A Certain Persuasion

There comes a time when you realize your teachers lied to you. In my fifth grade Catholic school class, Mr. Marsh told us we would be putting on a play about Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. It was a lovely tale about an obedient Spaniard who, upon looking for India, came across a lovely land we now call our home. In the play, Columbus and the native people make for a great pair. They find out that they like the same food, enjoy one another’s music, and partner in agriculture for the betterment of their future. I liked the play, it’s just too bad it was marketed to me and my fifth grade friends as non-fiction historical narrative. 

I was a junior in high school when I read Francis Jenning’s brilliant The Invasion of America and Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, both of which (along with many other works) completely desolated my original notions of my country. Columbus was more of a conquerer than a discoverer. Thomas Jefferson was a bigot and a hypocrite. Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed the company of many women and as did JFK.

While these historical figures were important catalysts for profound change, they (in the end) are not as they seem. Our founding fathers are not people to deify and the heroes of our cultural revolutions must be taken down from their pedestal.  Each had their own flaws. Many of them.

As Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy was released months ago, the commentary surrounding it has been overwhelmingly positive. This is the perfect picture of a kind and innocent wife, they say: calm and reserved, quiet and subordinating. 

But leave it to the dying, yet un-quitting Christopher Hitchens to take Jackie down from the mountain of esteem that her commentators are raising her toward. In his most recent column in Vanity Fair, Hitchens pushes back on the innocence of Jackie and uncovers her keen ability to play her role well - she is perhaps smarter and uglier than we thought. “[W]hen examined carefully and in context, the pouting refusal to have any ideas except those supplied by her lord and master turns out not to be evidence of winsome innocence, but a soft cover for a specific sort of knowingness and calculation,” argues Hitchens. 

In his piece, Hitchens uncovers the context of the interviews and comments that were made off of the historian Schlesinger’s record. We forget her knack for cliches and stereotypes, her strong vocabulary of hate (“She is a real prune - bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman) and her reactionary rhetoric (“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians,” she says once in a whisper).

On the record, however, Jackie knew what she needed to say both when her husband was alive and when she was dead. We now know that nearly all of the Kennedy’s had a rough relationship with the then-vice president Lyndon Johnson and his family (Robert Kennedy said LBJ was “an animal in many ways” while LBJ is quoted as calling the senator “a grandstanding runt”). But in the “honest” tapes of Jackie, she quite insincerely forces out, “The Johnson’s are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me.” Hitchens reacts by claiming, “Her need to make an immediate impression is evidently very strong. And yet her very firth concern is to keep things within the mental and aesthetic grasp of the average, to reduce the horizon and shrink the frontier.” 

There is such a fine line between respecting the dead and speaking the truth. The unsettling aspect of Jackie’s interviews is not about her personally, but about  a piece of American culture which she so classically represents, that the overwhelming ugly strains of history and life become a fantasy easily painted with bright colors and simple caricatures. Our personal lives reflect this and, most unfortunately, our churches reflect it as well. We are obsessed with image and able to speak in whatever way advances us forward.

In Why I Write, George Orwell famously said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Jackie’s tapes uncover the shocking reality that “political language” does not just exist in speeches, laws, and campaign addresses, but sometimes in a conversations between two friends. 

Over the last 20 years, the American church has been accused of giving the “appearance of solidity to pure wind” from the pulpit. But I don’t think they even need to hear a sermon, perhaps our need to make the immediate impression is more evident in line at the grocery store, at a dinner party, or in the parking lot right before we climb in our cars, lash out at our children’s disobedience, start the engine, and drive away from church.

With the flooding of talk about Penn State this week, it is strange how rarely the name Jerry Sandusky is said. But it is hard to watch any sports or news channel and not hear or see Joe Paterno’s name. A friend of mine recently made the comment, “If I were to ever commit a heinous crime, I could only hope to have someone take up the majority of my publicity and shame for me.”

Many of the students at Penn State seem to agree that the wrong man is being charged. But then again, most of the commentators who surround the issue and almost all of the op-ed articles surfacing would agree that both men (along with many others) are at fault. There’s no question that this entire situation, from Sandusky to the rioters on campus, is filled with wickedness.

I was surprised where my mind went upon hearing this story. I did not think of another sexual crime committed in sports, but instead thought of the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. 

Some of the same confusion of the Penn State story surrounds this ancient story found in Genesis: who is to blame? Eve took the first bite of the forbidden fruit, she fell for Satan’s deceit and made the wrong move. But the rest of the Bible and all of theology calls the disobedience in the Garden of Eden “The Sin of Adam.” The Bible goes as far as to say that “sin entered the world through one man [Adam]” and makes no mention of his bride. But what did he do? He went second - how could sin enter the world through him and not through the one who actually committed the wrong-doing?

I’m sad to report that I won’t answer that question directly, but I will use it indirectly as a way to approach this idea that connects Joe Paterno to the Garden of Eden. Both Adam and Joe Paterno (and many others at Penn State) committed sins of omission. Most of us put the spotlight on sins of commission - that is, doing the wrong thing. But a sin of omission is not doing the right thing and is constantly considered lesser. 

In the Genesis account of the Fall of Man, as Eve eats the Forbidden Fruit, the text says that “she also gave some to her husband who was with her.” Some versions say that Adam was “right beside her.” Eve did the wrong thing. Adam didn’t do the right thing. He didn’t stop her. He didn’t question. He didn’t report her to the Authority.

And then, for the rest of time, it is Adam who we remember. Many people who do not know the text will assume that Adam ate the fruit first and get the whole story backwards. Have we wrongly communicated the story? Is Romans 5 off when Paul says that sin entered the world through Adam alone? Have we put blame on the wrong person?

