Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

As you know better than I do, the apparatus of government in these United States is held now, as it has been for at least sixty-five years, in the ineluctable grip of an iron triangle of socioeconomic forces – the true axis of evil that former President Eisenhower identified in saying prophetically that, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Since January 17, 1961 when General Eisenhower gave his farewell address as President to the people of this country, that appellation has become standard terminology − as the pervasive power of the cancerous concatenation of forces represented by the Pentagon, the so-called national defense industry, their corporate mercenary armies, and their allied financial and political organizations, have grown toward metastasis.

Old Uncle Ike should better have referred to the military, industrial, and congressional complex in his final speech. The majority of our members of Congress, including the Senate, have become tragically complicit in that insidious and malicious combination of forces. There can be no doubt that Ike meant to point out the truly malignant nature of the combination of private sector and public sector establishments in continual military preparedness and elective wars. He himself included in his rhetoric the urgent warning that,

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In beginning his speech, Ike couched his remarks with a summation of his working relationship with the Congress, and the looming threat to our freedom and peace posed by the military-industrial complex. He noted that,

“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence − economic, political, even spiritual − is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.”

In words that echo down the many years since his time, Ike warned us that, “Any failure of our [government’s] basic purposes . . . to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations, traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.”

At the time, he spoke of the military threat posed by the former Soviet Union and its supposedly inimical ideology, and he paired with it the threat of a galloping tendency toward fascism – let us call it what it is − in our social, economic, and governmental order.

According to Wikipedia [on the topic of the military-industrial complex], in the prescient book Fascism and Big Business, “by the French historian and anarchist Daniel Guerin, which was written before the Second World War broke out, [Guerin] examines the development of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, and [the] relationships [of the Fascist political leaders] with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that fascism supported the heavy industrial sector to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of ‘corporatism,’ which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and workers’ inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.”

Nowadays we devote even more, much more, of our economic productivity to weapons and war than we did in 1961. We have recently wrought havoc in the Middle East, and elsewhere, with our criminal wars and covert misadventures. And we have created widespread economic disadvantage, and enforced repression of dissent at home, in our headlong rush to hugely advantage the interests of the ruling elites in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, in so-called defense industries, and on Wall Street.

It has been more than thirty years now, since the late enemy of Eisenhower and his contemporaries, the U.S.S.R., imploded and ceased to exist. Yet, instead of making a return to building plowshares, we have continued to build ever more terrible swords. Now we tilt at windmills against a false enemy, created out of whole cloth by our shadow government: the supposed terrorist alliance of Al Qaida, and the imaginary enemy Osama bin Laden, who in fact is almost certainly deceased, and storied beyond all true fact.

In your administration, Mr. Obama, you have demonstrated a deeply worrisome unwillingness to break with the continuity of former administrations in furtherance of the United States’ unending warfare, military expansion, and export of militarism globally.

I, for one among many, had dared hope you would lead the rulers of the nation toward peace and disarmament, toward withdrawal from our global conflicts, toward demilitarization, and the cessation of international weapons distribution – as I believe President Eisenhower would have done if he could have − and that you would instead lead us toward a retooling of our industrial capacities for clean energy sufficiency, and critical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

But you have so far failed us in our hopes.

And during your watch, the ruling elites have by now arrogated to themselves trillions of dollars of the public weal, crippling our national economy and consigning the poorer 99% of our people to decades of continual economic decline, while you have stood by impotently, complicitously making the former administration’s disastrous foreign wars yours, and the universally hated far-flung military empire of the United States has become your own legacy.

Unless this country’s misbegotten foreign military and insane so-called national security expenditures can be reduced by huge proportions – soon – the domestic order of the United States will certainly collapse into chaos, anarchy, and violent popular uprisings against our failed national institutions.

Is this the nightmare you will preside over before your term in office is finished, or will you find the personal courage to commit your administration to the radical change that is absolutely necessary to avoid this country’s impending descent into fascist tyranny?

Which do you choose?

Sincerely,

Jim Weller

Sermon preached to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County on July 5, 2009

Good morning, friends! God be with you. It is a special blessing to revisit a place one once called home, and I’m feeling especially blessed to be here, to revisit, if just for a short time, the area where my daughters were born, and where their childhoods were spent, and where we had so many memorable times together, on weekend visits after their mother and I split up.

Santa Cruz was where I eventually returned to live, to be closer to my girls, and where I found my way to this Fellowship, where I found a spiritual home, a community of like-minded and like-hearted people where I could belong, where I found friendship, and fellowship, and love, and ways to participate meaningfully in worthy service to the congregation, and the larger community.

The people I came to know here helped me to heal, and grow, in many ways. I remember all this with gratitude to you who are still here, and honor to those who have passed on since I’ve been away. It was here that I first began to feel my calling to ministry, and where I began to discern the shape of my potentiality as a minister of the word and the sacrament, whatever those might turn out to be – because I hardly knew then, not that I know so much more now!

The bonds of affection are still strong for me here; this is a place where I felt very much at home, in community, in ways I have felt nowhere since I left.

As I contemplated setting to the task of telling my story, I realized it is not all, or even mostly, mine. Our lives, and those of all creatures, are profoundly connected with – and considerably determined by – those of others among them. And so it is with me. I believe that we engage with God most immediately and effectively in our relationships with other persons.

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to his disciples, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Each one of you is here today, I know, because you share an understanding that the world we live in is connected profoundly, and mysteriously. You gather to lift up your mutual care for and celebration of the interdependent web of existence, of which we all are a part. Your communal worship has sacred meaning for each and all of you.

The English word “worship” is derived from a combination of old roots meaning, “worth-ship,” or “worthiness.” We gather together to honor the worthiness, the moral value and sacredness of the life we share, and the love that gives us birth, that binds us together in a kind of holy communion.

I am here to share with you the meanings that I have come to recognize in my own spiritual practices. And I want to acknowledge that there are some here whose own spiritual meanings, and the words they use to express them, differ from mine. Let me honor those differences, as I try to express mine to you.

You are going to hear a lot of religious language coming out of my mouth this morning. If you’re having skeptical difficulties, I implore you to suspend disbelief, just for now. One hundred percent of the language and imagery of religion – every religion – consists in metaphor, myth, and symbol. Profound truths and ultimate realities are “pointed toward” by these verbal signs and imagery. Humanity employs such methods because the ineffable, ultimate concerns of our religious traditions cannot be adequately described, nor their meanings conveyed, by ordinary descriptive language.

We progressive theologians like to say, “To each its own meaning.” I even remember a textbook on critical interpretation having that title. So, if a word or idea sticks in our ears at first, we try to deconstruct it, and reinterpret it in a way that better suits our understanding and experience.

I have read the Bible, and studied its original languages, as well as the scriptures of Buddhism and Hinduism, and this has been my method for approximating an understanding of these books’ meanings for me, for accommodating them to my own system of belief and appreciation. So, come along with me now, and try beginning to unpack whatever words you may wince to hear!

When we set out on a journey of exploration, it never leads where we expected it to lead us.

