Perhaps I was a bit vain after how well I faced heart surgery, but last night was a completely different story. Yesterday was such a great day. It felt so good to finally be out of the hospital. When I couldn’t sleep this morning I decided to get up and make myself some breakfast. It was about three am. Assuming the reader has never had heart surgery, I will tell you the the hardest, at least for me, has been getting in and out of bed. After surgery, they tell you to imagine you are a tyrannosaurus rex and cannot stretch out your arms. But tyrannosaurus rex’s at least get to bite someone. You cannot put weight on your arms without risking damage to the wound in your chest. If you don’t complete the “log roll” on the first try you can easily end up feeling like a turtle on its back. The feeling is very helpless. You can feel like an exhausted worm squirming helplessly on a hot pavement. Rev Babs has lent me a wonderful recliner that can lean back and forward and then help you actually stand thus greatly reducing the sense of hopeless. I almost felt like I was cheating by using it with my rehab. I was counting my chickens. So, anyway, it’s three am and I am trying to stand up but I can’t get traction with my yellow hospital socks. I slowly slump to the floor and end up helplessly in a self pitying puddle on the floor. Whatever Gandhi points I had earned facing heart surgery were lost instantly as I began to curse my yellow socks. Yes, I was literally swearing like a sailer at two inanimate objects. Lying pitifully on the floor unable, to find my footing, or find my peace of mind I suddenly remembered a teaching by the great Buddhist priest, Thich Nhat Hahn: “Anger is like a howling baby, suffering and crying. The baby needs (their) mother to embrace (them). You are the mother for your baby, your anger. The moment you begin to practice breathing mindfully in and out, you have the energy of a mother, to cradle and embrace the baby. Just embracing your anger, just breathing in and breathing out, that is good enough. The baby will feel relief right away.” So another lesson in living this week: my wisdom foundation is never really secure until I can love my immature emotions and transform them with nurture instead of judgment. Our work on world peace often begins within the cradle of our own heart.
I’m finally home from the hospital. Thank you all for your messages and thoughts this week. I very much felt the support of Saint Andrews, other clergy, and of this wonderful online community I would never have chosen to go through open heart surgery if I had an option. I am not one who believes that suffering is necessarily redemptive, but I also knew there is wisdom that can only be gained from suffering. In a way, this week was like being kidnapped at knife point and taken to a radiant Zen monastery to sit on the razor’s edge with the greatest teacher of all- Life. I am a person of enormous privilege. What I know of human suffering has been borrowed from Black activists who trusted me with their anger. I have had to borrow the lessons of human suffering from rape survivors and members of my LGBTQIA human family who trusted me enough to share the lessons of a depth of suffering I have never experienced directly myself. It is a good thing to empathize with the sufferings of others, but is a better thing to learn to FEEL that pain in my own body. I’m not sure I am articulate enough to express this week’s experience. It was a Dante’s Inferno moving from subjective to objective perceptual states with the help of mythic symbols and hundreds of human rights teachers I have known in my life. I empathized with human suffering, but I did not yet FEEL the thorn of human suffering in my own heart. Sometimes this week my inner hallucinations were so strong and clear that it was hard to witness the objective reality happening before me. Other times, the passionate empathy of ICU nurses clearly feeling my duress was so sweet and noble that they were my objective teachers in the the central importance empathy. In the early North African Church there was a reverence for human reason. Many of the hymns of the early Alexandrian church spoke from a wisdom lost when Christianity became European, dogmatic and hierarchical. For some reason, lying on my back in this week I realized that most of my heroes in the early church were Black. I also remembered that, just as “Logos” was the rational part of wisdom in the early church, there was also an emotive side to wisdom that Aristotle termed “Pathos.” To be fully human in an indifferent cosmos means to suffer. There may or may not be a meaning behind our suffering, but there is enormous wisdom to be found within it. This week, it seemed to me, that “Pathos” was the mythic truth behind Jesus on the cross, Prometheus bound, and the Goddess in search of her absconded child or lover imprisoned in the underworld. I remembered Jung’s statement that all neurosis comes from an unwillingness to suffer. (I didn’t have any books there so don’t trust my quotes yet.) It occurred to me this week that, perhaps, the MAGA movement is a collective neurosis of White people unwilling to FEEL what we have done to People of Color through history. Perhaps MAGA is shared neurosis of men lacking the courage to FEEL our connection to the rape and battering women have endured since the founding of this nation. Perhaps Christian nationalism is a shared neurosis of Christians unwilling to FEEL our connection to the German Holocaust and our betrayal of human rights through history. Albert Schweitzer was my first real spiritual hero. He came to his “Reverence for Life” philosophy watching the duress of a herd of hippos struggle to cross a swollen river. Perhaps he was realizing the central importance of “Pathos” to any who seek to live an ethical life. When the Buddha spoke of human existence as suffering, perhaps he was not being negative but teaching the message of “Pathos,” that peace of mind is to be found by becoming fully aware of our human suffering. When Arch Bishop Romero said there are things in life that can only be seen through eyes that have cried, perhaps he was singing a hymn of homage to the Goddess of Wisdom whose name is “Pathos.”
