lent

I’m watching the horrific details of the shootings in Binghamton, New York, unfold and it forces me to refine some of my previous Lenten thoughts.  Earlier I surmised that God would never shoot first.  For lack of a better way to clarify, I find myself resorting to the Matthean premise of good and evil, right and wrong, and therefore qualifying that position insofar as God’s “good” nature would never shoot first.  This is the conundrum of radical monotheism, because this paradigm requires the concession that God’s “evil” nature will shoot first.  The yin and the yang.  The positive and the negative.  The infinite aspects of the whole.  If we are praying to God that these evil occurrences cease with the expectation that God will somehow miraculously intervene, then we must revisit our understanding of the clinical definition of insanity.  Humankind is both blessed and cursed by the gift of volition, the ability to choose the direction the life force within each of us takes.  I pray for an Easter resurrection of my unceasing awareness that the Source empowers me for good or for evil while lovingly encouraging me to resist the temptation of the latter.

I’m Hearing God Again

If you’ve taken the time to visit my blog, I hope you’ll take the additional time to read an essay so excellent that I can only wish that I’d written it myself:

The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America? By Kurt Andersen