I set out to prepare myself for religious ministry some seven years ago, and I thought I would go straight to Starr King School for the Ministry – a primarily Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley. I’d considered nothing else, since I’d identified as Unitarian Universalist since I was a youth. But my application for admission to the Master of Divinity degree program there was denied, and I was unable to find out why. I was told only that a second application for admission was strongly discouraged.

So, I decided to complete an undergraduate degree in religious studies first, and before long I was enrolled in a bachelors degree program at Holy Names University – a small Catholic liberal arts college in Oakland. When I was finished, after two years, I applied for admission to Starr King School again, and lo and behold, this time I was accepted!

But I had also applied for graduate studies at Pacific School of Religion – a progressive multi-denominational Christian seminary in Berkeley, which is part of the Graduate Theological Union, as is Starr King. I was offered admission there as well, and for reasons mostly intuitive, and non-rational, I accepted that offer instead of Starr King’s.

In care of the dedicated and radical Sisters of the Holy Names, I had studied the Bible critically, the history, theology, and ethics of Christianity and Judaism, philosophy of religion, and so forth, and I had begun to adopt a new identity as an appreciative heir to the long Judeo-Christian monotheist tradition.

The Unitarians and Universalists, after all, had first defined themselves as Enlightenment Christians, the intellectual liberals and radicals of Protestant Congregationalism. I had begun to feel I was recovering, and reconstructing, my Reformation religious heritage.

If the depth and breadth of my inherited religious traditions were new to me, God was not. I had formed the conviction long before, based in experience, that God is real, ultimately real, and of ultimate significance to the human condition.

A power higher than my own reason, a saving grace I had prayed for, had enabled me to recover from alcoholism in an earlier phase of my life. I came to find consolation and strength in prayer, from a source deep within me, and I knew that, whatever God is, God is present, always and everywhere with me. The feeling of God’s presence is love. God is love, and I know always, as the Gospels say that the Holy Spirit assured Jesus, that I am a beloved child of God, in whom my Creator delights. For me, religious experience is love, and in unconditional love, there is salvation.

Let me tell you a story, a bit of memoir I wrote in reflection on a very special experience I had, quite some years ago now:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Soon after I wrote that reflection, I began seeking to understand and cultivate, and to try to communicate the meaning of that deeply spiritual experience of God’s love I shared with Anna.

In graduate studies, at Pacific School of Religion, I went on to study the Hebrew and Christian scriptures more thoroughly, seeking the central significance of the biblical religion that pivoted on the teachings of Jesus.

I also spent a good deal of time in study of the sacred texts Buddhism, and those of the Indian wisdom traditions, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita. Certain elements of those teachings have contributed importantly to my spirituality, and shaped my views of the teachings of Jesus.

In a postmodern, post-structuralist intellectual environment, my position may be an unpopular one, but nonetheless, I believe that the central personal experience in every religious tradition, despite all their diversity, is the selfsame relation between the human person and God.

And I have, step by step, come along the trajectory of the Christian tradition, for though there are many ways of ascending the spiritual mountain; I think it is better to follow a wide, well-marked way, than to wander through the underbrush unguided, or to skip from one trodden path to another.

I have learned that before the doctrine and dogma of the Latin fathers, and the Greek patriarchs, were erected into an institutional church, before the texts of the New Testament were composed, there was a very human revelation, a transforming message, that emerged in Jerusalem, and challenged the established religious authorities to a spiritual turnabout, to re-pent (which means, “think again”) and to embrace whole-heartedly and whole-mindedly, as whole human persons, the ultimate, incomprehensible reality of God, to which we can only respond with love.

Just what, exactly, was the “good news,” the Evangelien, the gospel, or God-spell that Jesus taught? One preaching professor of mine stressed that a sermon has to have some good news in it, somewhere. So, I took my search for the good news of God to heart.

Some of the work I found I needed to accomplish, after poring over Biblical translations, alternate versions, and commentaries, was to paraphrase the texts of the Gospels, and the most significant parts of them, in ways coherent with my own developing faith, and my theological understandings. Thus, according to the first-written Gospel,

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

In my paraphrase,

Jesus came along, so it is said, and he preached a great blessing, saying, “The time for enlightenment and liberation of the spirit is now! God’s real presence is with us, among us, within us, now and forever. Let your hearts and minds be changed; believe in this very good news!

We can read too much, or too little, into Jesus' saying that time is fulfilled. From a God’s eye point of view, time is always fulfilled in the Eternal Now, and that is the point here. Not that the time of God, at long last, is finally upon us, finally full, finally filled – it always has been! Is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

God’s reign (or, perhaps better, the community of God) is not just near, almost here, about to happen. What Jesus meant is that God is not merely close by – God is present among us, and within us, and each other, here, now, and forever.

Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”

God’s presence is real and immediate, at all times, for everyone who is ever disposed to apprehend it. But we are made in God’s image; therefore, God’s presence is visible and most palpable in community, where we recognize, and speak with, and sing with one another.

Because we are God’s creatures, and God’s conscious embodiments, when we gather together to worship, we witness the presence of God in one another. All of creation is God’s embodiment, but we disclose God’s presence most immediately to one another in our loving, affirming, and forgiving presence for each other.

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.

Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love.

While I can assure you with the greatest of faith in my meaning, that you are a beloved child of God, in whom your Creator delights, I must in all honesty admit that I myself often cannot feel beloved, and I spend much of my time feeling lonely. This is not hypocrisy, it is hope; and it is human. True, an assuredness of God’s embracing love can be faint substitute for a warm human embrace when a person is without loved ones. But it can still be a saving grace, when nothing else avails.

I believe this: Love is our response in joyful recognition of our deep connectedness with one another in the ground of ultimate reality, of being itself. The ground in which we are all connected, and interdependent, and the fully human self-consciousness of that reality, is what I call God. Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, an early Christian theologian.

For me, Jesus is a centrally significant religious symbol. He represents the potentiality of the fully human person, awakened to the ultimate reality of his fully human divinity. He has come to know himself as a beloved child of God, in whom his Creator delights, and he has come to understand his purpose on earth – to proclaim the good news of God’s loving, redeeming, and saving presence.

What does this tell us about how we can live our lives best, and most blessedly?

A pagan is said once to have approached the Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while standing on one leg. The Rabbi then stood on one leg and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” He said that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss, upon the Golden Rule.

Confucius first enunciated the Golden Rule in the fifth century BCE. “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do unto you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching, and that his disciples should put into practice all day, and every day.

The great Rabbi Meir, of the second century CE, said that any interpretation of Scripture that leads to hatred and disdain of other people is illegitimate. Saint Augustin made the same point. He said that the Holy Scripture teaches nothing but charity (meaning loving-kindness), and we must not leave off interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation.

Religion is as religion does. A prophet called Micah, who lived long before Jesus, summed up the Torah this way: What does Adonai require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

A first-century Jewish prophet, Jesus located the central tenet of the manifold Law of Moses in the single “greatest commandment,” the law of love that stood as Judaism’s holy imperative:

Shema Yisraeil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And there is another like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On this, he said, “depends all the Torah and all the Prophets.”

