Insight Trails

Witnessing to Life

By Jon Berry

 LOOKING OUT FROM THE SCREEN PORCH AT MY PARENTS' home onto the back of their little farm – the corn and soybean fields in midsummer splendor; the vegetable garden offering up its bounty of lettuce, green beans, and sweet corn; the newly adopted cat skittering across the lawn and up a tree to get a closer look at the bird feeder – it’s sometimes possible to forget that 11 years ago this August, we got the call.

    My mom had felt unwell on the flight home with Dad from Paris to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. For years, she’d dreamed of going to Paris. In one of those rare alignments of the cosmos, reality lived up to expectation. We rented a garret apartment in the historic Beaubourg. Everyone, including our two teen-age kids, was entranced. We had long walks through old neighborhoods. Simple, gourmet dinners on warm summer nights. Fresh croissant and dark coffee every morning. Museums. Monet’s Garden.

    Best of all to my mom were the leisurely evening boat trips down the Seine, an experience she loved so much we repeated it on our last night.  

    Barely three weeks after our return, she phoned with the news. She was going into the hospital. Her doctor had found a mass. It didn’t look good.

    Life stopped. Became a blur. We hurriedly packed the car. I remember calling from a phone booth at a gas station in eastern Ohio, and praying, over and over, hold on, hold on, hold on. We arrived to find her preparing to go to Indianapolis for surgery.

    The morning of her operation, we encircled her on her bed to gather her in light. My dad. My family. An uncle. The nurses. My mother proudly told the nurses that I’d begun seminary studies, which, technically, was true. A class in preaching, a class in the philosophy of religion, and a class on peace and reconciliation, squeezed in between a full-time job, family responsibilities, committee obligations at our Friends meeting, and a beginning practice in 12-step. That year, as I rode the subway up to my classes, and spent my evenings reading and writing, I felt a new world opening up. But, in this moment in the hospital, I felt woefully unprepared. I quick-sifted my memory for a ministerly insight. Blank.

    Mom, as it turned out, said all that was needed. She thanked us all for being there. She said she’d “had a good life,” and was ready to accept whatever the day would bring. “I trust the doctors and trust God. I love you all.” We took in her words, returned our expressions of love, said we would always be there for her. And she was wheeled away.

    In my mind’s eye, I can see the scenes that ensued as fresh as this morning’s drive into town. We waited, uncomfortably. Occasionally there would be reports – the doctors were beginning; they were making progress; they were almost done. Then the lead doctor came out, ashen-faced. “Gather your family,” he said. “She didn’t make it.”

    To this day, the medical explanation for what happened – complete system shutdown – and when it happened – after they’d removed what they could, discovered the cancer's startling extent, and were finishing up – still jars. She knew, we surmised. She knew, from her experiences with others, what was to come – the months of pain and hardship of what, inevitably, would be a losing cause; the doctors said she might have six months. She decided in faith, we believed, to turn it over, surrender, let go.

   Numb, shocked, in tears, we walked out later that night and gazed up into the most beautiful, vivid star-filled sky we had ever seen. One of the nurses attending mom, on hearing the news, brought out a tray of cookies (“she was such a lovely woman,” she said) – communion, on a starry night.

    This week, I’m resuming seminary. It’s been a fits-and-starts, on-off journey, a class here, a class there, between work, family, and other obligations. For this class, in a new program, in Indiana, that I switched to two years ago, I’ve been asked to write a spiritual autobiography. In the paper, we’re to reflect on what’s been “rich, inviting, and memorable” in our spiritual journeys; what’s drawing us to seminary “at this point” in our spiritual lives; and what “spiritual hungers” seminary may nourish. We’ve been asked to think back on people, places, events, and spiritual communities that have been significant to us.

    I didn’t intend to start with my mother. But, when I sat down to write this morning, it’s what came out. In truth, she’s been with me all week, since I arrived in Indiana to visit with my father, in his 85-year-old farmerly spryness, before beginning classes, on the farm that he and mom had bought – and worked – as the retirement gift to themselves.

    The other day, I asked a friend if anyone’s ever done research on how much being read to as a child affects intelligence scores when you reach your teens. The ostensible impetus was a summer reading camp I’d bumped into while going to the college library to work. But I was really thinking about my mom's weekly library visits, from as early as I can recall (was I four? three? two?), and her checking out a foot-high stack of books to read to me. Blueberries for Sal. Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. Winnie the Pooh. The Little Red Lighthouse.

    She always had big plans for my brother and me. We were to be the generation that would go to and finish college (a project she virtually ensured by taking a secretarial job at a college, earning us tuition remission). Mom and I did not have an easy relationship. We fought, a lot. But over time, the tensions mellowed.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about the different ways we can be called to witness. There’s a tendency to think of witness, in the religious sense, as action: to witness against war by refusing to pay taxes, for example. I’ve had some experience with active-tense living-out of belief in recent years – clerking Quaker meetings; overseeing a Quaker wedding and a Quaker funeral; 12-step service like speaking in meetings, going into classrooms and hospitals; and searching for a voice to write about the experience of the spiritual in work and life in this space.

    It’s my hope that seminary will deepen me in all of this and, perhaps, point toward work that engages them. But as I look back on the circle that formed around my mother eleven years ago, I see again that often the most profound witness that can be offered is not to what we say, or do, but to be present and listen, fully.

That's I.T.

