New column on boomers, leadership and the church…
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February 12th, 2011For many across the United States the winter of 2011 has been filled with surprises. Falling temperatures, snow, and ice have pummeled nearly every part of the country. Here in Dallas the weather plunged from highs in the seventies to lows in the teens with ice and then snow.
We complained about the uncharacteristically warm temperatures. Then after days on end of ice and snow, others groused, “It’s beautiful, but enough.”
When I was tempted to join the chorus, I thought, “Take your gift and say thanks.”
We complain far too much. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with desires and longing, ambition or progress. But some elements of life just are what they are and almost nothing that needs to be changed yields to change over night.
The secret of life deeply and joyfully lived is just one that not only lives in the moment (as I so often hear people say). The secret of life lived joyfully is life lived in the present with gratitude.
Take your gift and say thanks.
You will live with greater joy. You will notice things for which to give thanks. And change will not leave you struggling in quite the same way.
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February 7th, 2011Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.Sallyland Fundamentalists
February 2nd, 2011During the time that I spent in Jerusalem, St. Catherine’s Monastery was a regular destination for the classes that I taught. We took a chartered bus to Sharm el Shekh, crossed through the border control, and on the other side met Bedouin who drove us across the trackless expanse to the southern tip of the Sinai Desert. There we visited the monastery; climbed Mount Sinai at three in the morning; and celebrated Eucharist on the way back down. The return trip to Jerusalem, like the one on our way down, was a long one and it required an overnight stop.
It will sound strange, but our favorite respite from the trip was a small motel called “Sallyland,” located on the Gulf of Aqaba. The owner was from Chicago and had named the establishment after his wife, Sally.
When we arrived the first time the owner apologized repeatedly for the absence of TVs and mini-bars in the rooms. We didn’t miss either one. Frankly, we were thankful for beds and clean sheets. But the apology struck me as odd. So I finally asked why, if he felt badly about it, the rooms didn’t have both.
“We did, at one time,” he explained, “but fundamentalist Muslims from Cairo would hide out here for days on end, drinking heavily and watching television with the volume turned all the way up. It disturbed our other guests and eventually drove them off. So we took both the bars and the TVs out of the rooms.”
It was one of many experiences over the years that have taught me these truths:
- There is no worldview or religion without its fundamentalists.
- There is no fundamentalism without hypocrisy.
- And every creed and conviction has its fundamentalists and hypocrites.
Fundamentalism is not the product of a single religion or worldview. It is one of two poles. A place where opinion and passion constellates around a distilled and oversimplified version of a creed — just as the same passion and opinion constellates around its rejection at the other end of the spectrum.
- Muslims at Sallyland —
- Christopher Hitchens, fundamentalist to atheists —
- Jerry Falwell, fundamentalist Christian —
Name a religion, life philosophy, or political point of view and you will find fundamentalists left and right. People are drawn to it or repelled by it. For some it constitutes the purest expression of a tradition, for others it represents the best reason for rejecting it.
The troubling truth is that those who connect with a faith in ways that are passionate, without being fundamentalist, are few and far between. Passion too often resides at the extremes. Far too many people who lived in the middle are simply disaffected. But it is that passionate balance that is needed.
Find it.
Nurture it.
Live from it.
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January 31st, 2011Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.Free range Christian
January 28th, 2011Not long ago one of my students described herself as a “free range Christian,” alluding to the diverse and varied character of her denominational past. The phrase captures in a fresh way a reality that has been true of the American spiritual landscape for quite some time.
Robert Bellah described it in Habits of the Heart in 1985. Robert Wuthnow in a book called After Heaven, written in 1998. And you see it on display all around us: Church’s that downplay their denominational connections or deny that they have a creed. People who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, by which they often mean, “I do God, but I don’t do church.” And you see it in the triage theology of rather more typical churchgoers who go to denominational churches, but whose personal theology bears no resemblance to the traditions that their denominations represent.
The phenomenon can be traced to a variety of factors. Some of it has to do with the churches — disenchantment with church’s that aren’t real, that are preoccupied with their own desperate search for survival, that don’t offer a persuasive reason for attending them, and that don’t teach their members much about their understanding of the Christian faith.
But the preference for free range Christianity can also have to do with a flight from spiritual accountability — the desire to craft a spiritual life that isn’t shaped by obligations to community, creed, calling — or anything else, in fact, that requires people to do what they don’t want to do.
In defense of free-range Christianity people will often argue that it comes closer to the “real deal” — a return to a time when people “just worshiped God,” “just read their Bibles,” or “just loved Jesus.”