An honored contemporary rabbi is asked by a lawyer, “What must I do to be righteous and merit God’s mercy?” The rabbi replied, “What is written in the Torah?” The questioner answered, “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” The rabbi replied, “You have gotten the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But the questioner continued, asking, “And who is my neighbor?” The rabbi replied with this story:

“One day recently, at about dawn in an alley in Downtown L.A., a teenaged boy from Pasadena was mugged, beaten badly, and left for dead, lying just by the sidewalk. The first pedestrian to pass by that morning was a middle-aged woman, a wealthy physician on the way to work at her sports medicine clinic.”

“Noticing the motionless body, she hesitated a little, then hurried to cross the street, and continued on her way, thinking anxiously of her legal liability. Next, a young corporation executive carrying a hot cup of Starbucks coffee, while speaking into a cell phone, frowned at the unsightly mess, and sidestepping it, he strode on by, dismissing from mind what he’d just seen.”

“At last, a raggedy brown-skinned man, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, came upon the scene. When he saw the injured body, he was moved with compassion. Remembering his catechism, he stopped to see about the boy. Using his bandana and his undershirt, a plastic bottle of water, and some cheap vodka in a hip flask, he cleaned up and bandaged the boy’s wounds, flagged a taxi, and took the stranger to a skid row hotel room where this man and three other so-called “illegal aliens” were living. The man attended the beaten boy and cared for him all that day and night, even arranging for an unlicensed day nurse from the barrio to come in and treat his injuries.”

“The following morning, the rescuer left to seek a day’s labor, first paying the curandera fifty dollars to stay and nurse the boy; and he promised her when he would return he’d pay her as much as she needed to take good care of her hapless young patient.”

“Now, which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the robbed and beaten boy?” asked the rabbi. The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy,” The rabbi said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

You’ve just tasted old wine poured from a new wineskin. You may recognize the parable I’ve just told as a revision and paraphrase of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.

Religion is as religion does. The religion that teaches me to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God is the religion I practice.

Now, I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to turn, and look at the person beside you; look a while, with loving kindness, for you are looking at a beloved child of God, in whom the Creator delights! Let us bless one another with a sign of God’s love and peace; shake a hand, embrace, give a holy kiss, as may be appropriate, to signify God’s loving presence, and reenact the ancient ritual of the passing of God’s peace!

Go now in peace. May the spirit of love surround you everywhere you may go!

How I'm Feeling Just Now

My heart feels as though it were a Leyden jar.
Not the cardiac muscle with its autonomic contractions -
I mean mi corazón, that center of psyche-spirit where bonds
of affection are meant to be formed with other persons;
where all those affect receptors ought to be aquiver,
awaiting a new acquaintance’s touch,
waiting to try for a fit, as a key fits its keyhole.

But no one has been able to reach inside the glass jar
since you sent me away into exile
to search in the taiga for my destiny.
And the battery wire is disconnected.
And the foil sheets lining the jar
make it impossible for anyone to peer inside
for a glimpse of what’s there.

I go about the tundra, and up and down in it like a ghost,
whose availability no one notices, even when I smile.
I imagine my smile is like the Cheshire cat’s grin
– a disembodied thing.

A Fable, After Aesop

Once upon a time a terrible forest fire drove all the animals in the woods down to the inside of a bend in the river. The birds took to the air and flew to the opposite bank. Some of the legged ones dove in and swam across to safety, but the others who crept or crawled, or slithered couldn’t swim or paddle. These gathered together, in great fear, with no means of escape.

One little snake, of a venomous kind, begged a large frog to carry him across the river on his back. “Please, please, kind Ranadaean Sir, Best of Batrachians, won’t you save my life, since you swim so well and easily?” wheedled the juvenile adder.

“But I fear you will bite me if I come close; you’ll kill me with your poison. No, no, I’m afraid to help you,” replied the old frog.

The snakelet answered, “Heaven forfend, dear Anuran Lord; I swear by all that’s holy, I won’t harm a wart of your handsome head. I’ll name my first hatched offspring after you. I promise the tale of your goodness and trust will be told for generations in Viperdom. There’s no time to lose; hurry! Come here and let me coil upon your back.”

Well, that big old frog repented of his mistrust; he beheld before him the spectacle of masses of creepers and crawlers beginning to charbroil, he felt a tide of mercy lift his warming heart, and he consented to remove the garrulous serpent from harm’s way, saying urgently, “Hold on as best you can; I’ll try to keep you above water.” And off they went, the frog stroking strongly, his bow wave streaming back from his nose as he surged ahead, the puff adder pup balancing on the frog’s broad green back.

When the odd couple of refugees, reptile and amphibian, arrived on the other shore, in the snake’s promised land of salvation, as it were, the good frog exclaimed enthusiastically, “Hallelujah, Brother Serpent, we made it!” And the snake struck, sinking his deadly fangs into the frog’s cervical spine just below his skull, where the back of his neck would have been, if frogs had necks.

The frog cried, “You bit me! You’re killing me! Why did you bite me, when I had just saved you from certain death? You made a holy oath! Why did you betray your word?” And the rescued puff adder, slithering away, replied simply, “Hey, I’m a snake. I bite. That’s what I do!”

The moral of the story is: Never turn your back on a snake. Not even a well-spoken one.

Bad Obama, Bad!

The Pentagon Plutocrats have no idea how to bring their Godforsaken debacle in Afghanistan to an end, no more than for their continual splattering of young people's blood and bone all over the map of Iraq - whilst a widening pall of depleted uranium dust and futility settles over all.

Into the City of War strides the new President Barack Obama, proclaiming a compromise deployment - or sacrifice - of seventeen thousand more troops into the quagmire of Afghanistan, who are now supposed to "stabilize" the situation.

I'm having deja vu, big time, Barack. Maybe you're too young to remember, but we've been here before, not so very long ago. Stabilize, you say? Are you playing Big Brother, Barack, or what? Let's lose the Newspeak, shall we? Tell us now, just what is the big idea, Mr. Commander in Chief?

Campaigning for election last fall, you blustered about, threatening to send - yes - no fewer than thirty thousand more hapless hod carriers for the Kabul regime construction project. What's up with your new number? Are you opting for the Golden Mean? Are you striking a virtuous pose, replete with classical virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice?

If so, I beg to differ.

This is not prudent, not just. True temperance, and due fortitude would rule out warfare in the first place, deploying diplomats, not destroyers to engage the world in peaceful solutions to whatever real threats might subsist. And I challenge the idea that any regional political movements, from the Mideast through Central Asia, are our enemies. We, not the alienated victims of our world-girdling military empire, are our own worst enemies.

It's not just the economy, stupid.

Start the task of reconstructing the political economy by decimating the American military-industrial complex. Slash away the brass hats at the Pentagon; burn out the institutional thickets of waste and larceny thriving there behind corridors of closed doors. Put the multitudes of undereducated American youths who have been, and otherwise will be suckered into Devil's work in the military class, into re-education and vocational rehabilitation programs oriented toward waging peace, not war.

Let's just stop manufacturing mountains of weapons to arm the whole world. A single executive initiative on the part of our new President could put an historic end to that evil enterprise. Instead, let's make enough silicon photovoltaic solar cells to roof the planet, to power pumps to raise deep groundwater to subsistence farm families all over the Two-Thirds World, to do every piece of life-sustaining work electricity without emissions could to to bring about the transformation of our whole world into a new world of peace and justice!