Why? The Surprise

By Jon Berry

SOMETIMES NOSTALGIA ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK IT WILL BE. Going back to West Richmond Friends Meeting, the sturdy, old church I grew up in, the memory that often comes up first is about the Kinks.

      Yes, those Kinks. The raucous, anti-authoritarian, 1960s British rock band. It was at West Richmond Friends that I first heard the Kinks.

    I’m not sure exactly how it happened. My recollection is that my Sunday-school class had been turned over that week to two girls in the high-school group. After finishing the lesson, they decided to spin some of their LPs.

    I don’t remember what they played. What I do recall is a room full of 10- and 11-year-old mop-tops bouncing up and down like the kids in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

    And I remember what I thought: “These Quakers are cool.” It wasn’t the first time the idea came to me. And it wouldn’t be the last.

    Within a few years, it inspired me to don a black armband, skip school, and join a group of Quakers on National Road West to protest the war – no small act in a town that was, and remains, heavily Republican. Over the years, it’s inspired me in other leaps of faith.

    And it’s kept me coming back to Quaker meeting. Some people go to their place of worship for the experience’s predictability, the constancy of the rhythms and ritual. I prefer the surprise of the experience.

    The open, expansive silence of Quaker worship, in which themes emerge through the collective, mystical grappling of the group, and anyone can speak (or, more accurately, be “spoken through”), is, to me, an adventure. I never know what I’ll find in meeting for worship – within myself (the insights and images that come up, particularly after the initial period of settling down), or within others’ messages (which, amazingly, often synchronize with what’s coming up for me that week). Or the stories I hear before and after meeting.

    This surprise-inside has come to be a measuring-stick for me for all spiritual experiences, from visits to other churches and synagogues, to 12-step meetings, workshop retreats, yoga talks, or morning meditation on the train into the city. That may sound a bit unusual. Religion is often portrayed as a force of conservatism, the never changing “rock of ages.”

    I side, instead, with the 20^th-century Quaker leader Rufus Jones (pictured), who argued for an “open, expectant” religion that would spur “hope and faith and vision,” over “comfortable formulations that seem to ensure safety” and “endeavoring to coin repetitive phrases.”

     Experience encouraged me to pay attention at meeting. From Friends, I learned early on that it’s possible to pack up your worldly possessions and go off to China to become an educator, or to Kenya to teach business management to local crafts groups – revelations that encouraged me to envision a larger life than I otherwise might. I still remember one speaker pointing on a world map to where she’d been. I never looked at a map the same way again.

    Over time, I’ve come to believe that the most important gift of a spiritual community to its young is the often-surprising stories of "how" people live out their beliefs, more than the “what” of the Bible stories, commandments, etc. When kids in meeting grow up, I hope that the first memory that comes to mind isn’t a detail, like that certain Quaker beliefs spell “SPICES” (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, stewardship).

    I hope, instead, they remember a story of how people put those ideas into practice. Like how Rosa, a woman in our meeting, went to court to try to win the right to not have her tax dollars go to war. Or how Horst, another member, saw a parallel between the Quaker concept of Light and the light he created, in his work as an engineer, in vast, tensile structures like the Denver airport. Or how a college student and adult in our meeting recently flew to Latin America to help facilitate workshops for the Alternatives to Violence Project.

    It said a lot to me about the openness of the meeting I grew up in that it trusted the teens enough to let them put on a record. In its own, idiosyncratic way, it created a sense of openness and expectance in the 11-year-old me.

    Periodically, religions have back-to-basics turns. It can mean anything from clamping down on “looseness” in vocal ministry to rejecting influences outside the religious tradition in Sunday-school lessons.

    But, from my experience, it’s a balancing act. This came home a few years ago when a prolonged wrangle over whether infants should be permitted in meeting for worship was resolved when a beloved older Friend declared that the recent burbling of babies was one of the most life-affirming messages he’d ever heard in meeting.

    You never know what will connect with someone. It may be that the shaggy-haired radical preaching peace and love, and making the grown-ups uncomfortable, is carrying an electric guitar and has a beat you can dance to. 

That’s I.T.

 This post was set in motion by a “Quaker Dialogue Series” initiated by the First-Day School in my Friends Meeting (Purchase, NY). Over successive Sundays, adults in the meeting were invited to come in to meet with the kids (ages 7-14) and address six questions:

(1) “What was First Day School like when you were a child? (or, for those who came to Quakerism as an adult, “what led you to meeting?”); (2) “What is it about meeting that keeps you coming back?”; (3) “What does being a Quaker mean to you?”; (4) “How does silent worship strengthen your faith?”; (5) “How do you handle feelings or thoughts that may be in conflict with Quaker beliefs?”; (6) “If you have experience with another faith, do you find more similarities or differences between it and Quakerism?”

They’re great questions, not only for breakfast discussions but to just think about on your own. I was the interviewee two weeks ago. As it turned out, I never got to tell the Kinks story. The kids were more interested in my experiences on clearness committees, Quakers’ tradition of assembling a group to ask you questions to discern whether you’re “clear” about a decision you want to make; couples often are asked to go before a clearness committee before marrying. The consensus of the kids was that clearness committees could be useful for family decisions like whether to get a pet and who’d care for the pet. One boy suggested he’d be happy to take care of petting the dog's head, and his sibling could handle the business at the other end.

Also, I believe the Kinks record I heard all those years ago was “The Kinks’ Greatest Hits” (1966, pictured above). I found a copy a few years ago at a tag sale and, have to say, it's still pretty danceable.