It seems to me that someone doesn’t really love America if they do not believe in three equal branches of government providing checks and balances. It seems to me that someone doesn’t really love America if they don’t believe in due process for anyone accused of a crime. It seems to me, someone who doesn’t believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all persons, regardless of race, creed, or gender, may love the flag, they may love the economic opportunities here, but they do not really love America.
This will be my last post for a while. My heart surgery begins early tomorrow morning and it will probably be a week or so before I am out of the hospital. This will be a good week for me to contemplate the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness usually comes to us when we get what we want out of life. Joy is ours when we accept and affirm the whole life process as it is. Happiness usually feels like we are being lifted to an elevated emotional state. Joy is ours when we can stand on the firm foundation of what simply is. Happiness feels like a stimulant. Joy feels more like a nutritious meal. Happiness and grief are hard if not impossible to experience at the same time. Joy can be often discovered deep below life’s storms shining through our tears even while we are still sad. Happiness usually follows something good that happens to us personally. Joy is always available to us when we remember the tie that binds us to others. Joy is an gentle empathy that can be experienced vicariously through the laughter of distant children or the dance of fireflies at a setting sun. Joy is a sense of our common being.
The worst heresy against the teachings of Jesus is not Atheism but loveless Christianity. The worst denial of Christ is not a lack of theological orthodoxy but a lack of ethical compassion. Heresy is believing that outsiders to one’s worldview are enemies to be feared instead of children of God to be loved. Heresy is believing that unshared wealth and power are signs of God’s blessings instead of symptoms of a deeply wounded soul. Heresy is believing you can put America first without putting the Sermon on the Mount second.
It is a mistake to think of idols as statues of foreign Gods. The deadliest idols are the sense images derived from our own traditions that replace our reason, creativity and ethical principles. Idolatry is when someone waves an American flag as they assault democratic principles protecting unpopular minorities. Idolatry is when patriotism becomes an assault on the weakest members of our one human family. Idolatry is when the cross is lifted up as a symbol of political power instead of sacrificial suffering for others. Perhaps the biggest idol in the church today is the bible itself understood literally. For many, scripture is a vital bridge to the experience of our ancestors. It is a bridge back through the ages to the great questions that have haunted humankind since we lived in caves. Scripture allows us to live in a longer story than our own brief span permits. It is the height of idolatry to turn the Bible into a finished relic instead of a living conversation reaching back through time. No one really loves the Bible who pretends it is a flawless book that can be understood literally. ALL human speech is contextual and ambiguous by nature. It is a lie to say the bible is one consistent manuscript that has been passed on unchanged through the centuries. What we call the bible consists of thousands of partial and often conflicting fragments woven together by human committees into a best guess of what the text originally said. No existing manuscript represents the original bible word for word. Originally, the bible was not divided into numbered verses and so people naturally focused on the great themes found in the ancient stories. When the text was divided into individual verses, people began to gravitate toward the triviality of their own interpretations. Literalists forget the ancient questions that makes scripture helpful in the first place. Once the bible became a sacred object consisting of neatly dividable verses, the ancient conversation it represented was lost. At that point the “living word” became, for many, an idolatrous relic as dead as a dissected frog.
I just got back from meeting with the heart surgeon. He is going to try to do the procedure within two or three weeks. It looks like I’ll need a new aorta, probably a valve and maybe a heart pacer. It’s all pretty routine these days. I’ll be a week in the hospital and then four to six weeks recovery. If all goes well I hope to be back to work in July. Thanks for all the well wishes, cards, food, etc.