Make love, not war!

I, for one, am not too young to remember the powerful impact those words had on the imaginations of a generation too much reviled now, but still capable - if we all have the will - of saving the world. I still believe, and I'm not the only one. I hope one day you'll join us, Barack; let the Devils of War and Mammon take the hindmost!

 

Let's hear the truth, for a change, Mr. Obama

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared, “Our nation is at war, with a far-reaching network of hatred and violence . . .” Probably, his speechwriter did not include the significant comma I do in that declarative sentence. But, with that critical punctuation, the statement is definitively true. Without the comma, it is merely a turn of deceitful polemic.

The truth the entire world knows is that our nation is indeed at war, with its far-reaching network of hatred and violence, that is, with the demonic power of its world-girdling military complex, headquartered in the Pentagon, and standing ever ready to dispatch cruel death, destruction, and despoliation, anywhere resistance to American hegemony arises.

I have yet to see a clear sign that this status quo will be altered, now that Barack Obama sits in the Oval Office.

How now, Mr. President?

Indulge me, my friends, will you please, on this Inauguration Day 2009, so full of bombast, hoopla, and dewy eyes, in an uncommon exercise of common sense.

We hold, I trust you’ll agree, these truths to be self-evident: That common men and women, of every land, in every age, are mostly people of good will; that is, they demonstrate in their lives and works, most of the time, the virtues of faith, and hope, and charity. And this, as well: That the predominant forces in all societies’ institutions, that rule the lives of the common people, are those of bad faith, mistrust, diffidence, and ill will.

You know there’s something going on here that is not good, but you don’t know what it is, do you?

Even the former President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his farewell address to the nation, reminded us that, “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

Right. So you may say.

I ask then, why is the common good so patently compromised by evil?
Something wicked this way comes, eh? That phrase is to be found in Shakespeare's play “Macbeth.” The speaker is the second witch, who prophesies, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." The wicked thing is Macbeth himself, by this point in the play a traitor and murderer.

What do I make of this? Well, first of all, the common people are not in charge of society. And those who are in charge obviously do not have the common good in mind. Why? Well, ipso facto, they are not common people.

Those who are in charge are rich and powerful people, a perennial ruling class, and they are enemies of the common good. Thus, Mr. Bush, a scion of ruling class patriarchs, were he at all a reflective man, would do well to consider the tragedy of Macbeth. Even more so, I think, should President Obama, a man surely better equipped for self-reflection, as he assumes authority himself, going henceforth ever amidst a congeries of ruling class plenipotentiaries.

We will all do well to keep in mind that what is going on, in the final analysis, is not a struggle between good and evil; it is everywhere and always an economic class struggle, and we must choose which side we are on. Let us remember the still-relevant words of Frederick Douglass, penned in 1857:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

You are now between a rock and a hard place, Mr. Obama, God help you. I wish I knew which side you are on.

Now, Mr. Obama, change U.S.-Israel policy

When you step into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama, will you be leaving a trail of bloody footprints? Are you already so obliged to the Israel Lobby that you’re constrained to say nothing, and do nothing, about the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli war machine, its veritable Wehrmacht, its “mighty defense,” wielding horrible weapons supplied by the U.S.A.?

The Godforsaken rogue terrorist state of Israel is, and has been since its strategic, founding war of conquest in 1948, a lawless, merciless criminal aggressor in the region of Syria-Palestine – the enablement of the U.N. under the control of the U.S. and the U.K. notwithstanding.

Israel’s so-called “Defense Forces” have unceasingly engaged in cruel, unjust, unmerciful acts of forced relocation, and confiscation of Palestinian lands and buildings, mass displacement and imprisonment, “ethnic cleansing,” and virtual genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people. They are the native Muslim and Christian farmers and villagers whom the Zionist Movement, and its synthetic Zionist State, have resolutely sought to decimate and destroy, as individuals, families, communities, and even as a would-be Palestinian nation.

The criminal Zionist Israeli military regime has made for itself a history of decades of evil-doing, having waged war endlessly against its Syro-Palestinian and farther away neighbor states, and having become loathed and reviled uniformly throughout the world – except for the political and military-industrial elites who control the policies of the United States government – the corporate godfather and super warlord that supplies its Eastern Mediterranean vassal Israel with all the weapons and finances, and military support it ever needs, to continue and enhance its ongoing criminal aggression and war crimes.

The Palestinians of Gaza are trapped within armed perimeters, like fenced-in cattle, awaiting slaughter. They are living and dying – by thirst and starvation, untreated disease, and Israeli military murders – in a scenario reminiscent of nothing so much as the Warsaw Ghetto, where German Nazis imprisoned and massacred European Jews seventy years ago.

This cruel irony of history seems peculiarly unnoticed by the bloodthirsty leaders of the three Israeli war parties competing for election to its Prime Ministry. Zionist Israel has become the Doppelgänger of the Nazi's Third Reich. Its pursuit of military solutions to the problem of Palestinian resistance is like the Nazis’ pursuit of successive solutions to the “Jewish Problem.” Will Israel’s “Final Solution” be anything like Die Endlösung der Judenfrage?

The United States of America has played the single most dynamic role in the international pro-Zionist cartel to establish, arm, and enrich Israel through a process of violent dispossession, impoverishment, and dislocation of the native Palestinian people, since Israel’s inception in 1948. At present, the government of the U.S.A. virtually controls the military, economic, and political prerogatives of the state of Israel.

To be sure, the persistence of Palestinian liberation fighters in resisting Israeli oppression by firing homemade rockets toward the towns of the Israeli Negev is misguided and counterproductive, and deserves to be reproved. Nevertheless, this is no justification for Israel’s abominable airborne terrorism and ground assault on the helpless captive people of Gaza.

I say, Mr. Obama, I beseech you, to end U.S. government complicity in the war crimes of Israel, to withdraw immediately all U.S. military aid to and financial support of the state of Israel, to demand the removal of Israeli blockades on the borders of Gaza, to further demand Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies, and to insist on the abandonment of all Israeli-occupied settlements in the Palestinian territories. The United States has also provided small arms and military support to the Palestine Liberation Organization for use against Hamas, and those policies must be ended as well.

Our near-term goal should be a cessation of hostilities, followed by substantial disarmament and demilitarization of all warring factions in the Syria-Palestine region, including Israel, Hamas, and Hizbollah. No renegade state intransigence should be tolerated – such as Israel has demonstrated in the past, with the collusion of the United States.

This process should be enforced with all the diplomatic and economic powers at the disposal of the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union. Every attempt should be made to engage Russia, Iran, and China in the peace process as well. May it be so.

No, Mr. Obama, there is no "right war."

Mr. Obama, I supported you and voted for you – being for me, as Ralph Nader said, “the best of the worse” – but this time, my friend, you are wrong, dead wrong.

The United States military misdeeds in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are not “the right war.” There is no “right war.” As a self-identified Christian, you should know that, better than most folks do. And you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the so-called “just war” rationales of modern and pre-modern Christian ethics are obsolete and impossible to justify in our post-modern world.