The Hand on the Wall

By Jon Berry

FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, SINCE SEEING THE REMARKABLE new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet Cave in France, an image has been haunting me. It’s not the hundreds of beasts – bison, lions, rhinos, horses, et. al. – rendered with the stunning sophistication that prompted Picasso to marvel of a similar set of paintings at Lascaux, “they’ve invented everything.”

    Nor is it the cave's painting of a Minotaur-like creature, with a head of a bison on a human body - though that image has recalibrated the myth’s frame of reference for me. Apparently what I always thought of as an ancient Greek image was ancient to the Greeks, too.

    Nor is it the age of Chauvet's paintings, carbon-dated to 32,000 years ago, roughly double the age of the previously oldest known cave paintings - almost 1,800 generations old (assuming 18 years per generation), or about 600 grandparent-parent-child family portraits laid end to end.

    What stopped me was the image of a hand, outlined in ochre-red paint on the wall at Chauvet. When I saw it, I thought: I know that hand. There are two such hands on my bureau, small, delicate clay sculptures my children created decades ago for elementary-school art projects. In each hand, I keep a small object – in one, a card that says “release,” in the other, a stone with the inscription “serenity” – my wishes as my son and daughter move into the world. Periodically, as circumstances shift, I move the objects from one hand to the other, offering a prayer that a power greater than myself will see through my adult-experience-borne skepticism and respond. 

    Scientists debate what the Chauvet Cave hands mean;  the cave was only discovered 17 years ago. But, from the reading I’ve done since seeing Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a point of view is emerging. And it’s not so different from my bureau-top ritual.

    The handprints – there are literally hundreds, bearing the imprint of men, women, children, even babies – appear to have been a ritual of entry. In pressing their hands to the cave wall, the visitors likely believed themselves to be “palping” the rock “in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force behind it.”

    Caves were sacred spaces, sanctuary from the outside world and gateways to deeper, spiritual connection. One source compares the caves to twelfth-century churches. Like the great cathedrals, the caves satisfied familial, communal, and individual needs; people knew and were drawn to them. “For a nomadic people, living at nature’s mercy, it must have been a powerful consolation to know that such a refuge from flux existed,” writes Judith Thurman, in a 2008 New Yorker article that inspired filmmaker Werner Herzog to make Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Cave painters were, in effect, “sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.” 

      Jean Clottes, the French archaeologist who for many years led the exploration of the Chauvet Cave, thinks the cave paintings should force a rethinking of early humans. Rather than Homo sapiens, the wise, rational man, he contends, we are, in fact, “Homo spiritualis.” “The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems,” Clottes says.

     All of which, it seems, has implications for us today. In engaging in spiritual practice – praying, meditating, chanting, preaching, singing, making offerings, taking communion, listening to spiritual teachers – we are, in effect, following in footsteps going back 32,000-plus years. Like the hands on the walls, we are reaching toward the unknown for structures to contain an endless universe; narratives to connect us with our fellow beings, creatures, and environment; lessons to make sense of the past, the future, and our place in the present moment. 

    For someone like me, who appreciates history – that, since 1723, Quakers have been gathering for silent worship on the grounds where I go to meeting each Sunday; that Quakers have been around since the mid-1600s; and that Quakerism is an offshoot of a religion (Christianity) that has evolved over 2,000 years – the notion of spiritual practices reaching back 32,000-plus years is, well, a bit mind-blowing.

     It makes me wonder:

    Is what’s important not the labels we go by – Quaker, Buddhist, Unitarian (to name some that an online “find your religion” poll recently affixed to me) – but that we are following a deeply embedded, 32,000-plus-year-long path? 

    To the extent that we attach ourselves to a contemporary religious label, are we cutting ourselves off from a longer human lineage, and, in the process, denying ourselves a potential source of consolation and strength? Are we isolating ourselves from nature at a time when – given the vast destruction humans have wreaked on the environment – we should be deepening that connection?

    Does the depth of human spiritual practice – that people have been seeking the sacred for 32,000-plus years – mean that there’s something within spirituality that humans inherently need; that, despite the protestations of the atheist movement, that there’s something in this tradition that can’t be undone?

    Instead of focusing on this or that belief, should we instead concentrate on how we live our lives – reforming religion to lift up those in need, seek justice, create peace, offer comfort, prevent war, “walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone” (in the words of George Fox, Quakerism's founder), and, as the Dalai Lama says, profess that “my religion is kindness”?

That’s I.T.

For more on Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, click here. To view the film's trailer, click on the video below.

For more on the Chauvet Cave, including taking a tour, click on the French government’s site here.

For Judith Thurman’s wonderful New Yorker story, “First Impressions: What Does the World’s Oldest Art Say About Us?” published June 23, 2008, click here. Most of the quotes above on Chauvet are from her article.

Yes, I considered invoking the pun "the handwriting on the wall." But I thought it'd be better if you thought of it first.

 

In Praise of Falling

By Jon Berry

 “HOW OLD IS THAT KID?” We were four miles into the Leatherman’s Loop trail race Sunday, running through a woods in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester County, NY, when the guy next to me asked the question. “Good question,” I replied, and turned back to ask. “Hey, how old are you?”

    And in an instant – just as our tow-headed, skinny, young friend chirped “11!” and we marveled back “Wow!” “Nice job!” – it happened. My left foot hooked under a tree root and I toppled forward like a felled tree – knees, chest, elbows, hands – in the first of what turned out to be three full-frontal face-plants. Luckily, I had an all-dirt landing; no rocks. I got up, made a joke (“Well, that’s out of the way”), and started anew.