Or, is it that those who allow evil are just as guilty as those who commit it? If so, that doesn’t just place Joe Paterno in a bad place, that puts me in a bad place. It’s not that God has allowed injustice in this world, it’s that I have. I see bad things happen and I allow them to go on. Why am I any better than Adam, Eve, or Joe Paterno?

In the end, justice must be executed. Joe Paterno needed to be fired. Jerry Sandusky needs to be put in jail. And I need grace. So who’s with me?

If you want to get to the heart of the NBA lockout, just look at the language. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, right guys?

David Holmes posted a simple, but profound list of quotes from both sides of the NBA debate. And while every sports columnist, radio show host, and television commentator knows what will help solve this whole thing, I’d like to point out that judging solely by the rhetoric, the players and the owners agree on one thing: they don’t agree.

“We remain very, very far apart on virtually all issues.” —David Stern, commissioner of the N.B.A.

“We’re not at a place where a fair deal can be reached with the N.B.A.” —Derek Fisher, president of the National Basketball Player’s Association and point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers.

This seems to be the overall message we, the fans of the game, are getting - at least from the owners’ side. The players are quite freely tweeting their hearts out about all of this, and if Matt Bohner has anything to say about it, we might be in a standstill for a while. For all of the comments on how absurd it is, we need to remember that basketball left the sports world a long time ago and all that is left is real estate and big business.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/10/the-crisis-in-a-nutshell-the-nba-lockout.html#ixzz1atbfUycu

One of my good friends is a really talented musician and artist. He once told me that the quickest way to destroy creativity is to put more people in the room. It appears as though Occupy Wall Street is teaching us the same thing.

Last Saturday, Gayle Collins wrote about how “direct-democracy” and the assembly-driven, everyone’s-voice-will-be-heard technique will be the demise of the political uprising:

“You get so many voices and so many opinions, it’s hard to find consensus,” said Ambrose Desmond, a 32-year-old psychotherapist from San Francisco who was the leader of the meeting. Or would have been if there were any leaders. Which there most definitely were not.

The people sitting around with Desmond were studying a proposal for reorganizing the way that the various working groups — Donations, Finance, Outreach, Internet, Sanitation, Medical, Direct Action and many, many more — make their opinions felt in the evening assembly. The current system, it said, makes newcomers come away “exhausted by our model of direct democracy, rather than invigorated and inspired by it.”

What I’m realizing is that this is not a creativity issue or a political issue, this is a leadership issue. Somewhere in the linguistic fabric of our constitution, we have become disillusioned to believe that just because everyone is equal, that means everyone needs to be heard.

I learned a long time ago that if I wanted very little in my ministry to change, I would hold as many meetings as possible for the sake of “input” or “mutual ownership.” But the time it takes to make sure everyone is heard is the time it takes to lose good momentum.

Great movements were led. People had someone to look to and, more importantly, they had a mouthpiece - someone to speak for them. In a democracy, there is a special reliance on language because we rely on our ability to persuade one another in order to begin change.

The New York Times published a wonderful and brief profile of political and philosophical essayist, Christopher Hitchens surrounding his latest award. The profile, however, highlights the main concern over everyone’s heads who knows this man: the fact that he is dying.

There is a strange switch that happens in Hitchens through the profile. At times, he seems un-affected. His father died this way and, when you really think about death, you understand that it comes to us all. That’s why he prefers to say he is, “living with cancer” as opposed to dying of it. He also says things like, “It’s pointless getting into remorse.”

And yet the one thing is unable to get out from under is fear. “That’s what I’m most afraid of. I’m terrified of losing my voice.”  There is no escaping the terror of dying. Even in single sentences, you can hear the tension. He is afraid, but doesn’t want to be: “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.”

“Dark night of the soul” is a reference to the sacred writings of St. John of the Cross, who found respite in one thing: Christ’s death.

The strange paradox of the gospel is the relief of fear. As long as Hitchens continues to see his death as practical and his suffering as bearable, I’m afraid he will miss the central redeeming factor of Christianity: that death has been beaten. 

“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

Christianity is not a set of doctrines and teachings, it is rooted in a historical event that changed the way human beings could view death: that it is wrong, evil, and wicked. That death is the enemy of this preciousness we call life. 

I find Hitchens so fascinating because he has a fascination and respect for life. Beyond that, he is a true philosopher, thinking through past, present and future through a critical, yet honest lens. He has written about the beauties of his life.

But if we view death and the end of all things as meaningless and the beginning of all things as accident, then there is no escaping that everything in between amounts to nothing.

I wrote earlier about the limits of science and its misuses in some of the modern atheist writers. I’m realizing that I’m actually in great company - both with believers and non-believers. 

Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist had this to say in a Salon.com article:

I am an atheist myself. I completely endorse the Central Doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with Collins and Hutchinson and Gingerich that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. 

More encouraging is the growing amount of people tearing down the unnecessary Evangelical vs. Science dichotomy. Fred Clark said it really well:

To all the many practical and pleasurable reasons anyone has to explore the sciences and to be excited and enthralled by science, evangelical Christians can add one more: It’s God’s world, God’s cosmos. God made it. God is redeeming it. God loves it. Anyone who loves God ought to love the world as well — and to love learning about the world. We Christians ought to be famous for our love and devotion to the best, deepest, broadest and most ambitious science. We ought to be known for the same half-goofy, starry-eyed wonderment that the late Carl Sagan showed toward science. But that’s not the case. Perversely, the opposite is true.

To me, a huge issue in education, politics, and journalism is the pitting of science versus religion. It is a dangerous rhetorical issue that pushes intelligent believers into doubt and brilliant atheists further into a bitterness against the possibility of a God. Things are not this simple.