A genuine follower of the way of Jesus Christ would prefer (as Platonic ethics required too) to suffer injustice than to do unjustly unto others, would try to never do violence to anyone for any reason, and would rather choose the way of peace, as with St. Paul and St. Peter, “not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.”


Furthermore, and again you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the supposed threat to U.S. national security posed by “Islamic terrorists” – whether located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or Iraq or Iran, or Palestine or Somalia, or anywhere else in the world – is a convenient political fiction, a nightmare, a bete noir, a bugbear, used on behalf of this country’s plutocratic elites to falsely justify their imperialist crimes of transnational conquest.

I do not fear harm by “Islamo-fascist extremists,” but I do fear for the future if we do not begin to dismantle the military-industrial shadow government that rules the United States.

I believe I stand with a broad and diverse majority of the people of this country in an unequivocal demand to you as President-elect to withdraw U.S. military forces immediately, not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else in the world where they don’t belong, and aren’t required to protect our lives and properties – and I’m speaking for we, the people, not the military industrialists and plutocratic elites who have usurped our government!

We elected you to begin to undo the manifest evil visited on this country and the world by previous administrations, not to advance it and expand it.

To the barricades! Let the Revolution begin!

As our old tophatted comrade Pogo declared decades ago, "We have met the enemy, and it is us!" Let those with ears to hear listen!

The United States government and the elite ruling class minority it represents have, together, become a formidable enemy of the People. Our national government and its allied military-industrial complex have, together, become the greatest threat to peace and security the world has ever known. Today, under the mendacious, maleficent usurpation of Richard B. Cheney and George W. Bush, we have finally realized a dire state that the founders of our nation, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, foresaw with stern resolve.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [all persons] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . That to secure these rights . . . Governments are instituted . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The time has come for the Cheney/Bush regime to be decisively, forcibly, forever removed from power. The United States Congress has the Constitutional authority, and now the political wherewithal, to impeach the pretenders to the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency, for the commission of many high crimes and misdemeanors against the people of our country.

Furthermore, these outlaw executives have engaged our armed forces, and clandestine operatives, and armies of sociopath mercenaries in continual criminal wars of international aggression, in defiance of all applicable norms of international relations. Many more than one million human beings have been murdered, maimed, and tortured, in direct consequence of the Cheney/Bush junta’s policies and directives, for no other purpose than the corporate greed and sheer power lust of ruling class elites.

Though more than two thirds of our citizens, and majorities in Congress oppose them, the bloodthirsty White House dictators now demand the lives of tens of thousands more of our sons and daughters, to follow the hundreds of thousands who have gone before them, to be sacrificed for the idols of Mammon, on the bloody altars of this regime’s unholy wars.

The plurality of the governed no longer consents to the powers so unjustly wielded by the representatives of the miscreant junta who have seized control of our nation’s executive offices and the Pentagon. It is high time to alter the present state of executive power, to abolish the rule of the Cheney/Bush regime, to dispatch all their co-conspirators and accomplices, to rid the precincts of our Capitol of their evil and corruption.

It is our right; it is our duty, to overthrow that unjust and illegitimate government that now defies even the will of the United States Congress, in its hell-bent determination to escalate its wars in the Middle East.

The New American Revolution has begun; it is even now under way. The first sign of the confrontation between the People and the Presidency was the 2006 midterm election, in which Republican Party representatives were turned out of office in droves, and new majorities of opposition Democrats were elected, in both houses of Congress. The People’s Mandate was and is unmistakable: No more war! The People demand a complete, permanent withdrawal of U.S. forces, and their bases, from Iraq – and by logical extension, from the entire Middle East, East Africa, and Central and South Asia.

Yet Cheney and Bush scorn and despise the expressed will of the People. “I fully understand they could try to stop me,” Bush said of the new Democrat-run Congress. “But I've made my decision. And we're going forward.”

Now, Congress must make its decision, to go forward with equal resolve, to impeach Cheney and Bush, to deny the Pentagon any further funding to escalate, or even to continue to wage this war, and to expeditiously reverse the criminal regime’s military deployments, returning what remains of our occupation forces to the places they belong – at home with their families and loved ones.

The warlords of the Cheney/Bush regime have made the United States of America public enemy number one throughout the world. The time has come for the American people to declare them public enemies at home, and to decisively drive them out of the seats of executive power.

Love Is The Way

A homily preached on Sunday May 28, 2006 at New Spirit Community Church, in Berkeley, California.

Good morning! My name is Jim Weller. I’m your student intern pastor, and this is the last day of my official internship. I’ll bet you thought you were going to get away without having to hear me preach to you!

Perhaps I should explain the schema for our chapel arrangements this morning. White and red are the prescribed liturgical colors for the six Sundays after Easter, of which today is the last. I thought we would hang our United Church of Christ “God Is Still Speaking” identity banner, since we are now a full-fledged UCC church, and it matches the color scheme. And I just got back last Sunday from the UCC Northern California Nevada Conference Annual Meeting weekend at Asilomar, full of denominational identity!

I am, after all, a theological student, as I will continue to be until I become august and venerable, so I thought it good today to give you a brief survey of the key meanings of Christian theology, as I understand them. The core message is that love is what redeems us, but a few other theology words will make appearances, too. Don’t let them distract you!

Anyhow, I have my white and red on; my head is polished, so let’s go!

Let those with ears to hear listen:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, first and final cause of being. Creator and creation completely interpenetrated.

Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. There is no way by works of penitence to attain to the love of God. Love is the way.

Let me tell another story here. A Unitarian Universalist minister I know was preaching the good news of God’s love one day, and afterward an older man approached her with a question. Now this man, Bill, like most Unitarians, had an advanced education, and he was a perfectly rational thinker. He really was a rocket scientist. He and his colleagues knew how to put a man on the moon, and bring him back to tell about it – and they actually had.

So Bill asked, “Pastor, I know you believe in your experience of God’s presence, but how do you know that’s what you’re experiencing? How do you know it’s not just your imagination? Rachel could have launched into an intricate philosophical proof of the existence of God, and Bill could have followed it.

But instead, she asked him another question. “Bill,” she asked, “Have you ever been in love? I mean, really in love, so that everything was brighter, and more beautiful than before?” Bill smiled, remembering. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Well, how do you know?” she rejoined. “How do you know you didn’t just imagine it?

There you go.

Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells us that that is how God, in the burning bush, told Moses God’s name – “I am!”

Centuries later, because he knew he was of God too, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian, Irenaeus.

As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod! "Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One!"

"You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."

We are here to love one another, for that is the way to love God as we are beloved. These are the greatest commandments.

The relationship between God and human persons really is one of unending, unconditional love and acceptance. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God, now and forever. God’s acceptance does not end.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance!

The way Jesus put the saving message was this: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news."

What this meant was that God's time is always fulfilled. The love and acceptance of God are immediately available for you, right here, right now.

To re-pent is to turn the soul round right. It means, "Think again!" It is to respond rightly to the good news of God. We take our turned-inward spirits and turn them inside out, turning the light of love toward God and other people.

Jesus taught us to believe that in this way only, we will be redeemed from sin.

Sin is not a popular topic in churches like ours, where the gospel of love is emphasized. We all know that mistaken ideas about sin have been used, or misused, in church as weapons to shame us in our expressions of love and the joy of living, and to separate us from the love of God.