    Rule #1 of trail running says you never, ever take your eye off the trail in front of you. But in 6.2 miles fording up-to-your-chest stream crossings, crossing suck-your-shoes-off mud flats, scrambling up and down hills, and hopping over more fallen trees, rocks and roots than you could imagine, at some point, inevitably, you forget.

    Falling is part of the experience. It wasn’t the first time recently that I heard that idea. A week before, going to church with my dad and brother in Indiana, we heard it in the Easter Sunday sermon. An “unwillingness to fall” is normal, the pastor said; no one likes to fall. But falling is “the central truth of the Christian gospel”: “Life springs from death,” not only in the Christian belief in resurrection but from “the many little deaths” of life. My friend Bill, who is Jewish, says the larger spiritual lesson of death-and-rebirth has made Easter his favorite Christian holiday.

    In falling, we come face-to-face with our smallness. And that’s OK. We gain humility (I love that "humble" and "humus" -- dirt -- have the same root). We learn. We move forward.

    In his new book, In the Valley of the Shadows, Biblical scholar James Kugel calls this recognition of smallness the starting point of belief. “Religion is first of all about fitting into the world.” We may think we're masters of our destiny. But we’re still subject to forces we can’t really conceive. And, in our “modern, clumsy” way, we moderns are in some ways less adept at relating to those forces than people in ancient times. Faced with the unexpected (as Kugel was, with a cancer diagnosis that, fortunately, he survived), we realize like the author of Psalm 102 that “all things tatter and fade like a garment” in the face of a power that stays “the same,” whose “years never end.”

          There’s always something larger. As the singer-songwriter Steve Earle says in the song that seems the centerpiece of his new album, “God ain’t me.” It’s not an easy concept to grasp in New York, where people can seem so big and the world so small. It’s one reason I go back to the farm country in Indiana where my family's from; you can almost feel history unpeel there, today’s sights and sounds giving way to the Great Depression and my Dad and his brothers damming the nearby stream to go swimming; travelers on the Civil War-era underground railroad stealing their way to freedom across these fields to the Quaker safe houses in New Garden; and hundreds of years earlier, Native Americans coming to the swampy woods here to hunt. Sometimes it all seems to be alive at once -- a feeling that is as awe-inspiring as any I know.

    Being small means surrendering, at least once in a while. Try as we may, we can’t control everything. "We're not in the outcomes business," as a friend says. That pretty much describes Sunday's face-plant #2. Coming down the last little slope of the race, I carefully put my foot down into gloppy, black mud – and the foot just slid back and I went down with a plop. I laughed again, and looked around. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. The mud felt all right.

    So we try with our might but remember above all to enjoy the day (hello again, Ecclesiastes). That essentially seemed to be the message before the race from Danny Martin, the former Catholic priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual director. He urged the runners to look on the day as an exercise in sustainability: All the environmental good works we do will mean nothing if we don't take the wonder of the earth into our hearts. It was a fitting preamble to the Irish/Navajo blessing he then led us in, that there is beauty before us, behind us, below us, above us, and within us.

    An hour later, arriving at the last, largest, deepest stream crossing, aka the “Splashdown,” just short of the finish line, it seemed only right, then, to end the day not with a ginger wading-across but -- why not?! -- to instead stretch my arms high, let out a "whoop!" and take a big, arcing water-face-planting dive forward…

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, click here. Coverage of this year's race, including photos, are on the site. The Navajo/Irish blessing is in the FAQ section. Or go back to my Feb. 27 post, "A Spring-Seeking Blessing" which quotes it (amazing how this year's endless winter did turn to spring); click here.

To read the full transcript of "Our Own Resurrection," the Easter Sunday message at West Richmond Friends (IN) Meeting, delivered by Kelly Burk, director of religious life at Earlham College, click here. The quotation she cited is from the book Leaving Church, by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadows, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Steve Earle's new album, "I'll Never Get Out of this Life Alive," or to buy a copy, click here. To view Joan Baez's cover of "God Is God," click here.    

Street Wisdom

By Jon Berry

MY CELL PHONE BUZZED: “HAVE YOU HEARD FROM____?” I’ve learned through experience to be wary of text messages from people I don’t know asking for my friend’s whereabouts. So after making a quick mental checklist of the possibilities – someone looking for money? someone looking for a fight? a social worker? collection agency? – I texted back circumspectly: “Yes. Who’s this?”

    “I know him from the homeless shelter. He’s a friend.” Then, seconds later, “Do you know where he’s headed?”

    I didn’t have time for this. I’d just come off the train at Grand Central Station, and needed to squeeze through the rush-hour crowd and get a downtown subway to a lecture by a renowned spiritual teacher.

    “Dunno,” I replied, still skeptical. “He didn’t say.” That was true. I had seen my friend the day before, to give him some things I’d been keeping for him. But he didn’t say where he was going. My guess is he didn’t know himself. “He wasn’t too communicative,” I added.

    The next day, my friend resurfaced. I asked him about the texts. “Oh, yeah, that’s xxxx,” he said. “He’s been a good friend.” I changed the phone number on the texts to a name, and sent an update. “Good to hear,” xxxx replied. “Hopefully he will be good. Thanks for letting me know.”

    Years of keeping company with people on both sides of alcoholism and addiction – the sufferers and the friends and family trying to detach with love – have created a reflex in me to go to dark places when I’m on unfamiliar ground. But reality is more than darkness. And that should not surprise me.