In my life I have tried to learn from many teachers. From Buddhism I have tried to learn to turn my childish prayers of fear and desire into peaceful awareness. From Hinduism I have tried to learn to attune myself to the one cosmic dance. From Islam I have tried to learn that I do not belong to myself and so to give myself away completely. From Mysticism I have tried to to learn to sit in reverent unknowing. From Paganism I have tried to learn a reverent “nakedness” before the one holy temple of nature. From Atheism I have tried to learn radical honesty and preferring lessons learned from the natural world to what I personally want to believe. From Judaism I have tried to learn a longer story than my own, and to work for universal human rights. From Stoicism I have tried to focus on what I can control and let the rest fall away. From Taoism I have tried to learn that wisdom includes tuning ourselves to the processes of nature. From my own Christian tradition I have tried to learn that every true virtue is actually an aspect of love. From every tradition, person and event I have tried to learn to expand my horizons in the hope that someday I will be able to find compassion for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
When Christianity spread into the Roman Empire it got absorbed into the culture of patriarchy, nationalism and, eventually, capitalism. The faith was morphed from a message of liberation for all the wretched of the earth into a self-righteous cudgel for the rich and powerful. As you may know by now, the Roman emperor Constantine forced Christian bishops to come up with creedal statements that had little or nothing to do with the original teachings of Jesus. For many, the Christian religion was reduced to supernatural claims, cultic moralism and shameless toadying to the hierarchy of the day. For many, Christianity was reframed from a religion of empathic servanthood to one of judgmental sectarian control. The new imperial Christians were superstitious and ignorant about this world, but felt they were experts on the world to come. The new imperial Christians weren’t so good at loving their non-Christian neighbors, but felt they were good neighbors to their new and improved Jesus who now preferred working through the rich and powerful, and was no longer concerned with the poor and outcast. I believe there is confusion in calling the Christianity of Constantine and that of Jesus by the same name. I’m not saying we should argue about who gets the label, but it is important for somebody to say if some Christians want to force their dogma into the public square, that is the Christianity of Constantine not Jesus! Somebody needs to say, If there is a mass shooting and some Christians are more concerned about protecting their guns than the children, that is the Christianity of Constantine not Jesus! Somebody needs to say if some Christians are more concerned about the the success of the American economy than the plight of the working poor, that is the Christianity of Constantine not Jesus! And, finally, somebody needs to say, if the cross is a symbol of Christian superiority instead of a call to suffer on behalf of the oppressed of every nation, that is the Christianity of Constantine not Jesus!
I’ve always had a bad attitude when it comes to clergy garb. In seminary, I used to collect the pictures of clergy in pontifical poses because I thought they were so funny. I loved how Monty Python satirized clergy dressed like roosters trying to act humble. I was once doing a service with a conservative pastor who was hectoring me to wear a robe, but I was refusing to wear one until my LGBTQ colleagues could be ordained. The clergyman blurted out, “I wear the robe because this isn’t about me.” “Yeah,” I thought, “nothing helps you blend into a group of ordinary folk like 15th century garb.” So, when I was preparing to be arrested at a protest a few years back, my friend, the Reverend Babs Miller came to the office with a black clergy shirt and collar. My memory is a bit vague, but it seems to me she said, “You need to wear this.” My first thought was, “hell, no!” but I thankfully I did not say that out loud. My fear was that people would see the collar and think I was claiming special status in a sect that excluded many people who would be at the event. But I knew Babs had worn that shirt as a hospice chaplain. She wore it as a witness to dying people that they were loved even if they had been rejected by their churches and families. I knew Rev. Babs had also worn that shirt when she “came out” on the floor of Presbytery and called for justice for LGBTQ people within the church. Babs said, “This shirt and collar is a reminder of the message that are all loved. The press is going to take pictures and you need to communicate the message visually.” I wasn’t convinced but I showed up to get arrested wearing Bab’s black shirt and clergy collar. Perhaps knowing the garb had belonged to a lesbian minister helped me feel the subversive nature that symbols can have when taken from the powerful and given on behalf of those the church itself will sometimes betray. Bab’s words reminded me a bit of Johnny Cash’s song “Man in Black:” ” I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he’s a victim of the times.” When the arrest finally happened, it all felt a bit surreal. The arresting officer had me kneel. We were inside the building and could not see the press, but could hear the furious flashing of unseen cameras sounded like thunder. That picture of me kneeling in clergy garb showed up in newspapers all over the world. The picture of a minister getting arrested in that collar seemed to communicate that the crisis at the border had greater spiritual implications. Even when I was interviewed on Tucker Carlson, I could tell he was thrown off by the collar. God knows what he would have done if he realized it really belonged to a lesbian clergy. Babs had been right. Wearing her magic lesbian clergy collar had served as a reminder of the voices that really needed to be heard. The collar could serve as placeholder for the child drinking leaded water in Flint Michigan drowning in the fetid swamp of under regulated capitalism. The collar could serve as a placeholder for battered spouses told by the church to submit to their abusers. The collar could serve as a placeholder for the forgotten souls who rot in America’s vast prison industry. On this day I clearly felt myself to be a mere placeholder for mistreated undocumented immigrants whose righteous cries for justice were not being heard. After the arrest, Babs gave me her magic clergy collar. I still hate religious garb pretty passionately, but I wear the collar when someone’s humanity is on the line. To me, the collar serves as a reminder of every single person the church has excluded and whose humanity this nation has betrayed. The collar serves as one denomination’s reminder of that higher love to which we are all called- that love which is bigger than any of us, yet includes us all. (Story first posted March 2024, Picture credit to Austin American Statesman.)
