Faith and Default Settings

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
- David Foster Wallace

Maybe this is how blogs are supposed to work. I publish something. Then someone else publishes a comment that includes a Hey, you ought to read this. And my next blog is about the this.

The this is David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College from 2005 (thanks Winston Brown). Click HERE if you want to read it for yourself. The speech was (partly) about a trip to the supermarket after a long day at work.

Rather than telling all that bristling robed intelligence that great things await them, that they can achieve their dreams, that their enlightened minds will make the world a better place, David Foster Wallace said,

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in.

The startling thing about these lines is that they could be just as appropriately delivered to dropouts and misfits in a court ordered anger management group. Life is about choosing. And whether you're graduating from an elite private school or teetering on the edge of society, what we choose to worship matters. The ultimate choice becomes whether to worship something or someone out beyond myself or to live as "lord of [my] own tiny skull sized kingdom, alone at the center of creation."

Learning how not to end up alone and angry in the checkout line is what life and religion are about. It's as true in the Heights as it is in the 'hood. If all we have to worship is our selves, we'll live in one hell of a lonely place.

Not, perhaps, what the bright young graduates at Kenyon were expecting. But we all have to come to terms with the checkout line self. That familiar self there under the soul sapping fluorescent lights, among the soul sapped shoppers, among all those annoyingly other people, where everyone and everything is in my way.

There I find my basic default setting. It's my way that matters. Why can't everyone else get out of it?

But the good news is that we do get to choose. We get to choose whether or not to live like it's only my way that matters. And so I'm a Christian. Maybe this seems like a flimsy argument for religion. Maybe you're still hoping for 7 irrefutable facts that will pin you down and show you the light, or convince everyone else of the light by which you see. But I don't think there's a single airtight argument for the truth of the Christian faith. I'm less and less sure there's a single airtight argument for anything. And even if there were, we'd still have to choose. Ultimately I'm Christian because I find the perspective Jesus offered as compelling and life giving.

Faith is about stepping out into a perspective beyond the confines of my default setting. It's about giving up the small kingdom of my own skull and getting the whole world in return. The whole wondrous world of shopping cart clatter and traffic, of the shuffling old and the spastic young.

And maybe what I get first, when I override my default settings for even a moment, is simply that other soul on the other side of this table, just beyond my own cup of coffee, telling me who she is and why she's happy or sad or angry or bored and what the world looks like from a perspective beyond that of my own head.

Mine's an awfully small kingdom to give up for even just that.

The Daily Prophet

As they used to say on Monty Python's Flying Circus, "And now for something completely different..."

In other words, this blog isn't like anything I've ever written here.

When we moved to Little Rock from Virginia, Kate, then 5, asked, "Can we get one of those televisions that get channels?" So we plugged in the rabbit ears to our handmedown RCA. The few and often fuzzy channels we got were more than we'd ever had access to. But they obviously din't include Comedy Central.

After hearing about Jon Stewart's recent grilling of a CNBC commentator, I found the show on the internet. That show got this blog going. (Click here to watch it. Warning: it contains some thinly bleeped profanity.)

I think this was a prophetic moment.

It's news to most people that the Bible talks relatively little about sex, or what we call "family values". And most of the stories and teachings about sex and families would be scandalous to the folks who would present a middle class white Protestant American family from 1952 as the image of biblical perfection.

As I mentioned in a sermon on Sunday, what the Bible does talk a lot about is money and economics. Ingrained in the Torah, the Law, is a deep suspicion of the accumulation of too much wealth in the hands of too few. And a deep suspicion of making money just by having money. Charging interest was forbidden. Debts were forgiven every seven years. Property (which tends to gravitate towards a few) was to be redistributed every 50 years. The prophets repeat these warnings, more in the tenor of Jon Stewart. And my hunch is that the profanity was bleeped out of Isaiah as well.

Mr. Stewart's rage was towards managers and commentators like Jim Cramer who was caught on tape admitting that he and others in his business manipulated stock prices in order to make money. Piles of money. Some traders were just doing their jobs. But some were playing games with other people's money. Money earned by the real work of schoolteachers and electricians and business owners and all kinds of people whose wealth came from their work.