    In Liberation Theology, people talk about the lessons that can be learned from those on society’s margins. The marginalized “can help cultivate a new look at the way things are.” If we learn anew “how to listen,” we can gain insights “in places where we least expect it” (Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor). 

    I sort of got it intellectually when I read it in seminary. But, to really get it, I had to have real-life lab practice – like seeing again last week that that friendships exist, too, among the homeless, maybe especially so. I needed to experience that a lesson can come in unexpected places, at unexpected times – including on the way to what I think is my lesson. As a friend says, “If you want to hear God laugh, make plans.” 

    The surprise of insight in places we least expect it came through in my reading this week, too. On the recommendation of my friend (who found solace in it during a recent stay in a drug-treatment program), I bought Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer’s 1998 memoir of the decade he spent living on the streets of New York addicted to crack cocaine.

    In some ways, the book confirmed my worst fears. Life on the streets can be predatory. There's what the author calls "the pocket incident": two men carefully cut into the pants pocket of a sleeping homeless man and make off with a wad of cash. Guys routinely con each other and the system – and assume the system does the same to them. “It’s all a hustle,” advises one of the author’s acquaintances. What outsiders think will be havens, like the homeless shelters, turn out to be riven with a “watch-your-back, watch-your-mouth, watch-out-for-number-one, jailhouse mentality.”

    But it’s not all darkness. There’s a moral thread that runs through Grand Central Winter. Guys keep an eye on each other. It’s rare for someone to get lost on the streets; the homeless generally know where each other are. There's humor. There’s creativity; for a while, a group of guys keeps a large population fed on the food thrown out by the train crews because it’s passed its sell-by date. There are charitable impulses, like when Stringer tries to give a passerby a copy of Street News, the newspaper for the New York’s homeless, arguing “If I couldn’t give something to someone every now and then, wouldn’t that make me even poorer than I am?”

    Most important, there’s hope. The author eventually puts down his crack pipe and goes into recovery. It’s not a clean break. He has near-misses, then relapses, leading to an epiphany, on his knees, praying for help on Dog Run Hill in Central Park, and receiving it in the form of a seemingly heaven-sent dog that dashes up the hill...sits down...and leans into him. "I break out in goosebumps," he writes. "From that second...I never, ever had another craving."

    Stringer remarks that he does not know any “hardworking, moral, churchgoing, non-addicted American who would go to the lengths to which recovering addicts and alcoholics go for the sake of spiritual growth." He repeats the oft-heard wisdom in the rooms that “religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”

    On the other side of that hell, he finds that the “miraculous world” that he believed in as a child, then through “grinding disappointment” had given up on, is still present. It’s in the joy he rediscovers in his travels through the city, coming up out of the subway, seeing the day with new eyes. Most, though, it’s in the people whose stories he hears – “people who’d stopped kidding themselves” and now “took solace in revealing their weakness and pain.”

    “I doubt if people are ever so profoundly attractive as when they are being honest about themselves,” he writes. “…Damned if it isn’t a miraculous world after all.”

That’s I.T.

 For more on Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter, or to buy a copy, click here.

These are times of incredible need. Please remember to support your local food bank, organizations dedicated to providing homes for those ready for them like Habitat for Humanity, and organizations providing services to those in need. Some New York-area ones: City Harvest, the Food Bank for Westchester, Midnight Run, and SHORE (Sheltering the Homeless is Our Responsibility).

God in the Cubicle: Becoming 'Present-Day Abrahams'

THE GREATEST INSPIRATION CAN BEGIN IN THE PARTICULAR. I was reminded of this while reading Pamela Haines’ article “Faith and Economics” in the May issue of Friends Journal, the magazine of contemporary Quaker thought. Haines describes how she pursued a goal that initially seemed beyond her – starting a conversation among Friends to challenge the way the economy works in our society – by breaking it down into human-sized actions.

    While the essay's focus is her process of organizing an interest group on the subject at Friends General Conference’s annual “Gathering” last year, she communicates a larger idea relevant to this era in which so much seems to be askew: that we have the right to speak the truth as we seek it. We have the right to take a seat at the table; to say, as Haines does, that there is  more to life than “the idolatry of materialism,” that “unbridled growth comes at the expense of the planet’s integrity,” and that “we can do better.”

    Early in life, Haines writes, she learned that “I had the right to think, to question the standard way of doing things, and to act.”

    Reading the Old Testament this spring for a class at Earlham School of Religion , I’ve been impressed at just how grounded that right to question and call to mercy and justice is in Judeo-Christian tradition. In challenging the world – be it to help people suffering in this economy; to prevent environmental catastrophes like massive BP oil spill now spreading through the Gulf of Mexico (BP photo of the leak below); to end military aggression; or to create a more compassionate workplace – we live out an idea that goes back thousands of years. We become what one writer calls "present-day Abrahams" bearing witness to "the scandal of the particular."

    I think I first heard the story in Genesis 18:22-33 of Abraham persuading God to spare the city of Sodom if 10 righteous people can be found.  Studying it again, as an adult, I’ve been amazed at Abraham's feat. It’s not only just Abraham "talks God down,” as a friend, recalled the other day, smiling at the memory of his Hebrew school lesson.