No one is untouched by sin. William Sloane Coffin said that sin is the abuse of our God-given free will. I say that it almost always involves pridefulness and abuses of power. In any case, it erects barricades that keep love out.

Sin forms in the shadow of the isolated self that stands between the human soul and the light of God’s love.

To sin is to do the opposite of the Great Commandment to love God, and love others as oneself. It is to be alienated by self will from God's will to love unconditionally. It is to will harm, and to act harmfully, instead of for good. It is to abide in diffidence, ignoring and disguising the harm others and we do in our alienation. And, it builds up permanency in our social structures and inherited cultural traditions.

Sin and salvation could be explored at length in many other sermons. Understanding them is at the core of understanding the meaning of the gospel. But today’s topic is simply about love and acceptance.

The glad tiding of God is the good news that you are accepted! Sinners and saints alike. You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.

All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: "Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly in the presence of God."

Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.

One morning last weekend during the UCC Conference Annual Meeting, I took a walk by myself among the flowering dunes, back of Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay. The sky was full of sailing clouds and sunlight, and the wind tore wildly at my shirt. It would have whipped the hat off my head if it hadn’t been tied on. For weeks, I had been full of self-doubt, and despaired of the authenticity of my vocation, feeling alone and ill equipped to accept God’s calling – if it even was that, and not just my wishful imagination.

Then I rounded a bend in the path, coming into the lee of a sand dune under a sheltering growth of cypresses. And the wind ceased its howling. The hollow where I stood was bright and quiet. I reflected that this walk was a metaphor for these days of my arrival in the company of saints, so to speak. For I was a part of a gathering of members of the body of Christ, young and old, clergy and laity, ordinary human persons who were accepting their acceptance – and I was accepted among them, imperfect as I am.

[solo singing accompanied by choir, humming the melody] “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Salvation is never done once and for all. We need periodic renewal treatments, makeovers, or tune-ups. We salve each other. That’s why we pray and worship together. Salvation is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s people. All people are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, if only we will accept God’s choice.

The Deuteronomist of ancient Israel discerned God’s message of salvation this way: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – so that you and your children may live" – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.

Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.

Let us choose accordingly, and love one another as God loves us.

May it be so. Amen.

Anselm said it way back

More than a thousand years ago, way back in the early eleventh century, the Christian philosopher and logician Anselm of Canterbury used words to the following effect to express the meaning of the word, God:

“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.

Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.

You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.

While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.

But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.

Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.

None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.

That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.

And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.

And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.

Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.

This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:

“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”

Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.

Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)

Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.

Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.

However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.

If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.

When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.

The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.

The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”

What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.

When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:

“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”

So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)

Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)

Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.

Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)

Holy Trinity?

God Almighty, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these are different aspects of the One God. Though understood metaphorically as distinctive divine persons, the differences among these aspects are occasioned only by human sensibility. God is triune only in traditional Christian understanding, not in essential reality. While it may be useful to conceptually differentiate the aspects of God’s ultimate unity, and it certainly is traditional in Christian orthodoxy, it is not religiously necessary.

Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.

In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.

“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.

Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.

As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.

God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.

This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)

Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)

To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.

The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)

The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.

Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.

For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)

In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.

I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.

Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

Word of God?

Yes, my friends, the Bible has great social, cultural, and religious importance. It is an incomparable, paradigmatic artifact of the human spirit. It is best understood religiously as a metaphoric record of the deeds of God and the piety of the people of God. But it is not literally the Word of God. It is a collection of the words of many ancient authors about God, among other things.

The Bible should not always be interpreted literally. In fact, it is most often not to be. It consists of the religious expressions of ancient people who spoke languages now long forgotten, and who were not of our world time, our culture, or our society. It is foolish to believe that their holy scriptures must apply directly to us in our contemporary context.

God gave us minds, and hearts, and consciences in order for us to work things out ethically and theologically for ourselves, not for us to rely, near-sighted, wearing shades and blinders, on literal readings in translation of archaic and unchangeable textual artifacts.

For liturgical purposes, sincere believers may name The Bible, metaphorically, as the Word of God. But God does not actually speak in words. God does not speak at all, actually. God needs people for that, and people have done their job to the best of their abilities. God needs people, reading the signs of their times, to create new symbols, metaphors, parables, psalms, and sermons, informed by the Biblical tradition, but reinterpreted and recontextualized, so as to bring the kerygma of the early Christian Jesus movement, and the good news of God home to our diverse, sectarian, secularized twenty-first century people.

If the Bible, then, is a merely human testament to an ancient era of religious experience, why do I continue to read, study, interpret, quote, and preach it? A one word answer is sufficient – Tradition! Tradition is the way that human societies accumulate, appreciate, and assimilate the wisdom and experience of their forebears. I place high value in the venerable religious traditions, and persistent philosophies of humankind.

Like all persons who have lived before us, we do not apply our human faculties to contemporary realities in isolation from our cultural precursors. We are swimmers in a great and ever-flowing stream of tradition that has largely formed us, to which we belong, and which belongs to us. The Bible’s recollections are the primary sources of our religious traditions.

Along with more than one-third of the world’s people, I stand in the vast and interflowing delta of the broad river of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Truly indeed we are, historically and culturally, people of the Book. But that is not all we are. We are children of the living God, and, as my confreres in the United Church of Christ love to say, in rich metaphor, God is still speaking.

My Calling

My calling, to use Judaic terms beyond a Judaic context, is toward a prophetic and rabbinic ministry. I am called to pedagogy, to teaching the meanings, interpretations, implications, and applications of religious wisdom and truth, in the manner of a rabbi. I am called to proclaim the glad tidings of God, as Jesus did, and to a saving or healing ministry, as Jesus’ own ministry was, salving the wounds of sin and pointing the way to salvation in the embrace of eternal life.

My vocation is to reinterpret the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for the hermeneutical edification of my Christian and non-Christian contemporaries. I feel I am in an apt position to do this, as a member of a post-Christian religious movement, descended from Jewish and Christian traditions. If we have largely outlived the usefulness of the old modes of meaning making, we have not transcended them. We still live in the world our forebears have made. In our own lives, following in the living tradition we have received, we are making a world of meaning our progeny will inherit.

My vocation is to serve the people of God, that is, all people, and to serve God’s purpose, which is the well-being of all people, because we are all children of God made in God’s image, and God’s will is for justice and mercy.

The glad tidings of God are that you are accepted! You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.

All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in the presence of God. This is easier said than done, though, because sin abounds. It is as perennial as grass. Sin, as well as hope, springs eternal. Where there is life, there is sin –and hope.

Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. This is the ultimate meaning of forgiveness. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.

“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole,
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.” (Trad.)

Salvation is never done once and for all. It is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s chosen people, that is, ones who live in faith. All are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, but not all will ultimately accept God’s choice.

“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – if you and your offspring would live – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.” (Dt 30:19-20)

How shall we learn what God requires of us? By the insights of Holy Scripture and through prayer.

Homily on the Theology of Love

Let those with ears to hear listen:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, firstborn and the more pensive of two sisters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with their father on the front porch railing, after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” he answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.