Jim Cramer advised people that a stock price might have nothing to do with the soundness of a company. It's not about whether a useful service or good work is provided. Buy a stock only if you think tomorrow somebody else will be convinced to pay more for it. It's wealth without work, unless manipulating stock prices by a hedge fund manager passes for work.

The point of this tirade is that it doesn't, or it shouldn't.

The new state lottery is something that can raise a lot of moral indignation on both sides. Some people have scruples about gambling. Some people say it's a way to fund scholarships in which people can choose freely whether or not to participate. But my concern is about the increasing notion that wealth comes out of nowhere. Which is precisely the myth promoted by the likes of Jim Cramer.

Long ago we started seeing ourselves primarily as consumers rather than producers. At what point will our economy seem to be a lottery to most of us, having almost nothing to do with what we each actually have to offer? When will we have lost the connection entirely between our work and our wealth?

The most important moral formation that goes on in our lives is not the formation that makes us say no when tempted to start a Ponzi scheme. Few of us will ever be so tempted. More important is the formation that cares about the consequences of our work and our wealth on other people. Moral formation is not about knowing the boundaries of the law (see "Mount, Sermon on the" by Jesus), or knowing allowable ways to make money in a market. Moral formation means learning in ever deepening ways that our lives and our choices matter to one another and giving all of those ways our attention.

Moral formation means putting away the convenient illusion (at least until now) that the free market will tell us what is good, and reviving the responsibility we have for imposing goodness on our markets in every exchange that we make.

Here ends the rant. Next week's topic: Something nicer.

Hospitality

I had seen her on Markham Street on my way to work a couple of times. She was hard to miss among the bizarre confluence of colors and patterns, the hats and skirts and beads that she had wrapped herself within.

She was even harder to miss on the front row of the Christ Episcopal Church nave. There she settled in, fully regaled not only with gowns and bags, but with a bright red bear. Throughout the service that bear was lifted up, perched on her head, and occasionally turned around so that the rest of the congregation might benefit from the message of love it bore on its belly.

I'll not pretend that my thoughts were only charitable. I'll not pretend that I thought only of the welcome to the displaced stranger Christ commanded of us. Probably the closest thing to a Christian response that stirred around in me was, "I wonder what it's like to be her."

What visions swim before or within her eyes that cause her to clap her hands, pleased with the sharp sounds bouncing around all that silent stone? What did the brass cross above the font bear or reflect or cry out to her? Something asked her to lift the stuffed red animal up in an offering gesture and to wave her hands and to stand while the rest of us sat. But what was that something, and how did it ask, and why?

I wonder what it's like to be her.

Such curiosity isn't always charitable. But could it contain or become the beginnings of hospitality?

Hospitality is fundamental to the Benedictine Rule of Life. But the practice of hospitality is meant to arise less out of obligation than expectation. It's that Christian anticipation of God's arrival into our lives through the life of the stranger that makes hospitality an avenue to the divine.

Ironically, religious fervor even among Christians is often marked by a deep suspicion of the 'other'. Suspicion and distrust fills all the space where one might wonder what it's like to be that street person or that gay person or that conservative person or that (fill in the uncomfortably other of your choice).

But maybe God has scattered the seeds of new life indiscriminately. Even in the seemingly perverse curiosity of our gawking selves we might find enough empathy to be tended and nurtured into the lifegiving expectation that God may be coming to us even through this strange one.

Kathleen Norris tells the story of an old aquaintance showing up at her door needing hospitality one night. She and her husband were in something of a crisis. He had fallen into a fit of depression, and Ms. Norris found it contagious. But the truth soon came clear that what these two people needed was to be hospitable that night. Not for the sake of the stranger, but for their own sakes. They needed to look up and out and away from their own lives for a moment, just long enough to break them open to a little grace.

Maybe that's what hospitality has always been for. While we know that there are people in this world whose very survival depends on the hospitality of others, what if the Christian practice of hospitality begins with my very own need to offer welcome to someone who is not myself.

Some days I need more than a nudge to be reminded of this truth. I need more than a whisper. Maybe some days I need the strangest of strangers to walk to the front row of my life and plop down, wave her arms, clap her hands, lift her red bear in the air. Reminding me of how bland and colorless God's world would be if it were populated by nothing but me. Opening up, I hope, enough hospitality to receive a little of that color, a little of that grace for myself.