    It’s how Abraham does it – asking whether God really wishes to “sweep away the righteous with the wicked”; appealing to God’s sense of justice (“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”); acknowledging his secondary status in this negotiation (“I who am but dust and ashes”); admitting he’s pushing things (“Do not let the Lord be angry if I speak”; “Do not let the Lord be angry if I speak just once more”); and negotiating God down in increments, resting his case first on finding 50 righteous  people, then persuading God to accept 45 (“Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?”), then 40, 30, and 20, before resting at 10. To which God says, essentially, all right.

    Some scholars don’t seem to know what to make of this. Is Abraham (depicted below in an earlier encounter with God by the artist Raphael) being shrewd or foolhardy?  Compassionate or heretical? In the end, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed (presumably, lacking the 10). The New Oxford Annotated Study Bible deems the story “a theoretical reflection” on “how many righteous people are required to save a broader group.”

    But the passage -- though less famous than other wranglings with the Divine, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Job arguing with God, and Moses' intervention for the Israelites -- has inspired passion that belies that "theoretical" conclusion. It has been drawn on in calls against war, poverty, and degradation of the environment. “This story boldly states that what we do does matter,” writes a minister on the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota’s website on environmental stewardship.

    Word-Sunday.com, the Catholic lectionary website, holds it up as a model for prayer: Abraham is “clear,” “logical,” and “persistent,” pleading, essentially, “If you are the God of the just, then act with justice… Be faithful to those who are faithful; be merciful to those who treat others with mercy.”

    Most striking to me is Nora Gallagher's essay on the website Journey with Jesus (fast becoming a favorite for its interweaving of theology and world events). Within the back-and-forth of Abraham and God,  Gallagher says, is “a wonderful theological idea: the scandal of the particular.” God, who “‘hung the stars’ and created ‘that great leviathan just for the sport of it’” can be concerned with the particular, a tiny group of   10 persons in the vastness of humanity and creation. The "small" is imbued with Divine importance. Archbishop Tutu of South Africa makes a similar point in a recent interview on "Speaking of Faith," saying that everyone, regardless of our station, is a "God carrier."

    To Gallagher, this insight is more than a small-is-beautiful-type sentiment. It speaks truth. Individual human experience binds us in a special way. It's attested every day in the media in the photos of individuals; in the ability of stories to inspire, anger, sadden in a way that statistics or statements about aggregates like "nation" cannot. Gallagher quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “I don’t love ‘groups.’ I can only love persons.”

    This interdependence calls us to speak up and be “present-day Abrahams,” says Gallagher. She cites the example of 150 scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project who petitioned President Truman to not drop the bomb on Japan. That Truman overrode their decision is a tragedy that will forever haunt. “Our lives begin to end,” says Gallagher, “on the day that we are silent about things that matter.”

**

For more on Friends Journal, a magazine that I am a major fan of (and, full disclosure!, a member of the board of trustees of), please visit Friends Journal.

To read Nora Gallagher’s essay  at the website Journey with Jesus, please click on"The Scandal of the Particular".

To read “Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33,” by the Rev. Wanda Copeland, in the lectionary of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota’s Environmental Stewardship Commission, please click on Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33.

To read Larry Broding's essay on what Abraham teaches us about prayer on the Catholic lectionary resource Word-Sunday.com, please click on Negotiating with God.

God in the Cubicle: Why Aren't Quakers Talking More about Debt?

I REACHED THIS WEEK FOR FAITH AND PRACTICE, the book that Quakers turn to for guidance on how to live their lives in accordance with the testimonies and beliefs of Quakerism, to see what it says about debt. I was surprised to find that it says virtually nothing. At least that’s the case with the version I use most often, from my yearly meeting. 

    That’s a shame. The first generations of Quakers had a lot to say on the subject. With the U.S. struggling to crawl out of a financial collapse and recession brought on by a decade-long debt-fueled spending spree, our society could benefit from a point of view that looks at debt from a spiritual context.

    I’m not an expert on Quaker history; someone may jump in with a more seasoned perspective. But my sense from readings over the years and being part of Friends meetings is that early Quakers would say that the piling-on of debt in contemporary consumer culture through credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, lines of credit, personal loans, business loans, student debt, et al, has exacted spiritual as well as financial costs. It's hard to be spiritually free if you're encumbered with debt.

    “Owe no man anything but love,” in the words of George Fox (pictured), the founder of Quakerism.

    According to Israel Grubb’s history Quakerism and Industry before 1800, Quakers were not opposed per se to debt. Securing financing was a fact of life. Records from the 1600s and 1700s, in fact, show Quaker meetings advanced funds to help members start businesses, buy tools and materials for their businesses, and acquire training. (The generosity wasn't limited to financing; meetings also helped Friends find jobs and provided care for Friends in need.)

    Cork Meeting, for instance, loaned £4 John Hartford to buy materials for his trade. Dublin Meeting advanced £3 to help Richard Lloyd start a business, extended £5 to John Ashton to buy leather for his trade, and bought a loom for J. Baggiley. Meetings also recorded repayments of debt; one meeting said it'd received £20 from a young Friend it’d help relocate to Pennsylvania.

    But Friends also warned followers of the dangers of being over-extended – “trading beyond your ability” and “stretching beyond your compass,” in the language of the day. They offered advice on managing money, and stepped in on occasion to help Friends avoid bankruptcy. Their cautions on debt were often stern. Going into debt to support a lifestyle was especially disdained. George Fox deemed people who lived on credit “wasters of other men’s goods” and “destroyers” of resources that could be put to better use.