Truths of God, that God is eternal, absolute, infinite, unconditional, are true of no person or thing in being. God is ultimately beyond reason, unreachable to finite human understanding.

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, ultimate reality, first and final cause of being.

Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One! You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. These are the greatest commandments. Love your enemies, and bless those who revile you. This is the Way of Christ.

We hear and we believe we are beloved of God, and God is love.

Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible awesome reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells that that is how God answered Moses, asking God’s name – “I am!”

Because he knew he was of God, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”

As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”

Response to "Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P."

Now, Joe, I’m all for free speech, and I practice the Christian charity I preach, but I do think it would be more seemly of you, as a public intellectual, to know your story before you publish your opinion. (“Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.” by Joseph Loconte. The New York Times Op-Ed, January 2, 2006.)

You decry “attempts to draw a direct line from the Bible to a political agenda” by House Democrats and progressive religious leaders like Jim Wallis. Perhaps you ought to read The Book first. The Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish Prophet of the New Covenant, Jesus himself, did little else but point toward a political agenda. That’s why they were assassinated by the ruling powers. The Roman prefects in Judea didn’t bother to crucify just anybody. Nailing prophets to the cross was a dramatic kind of political execution reserved for those who seriously threatened the imperial status quo.

Jesus, Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al were no friends of the imperial governments that usurped the just prerogatives of their nation, and oppressed the people of Israel. No more are today’s rising voices of the religious left willing to countenance moral outrages perpetrated by the right-wing cabal in our White House and Congress, and their collaborators, the false prophets of the religious right.

“Linking faith with public policy” is the soul of political discourse in a democratic society. Faith without works is dead. Contrary to your disingenuous statement, this is exactly what American politics does need. The political “misdeeds” of so-called Christian conservatives are not being “replicated” by spiritual progressives – indeed, they are being repudiated. You claim there is no difference between anti-homosexual bigots quoting Leviticus, and Jim Wallis proclaiming the prophetic witness of Jesus on behalf of the poor. Excuse me, but I beg to differ.

You say the ethics of Jesus and the Prophets are “no substitute for a coherent political philosophy.” I think most Americans would differ with you on this. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian ethics are the sine qua non of political justice in Western society. I suppose you’d prefer the moral relativism of Hume, or Machiavelli – or Kissinger or Wolfowitz.

In defense of what you call the “war against Islamic terrorism,” you ridicule the supposed “chorus of left-wing clerics and religious scholars who compare the United States to Imperial Rome and Nazi Germany.” Methinks you protest too much. I cannot help but note that it is you who frame the discourse in those terms – and there would be none of it, after all, if there were not meaningful comparisons to be made.

You mention with disdain an “event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July,” as though it were somehow linked with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democratic Party leadership. I was there, and it was not. It was a convocation of some 1300 religious leaders of many faiths, and some “not religious, but spiritual” community leaders, most of whom are no more sympathetic with the Democratic party than with the G.O.P. – which is to say, not at all.

I was a participant in the Spiritual Activism Conference, organized mostly by energetic members of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, not by Rev. Jim Wallis, although we welcomed him, among many others, as a featured speaker. Our common concerns are grounded in spirituality and religion, and they are very much political, but certainly not partisan. As Rev. Wallis says, our religion is deeply personal, but it is not private. We must be very public about it. We deplore the hypocrisy and depravity with which the G.O.P. has co-opted Biblical religion in America, and the moral diffidence with which the Democratic Party has, until recently, abandoned it.

Jesus Who?

I tend to go along with Christian tradition in supposing that Jesus of Nazareth was a singular historical person. However, an intellectually honest critical analysis of the pertinent ancient texts calls for admission that there is virtually no direct evidence to support that view. It is entirely possible that the ultimate source of the Jesus traditions was not one singular person, but several, whose teachings and life circumstances may have been concatenated or conflated by re-tellers and later literary compositors, i.e. the Evangelists, the authors of the gospels.

My view, which serves as a framework for understanding and representing the religious-ethical teachings attributed to Jesus, is that the surviving scriptures are ultimately based on oral accounts of the sayings of a remarkable, prophetic Judaic teacher who engaged in a brief but very influential ministry, which was profoundly transformative for most of the people who received his teachings. I do not doubt that Jesus, like multitudes of prophets and religious teachers before and since his time, was divinely inspired, i.e. he was consciously and whole-mindedly in communion with God. His purpose was well described as proclaiming the gospel, or the good tidings, of God.

I have no reason to doubt that Jesus, or an historical personage very like him, was crucified in Jerusalem by Roman occupation authorities in about 30 C.E. It is also plausible that a few of his devotees promulgated a tale that Jesus had gone missing from his crypt on the third day following his death. What actually happened is unknown, but this story, and the fictive denouement of Jesus' bodily resurrection that was added to the first gospel narrative, have had incalculable consequences, affecting the history of religion more than any other dogma has ever done.

Whoever the original instigator of the first-century Jesus movement might have been (if but one), I believe he was no more God incarnate than any human being potentially is. Moreover, he was not Christian. He was, apparently, a Judaic Messianist. For all we know, 'he' may well have actually been 'they' - several 'Jesuses' as it were.

Early Christianity as we know it seems to have been invented almost single-handedly by the apostate, repentant Pharisaic letter-writer Saul of Tarsus, who was called Paul in Greek. The emergent Christian religious tradition was elaborated, following Paul, by a number of evangelistic authors working with textual sources based on oral transmission - and a few scraps of written "sayings" of Jesus. Nothing resembling an established, organized church developed in these traditions until some time in the second century, in circumstances far removed from the original Jerusalem assembly of “The Way,” observant Jews who heralded the coming of the Lord, that is, the advent of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of Man who they believed would inaugurate the reign of God in Israel.

The Greek translation of the Aramaic term, “Meshiach” - Messiah - was "Christos," i.e., Christ. The theological meaning I make of the term, “Christ” is that it signifies that condition of the soul in which the human person is in conscious communion with God. Another way I have put this is “the consciousness of personal being in relationship with being itself.” To be “in Christ” is to be awakened to the reality of one’s sacred identity with God, as Jesus is said to have been. Thus, as I would interpret the evangelistic narrative, upon baptism by John, Jesus became consciously Jesus Christ, Son of God, standing for the potential of sanctification inherent in every person.

I understand the term, “grace” as signifying that spiritually transforming self-realization in which one recognizes the identity of one’s personal being with the ultimate reality of being itself. Grace is the gift of God-consciousness, and it brings about the state of being in Christ. The gift of grace is received through faith, which is precisely that orientation of the whole person prescribed in the Biblical commandment to “love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”

The Parable of True Wealth

A certain wealthy young man owned a mill, which was the most important source of income for the people of his village. This he had inherited from his father, who had taken over the business from his own father, and so on, for several generations. The wealthy man inhabited his estate for all the years of his life, and throughout the years, as he walked proudly through his village, which eventually became a town, and then a small city, he often passed by a man in ragged clothes, the same man year in and year out, who meekly begged for alms each time they met.

The wealthy man was disdainful of the poor, thinking them lazy and idle. He was chiefly concerned with increasing his profit and his property. Yet he was a church-going Christian, and he was not mean or cruel. He remembered the parson quoting Deuteronomy, saying, “There will always be poor people in the land. Give freely to those who are poor and needy in your land. Open your hands to them.” So whenever he could not pass by unnoticed, he would give the poor man a few coins from his purse. Thus it went for many years.