There’s just one problem with this argument: The moment we begin to talk about how to worship, what to make of what we read in the Bible, or describe what it means to love Jesus, then we are already in the business of articulating a creed. And even if it is your personal creed (which is likely to have the limitations of one person’s thought and experience) you are doing what traditions and denominations once tried to do. The difference in today’s world is that we are coming closer to a world of personalized creeds than ever before.
Creeds and traditions are not meant to straight-jacket people. They are meant to help cultivate and deepen our grasp of the Christian pilgrimage by drawing on the wisdom, reflection, and experience of generations. It gives spirituality traction in our lives, a vocabulary that helps us discuss our experience of God with one another, and communicate it to another generation.
A free range Christian may be free, but he or she is also alone with a creed and community of one.
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January 25th, 2011Traffic jams force you to pay attention to the back of the car just ahead of you and after years of attending to the philosophical and political commitments of other drivers, I’ve concluded that not all bumper sticker wisdom finally wears well.
One of the widespread bits of wisdom that doesn’t wear well from a Christian point of view is the one that urges the reader to practice random acts of kindness. Of course, being kind is not a bad thing. And the great strength of the invitation is the freedom and surprise of such behavior implied in the word “random.” I am sure that at least some of what made this bit of bumper sticker morality attractive was that it leaves us in control and it allows us to be a surprise to others. That tracks well with the culture in which we have been reared.
Christian kindness, however, is not supposed to be “random.” It’s not even clear that the word “kindness” is really the central virtue of the Christian faith.
In fact, it isn’t even easy to convey the central virtue of the Christian faith any longer. The Latin for it is caritas and that word has been variously translated “charity” and “love.” But both words have fallen on hard times in the English language.
Charity often means little more than “hand out” and love has degenerated into something amounting to not much more than “affection.” By contrast, caritas is rooted in a different way of seeing the world that is rooted in an unqualified passion for God and for seeing the world as God sees it. The dignity, care, and love that is characteristic of caritas is rooted in the conviction that we are all the children of God, equally wonderful, equally in need of God’s grace.
Caritas doesn’t give, nor is it affectionate in a random fashion. It calls for much more and it calls for it consistently, because it is rooted in a fundamentally different way of seeing life. Random has nothing to do with it, because it’s not about the act of kindness, it’s about a fundamentally different way of being and seeing.
Beware of bumper sticker theology. There are times when it just doesn’t say enough.
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January 24th, 2011Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.Preaching the Gospel
January 21st, 2011Novelist, English professor, and committed Christian, Reynolds Price, died this week. He was 77, had battled spinal cancer, and spent much of his life in a wheelchair. When he went to Duke University 53 years ago he was offered a three year, non-renewable contract. But the success of his first novel changed all of that.
In the course of his career he was described as “an heir to Faulkner” by the New York Times, a comparison which Price skewered nicely, writing:
“The search for influences in a novelist’s work is doomed to trivial results…A serious novelist’s work is his effort to make from the chaos of all life, his life, strong though all-but-futile weapons, as beautiful, entire, true but finally helpless as the shield of Achilles itself.”
That, it seems to me, is an apt description of the preacher’s task, as well. But over the years of sermons that I have heard (and often simply endured), I have rarely detected that kind of deep struggle and vulnerability.
There is much to learn about the craft of preaching. But grasping the nature of the task would profoundly change every preacher’s efforts; and no preacher’s skill can compensate for the absence of that inspiration.
There are countless arguments that we might offer for why people ought to listen to the Gospel, but none of them is finally convincing, if we aren’t engaged in the struggle to which Price devoted his life and work.
May light perpetual shine upon him.
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January 19th, 2011Once, while the great Jewish sage, Honi, was walking along a road, he saw an old man planting a carob tree. Honi asked him: “How many years will it take for this tree to give forth its fruit?” The man answered that it would require 70 years. Honi asked: “Are you so healthy a man that you expect to live that length of time and eat its fruit?” The man answered: “I found a fruitful world because my ancestors planted it for me. So, too, will I plant for my children.” (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 23a)
The Jewish and Christian traditions demand attention to the present. But both are also spiritual traditions grounded in the goodness of creation.
For that reason, Judaism and Christianity are deeply shaped by a sense of indebtedness to the past and responsibility for the future. We are here temporarily, but we are part of the much larger work of God and of generations past and future. That awareness should ground us and motivate us to think about our lives in much larger ways.
There is a lot of talk today about finding meaningful relationships and work. But if sociologists are right, that quest is often conducted in narrow ways that are about the tight confines of our individual lives. How would your quest change if you grasped the fact that you are here temporarily and the meaning of your life depends upon the degree to which it is grounded in the lives of those who were here before you and those who will be here when you are gone?