    Such words may sound harsh to today’s ears. But how Friends managed their money, as all of life, was seen as an expression of one’s faith. Religion was not separated from daily affairs but “lived out through them,” Grubb writes.

    From my readings, the message I take away from early Friends is that debt, as often as not, gets in the way of faith. It complicates life, posing conflict with the Quaker belief in simplicity. It can lead to turmoil – stress, sleeplessness, tension in relationships, late fees, and, if it progresses, calls from collection agencies, foreclosure, and bankruptcy –  creating conflicting with other Quaker principles including peace and integrity.

    Though modern advertising often presents debt as leading to abundance – enabling us to buy to our hearts’ desires, create “priceless” moments, be “everywhere you want to be,” “tap” our equity, and be members of a special club that “has its privileges” – debt can also cut us off from paths we’re spiritually led to. The more bills we have, the harder it is to pursue a leading. Can we really “let our lives speak” if we’re weighed down by debt?

    To early Friends, it was important to stay flexible. It was not uncommon for Friends to step back from paid work periodically to devote themselves to good works. Thomas Chalkley. for example, noted in his journal that, having “got a little money” from his work, “a little being enough,” he planned to now devote himself to “the work and service of my great master Jesus Christ.”

    Some of what early Friends said and did seems strange from a modern vantage. In addition to proffering advice, meetings sometimes asked to look at members’ finances. Quaker elders in Ireland in 1702 ordered a “strict and diligent inspection into the condition and circumstances of all Friends,” with followers asked to “cast up their accounts, debt, and credit,” to address concerns that people were “falling into debts beyond what they have to pay.” One meeting separately reported that “to our great grief,” members were not paying their debts punctually.

    But in an era when Friends, as an upstart, disapproved sect, were subject to religious persecution, and debtors prison was a threat to all, debt was a big deal.

      A friend notes that there are times when debt makes sense, to pay down in increments something you couldn't cover all at once. That's true. But I wonder if meetings could do more to help people practice spiritual discernment about when those times are. Should we offer clearness or oversight committees on money decisions at different stages of life? Should we be updating Faith and Practice and holding breakfast discussions and conference seminars on debt?

    With millions of people today caught up in the “virtual debtors’ prison” of foreclosure and bankruptcy, Quakers’ timeworn wisdom could have new value.

    Friends’ blend of common sense and Spirit could offer a new voice to other conversations as well -- for instance, the modern application of the biblical “jubilee year” of debt forgiveness.

    While the Old Testament talks about debt forgiveness (e.g. Deuteronomy 15:1 “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts”) and counsels against charging interest (e.g.  Exodus 22:25’s advice not to “exact interest” from "the poor among you"), I struggle to find Biblical advice on taking on debt. The closest I come is Deuteronomy 15:6 “you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow,” but that’s a prescription to nations.

    A good starting point for conversation could be this sentence from Christian Faith and Practice, from London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (which has a bit more to say on the subject of debt): “From its earliest days our Society has laid great stress on honesty in business and the payment in full of debts justly incurred.” I particularly like the emphasis on “debts justly incurred” in context of consumers and Third World countries who have been inveigled into debts they couldn’t afford.

    Or there's advice 15 from "Advices from the Elders at Balby," from 1656, the one mention of debt in my Faith and Practice, tucked back in the section on the history of Quakerism: "Friends in callings and trades are to be faithful and upright, and keep to yea and nay. Debts to be punctually paid, that nothing they may owe to any man but love to one another."

**

Israel Grubb's Quakerism and Industry before 1800, the primary source for the Quaker anecdotes in this essay, appears regrettably to be out of print. I was fortunate to be able to read a copy earlier this year while in Richmond, IN, for a class at Earlham School of Religion. 

God in the Cubicle: Amos and Economic Justice

“YOU HAVE A CHOICE!” THE DECLARATION, from a woman in Detroit trying to stop a foreclosure, captured in Michael Moore’s recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, has been echoing through my week.

    As have two stories in the morning paper. One, headlined “In a Job Market Realignment, Some Workers No Longer Fit,” unspools the unsettling truth that many of the jobs lost in the recession resulting from the 2007-8 financial collapse “are not coming back.”  “I know I’m good at this,” says a 52-year-old administrative assistant who’s been out of work for two years. “So how the hell did I end up here?” The other story, “Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies,” peeled back another other layer of the inside machinations of the collapse. Says one discomforted insider who knew something was wrong, “I can’t tell you how upset I have been in reviewing these trades.”

    I don’t profess to have a direct line Upstairs. But I think something deep and spiritual speaks to us through others. In the voices of the people being quoted in films and stories in these hard times, I believe, is a prophetic voice for our times. It’s a voice of anger, frustration, and bewilderment. And it’s a voice carrying moral weight, reflected, for example, in the three priests quoted in Moore’s film, who call the current economy “immoral,” “obscene,” “outrageous,” and “radically evil,” and warn that “in some form and fashion God will come down” and punish capitalism. It is a voice that says to our society, like the woman to the foreclosure officers, that we have choices. 