The wealthy man strove industriously all his life, and multiplied his inheritance. Many sought to gain at his expense. People flattered, and wheedled, and cheated, and sued for his advantages. But the beggar just humbly thanked him for his little gifts and blessed him contentedly. The wealthy man and the beggar both grew old, keeping their different ways and means. The wealthy man at last became ill and weary, and was sorely burdened with his worldly concerns. One evening when again they encountered each other in the street, while handing him a coin, he asked the beggar in exasperation, “How can you have endured so long in your wretched alley, yet you seem so thankful and at peace?” The beggar bowed gratefully, and replied, “My friend, true wealth is knowing what is enough.” And so it was.

The Parable of the Seekers

Once upon a time, in a strange and faraway place, there lived a species of people who were small, but their numbers were very great, and they populated a land that, to them at least, was vast. Their species was ancient, having occupied the land for uncounted generations. The clans, and communities, and countries of them were numerous, and there were many different languages and traditions among them. They had no writing though, because their fingers were short, and so were their legs, so they rarely ventured very far from their birthplaces.

The landscape where these people lived was ridged and wrinkled, full of hills and dales, and rills and rivulets, and in the middle of it was an enormous rise of peaks, that they called the Mountain of God. Most of the people never knew what lay beyond their own particular crease in the earth, for their lives were as short as their limbs, and they had to work hard every day for a living. They all could see the towering tops of the Mountain of God though, from the higher vantage places, on certain days and moonlit nights, when fog and clouds didn’t hide them.

These people had just one food, which they prepared in many different ways, for variety. This was a sweet, aromatic, seed-like, whitish substance that appeared overnight as if materializing out of thin air, like hoarfrost. It was called “manna.” Some said it resembled a gummy resin exuded by certain trees, and some said it was like a grainy residue left on leaves by aphid-like insects. Legend had it that once, in a wilderness encampment, a great flock of quails had arrived, and then the people had feasted on roast squab, but as long as anyone living remembered, their food was just manna, manna, and manna, nothing but manna.

The people gathered their manna every morning and ate it up that day, because it would not keep overnight. It would spoil and be found crawling with maggots by next morning - except, oddly, on the sixth night. Every seventh day, no manna would be found, but the leftovers from the day before would still, inexplicably, be edible. So on that day, which was called “Shabbat,” no one had to labor gathering food. Everyone said the manna was a gift from God for God’s beloved people.

Another strange fact about this land was that the force of gravity was not the same everywhere. Everything weighed less at higher elevations, and weighed more at lower elevations. For this reason, though it was difficult for people to climb very far uphill on their short little legs and tiny feet, their work was easier, and they felt lighter and more restful, when they had made the effort to reach higher ground. Naturally, hilltop real estate was the most valuable. The big problem, though, for most people, was that the food always collected in the low hollows, and thus only the very rich could afford to pay servants to carry it up the hillsides to them. Consequently, no one lived permanently on the highest ridges, though people sometimes came there on day-trips, and felt their yokes most joyously lightened.

Now, most of these people didn’t think about God very much. They all believed that God could, in principle, be found way up on the tops of the Mountain of God, but almost no one claimed to have ever seen God. They would get together in small or large groups, on Shabbat, to praise and thank God for not having to work that day, and they cherished and enjoyed that tradition, but few were really very concerned about God, as Godself.

There were always a few, though, who were ultimately concerned with God. They loved God with all their hearts, and all their souls, and all their minds, and all their might. They were called “Seekers.” They sought to approach nearer to God by journeying arduously, step by tiny step, over the land, up hill and down, toward the Mountain of God. As they reached the ridge tops, they felt weightless and light-hearted, and they knew in which direction to travel because they could see the peaks of the Mountain of God gleaming beautifully in the light of the sun and the moon, when the air was clear. They were often hungry on their pilgrimages, since their manna did not last overnight during their crossings of the high country, where they could find none. On Shabbat days, the Seekers rested and worshipped God with the people gathered in little brown churches in the dells, who shared their manna with them.

For as long as anyone knew, Seekers had told the gathered people about their visions of the Mountain of God, about their hopeful journeys, their enlightenment in the high places, how they expected one day to see God, and to be in God’s presence. From time immemorial, multitudes of Seekers had come from every direction in the land, and many had reached the Mountain of God. Not only had they done that, but also many had returned to tell of it. They told of many paths worn and cleared by halting, little steps up the mountain, and of age-old signs and monuments left by those who had gone before, showing Seekers the way up, higher and higher.

Some paths ended in sheer stone outcrops, or had been blocked by rockslides. Those ways were hidden with overgrowth, or covered with rubble. But other paths, though steep and impossible to discern from below, had been kept open and free from stumbling blocks. Seekers knew, they said, that some pathways could still be ascended all the way up. Of these, there were known to be quite a few, approaching the peaks of the Mountain of God from every side.

To reach the summits took Seekers many years, even lifetimes. It required of them prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The climbing was easy, even though their short-limbed locomotion was very slow, because they were light as lizards at that high altitude. But how did the Seekers survive on the rocky mountaintops without fresh manna? God provided them with freeze-dried, extended-release, high-protein, carbohydrate-balanced manna substitute with organic preservatives, because God wanted to see the amazement on their sun-burnt faces when they finally arrived. God had a liberating truth to reveal to them, which came in a blinding flash of the obvious - this, of course, you already know.

The Seekers who had made their way to the top, and returned with the good news of God, advised others to do this: Find a well-worn path with well-kept signs; study the signs and understand them, set out on the path you’ve chosen, paying close attention to the ground ahead, and stay on that path. That will be your Way. Do not turn aside from it, looking for a better route. There are many ways to reach the heights, they said, but scrambling across the mountainside, scrabbling and sliding on this path, then that, from one blind curve to another, without learning the meanings of the signs, is definitely not the way.

But did the neophyte Seekers heed the advice their venerable mentors so generously gave them? Actually, most of them did, because they had never seen pulp fiction or television shows, and their undergraduate professors were Dominicans and Jesuits. And what of the unfortunate, sophomoric, heedless ones in a hurry, who couldn’t tell a blunderbuss from a bowling pin? Some of them eventually wandered back down into the valleys, all knot-headed, shin-scraped, and bruised, saying that, as far as they were concerned, there was no God up there after all.

So, ages came and ages passed, and most of the people never did see God’s face. God never spoke, and they couldn’t have read God’s handwriting anyway, but they mostly believed in God nonetheless, and they kept getting their daily manna. Wise and weary Seekers kept coming back from the Mountain of God, radiating God’s glory, and people fed them and listened to their stories, but most people really were content just to scrape up breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and admire the daffodils blooming in the meadows.

God, being just and merciful, and having other worlds to create, continued to love them as long as their short little lives lasted, because they were God’s people, with all their short little fingers and short little legs, and God had promised to deliver them from evil into the land. And so it was, because even though God is invisible and speechless, and no one can decipher God’s handwiting, God is nothing if not one who keeps promises.