    A parallel voice can be found in scripture. More than 2,500 years ago, the biblical prophet Amos sounded a similar warning. He denounced the exploitation of the poor that he saw in Israel. “They sell the righteous for a pair of sandals… They trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way… They lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge…and…drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” (Amos 2:6-8)

    Amos criticized the consumer culture of the affluent, with its preening over lying on “beds of ivory,” being anointed with “the finest oils,” and real-estate-pride of “the winter house and summer house” and homes “of hewn stone” (6:4-6, 3:15, 5:11). He challenged the country’s smug patriotism, pointing to the countries surrounding Israel, and asking, “Are you better than those kingdoms?” (6:2). He questioned which gods Israel really worshiped – the god of Israel, or “Sakkuth,” “Kaiwan,” “your images, which you made for your self” (5:26) – and disparaged the false piety of going to church then putting it all aside the other six days of the week. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (5:21). 

    Instead of “burnt offerings and grain offerings” (5:22), said Amos, God desires  justice. “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24), he says in one of the Old Testament's most famous passages. Following God, he says, means doing good. “Seek good…that you may live…and the Lord…will be with you. Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate” (5:14-15).

    As one modern theologian writes, reading Amos today feels “like a blast of cold, clean air.” And with good reason. Amos was called to prophecy in a time like ours. According to The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Israel was reaching “a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity.” That prosperity “led to gross inequities between urban elites and the poor.” By “manipulation of debt and credit,” the wealthy amassed capital and estates at the expense of small farmers.” Those loans became “a wedge” that separated farmers from “their land and personal liberty.” 

    Amos was the “consummate outsider,” “blue collar rather than blue-blooded,” “a farmer from little Tekoa, about 12 miles southeast of Jerusalem,” says Daniel Clendenin, author, professor, and founder of the website Journey with Jesus. Not surprisingly, given his critique of the culture, the elites of his day "despised Amos as a redneck.” They tried to run him out of town.

    Rereading Amos this week, I’ve been wondering if there should be an “Amos day” – a Sunday in which every house of worship across the country turns over its services and education programs to reflecting on Amos’ message. Doing so might give comfort to those afflicted in this economy; they are not alone. It might prod those who are in positions of responsibility in business, government, the media, and other institutions, to take action – through their decisions, investments, purchases, and other actions – to create a more just economy.  And it could bring a moral, spiritual dimension to a discussion that all too often seems to be dry and remote, about regulations more than spiritual intent. 

    What would Amos say today? Would he growl out his prophecies in a rock band, on YouTube, or in rallies on Wall Street and Washington? Would he proclaim, “They buy sports cars with the fees they’ve taken from CDOs of subprime mortgages”? “Your offer of a new wing of the library won’t make up for the way you earned your money”? “You have built mcmansions but you shall not live in them”? Would he, too, say “You have a choice”?

***

There’s a lot of good writing on Amos’ relevance for modern times on the Web. Daniel Clendenin’s essay on Amos, “Growing Strong By Destroying Others: To the ‘Notable Men of the Foremost Nation,’” though written in 2007, before the crash, is particularly good:

http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20070716JJ.shtml

Clendenin’s website is also worth checking out for book and movie reviews and perspectives on other topics:

http://www.journeywithjesus.net/index.shtml

To read The New York Times story “In a Job Market Realignment, Some Workers No Longer Fit,” see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/economy/13obsolete.html?scp=1&sq=job%20market%20realignment&st=cse

To read The New York Times story “Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies,” see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/13street.html?scp=1&sq=ratings%20agencies%20duped&st=cse

 

God in the Cubicle: Wall Street and 'Widows and Orphans'

WHEN I READ THAT A 31-YEAR-OLD WALL STREET BROKER had joked in an email about selling toxic investments to “widows and orphans,” my first reaction was shock. Did he realize what he was saying?!?

            My response turned briefly to empathy. Who hasn’t said something in a private email that they’d be mortified having repeated in public?

Then the question shifted back outward. Does Wall Street see how much trouble its language gets it into with Main Street? 

The firm and the broker issued quick apologies. The incident reflected “very badly on the firm and on myself,” the broker said. He noted that his customers, in fact, are institutions, not individuals.

Still, I’ve been wondering if there’s a larger lesson to be drawn.

Perhaps new employees at public-facing businesses, as part of their training, should be asked to spend an afternoon searching through the references to “widows and orphans” in the Bible, Torah or other treasured text, then spend some time reading how the phrase comes up on the Internet. And maybe give a brief presentation on what they learn. Call it language/values sensitivity training.

They might get a better understanding of how that email, sent in 2007 by Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman Sachs broker, to his girlfriend, and released recently in response to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman, struck such a deep nerve.

And how, by within a week, it generated 5.2 million hits in Google, everywhere from The Wall Street Journal (which deemed its “dark humor” reflective of the “take-no-prisoners” mindset of the firm) to The Washington Post (which called the broker “a Michael Milken for the current times”) to Al-Jazeera (for which it was business as usual in America: “Goldman ‘boasted as market crashed,’” read its headline).

Some words are sacred to people. They’re vested with thousands of years of religious meaning. “Widows and orphans” is among them. The phrase is at the heart of a moral life in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained in the world” (James 1:26).

It comes up early. “You shall not abuse any widow or orphan” is among the commandments passed down to Moses (Exodus 22:22). It is echoed by prophets, who call on their audiences to “plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17) and “oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor” (Zachariah 7:10).

And it comes up often. In all, “widows” appears more than 90 times and “orphans” or the “fatherless” more than 40 in the Bible (“religion,” interestingly, appears only five times).

Most are in the Old Testament. There, we are called to care for the vulnerable and defenseless. Deuteronomy says to setting aside a portion of one’s harvest for “the alien, the orphan, the widow” – “grapes of your vineyard,” olives from the boughs of their trees, and gleanings from the field (Deut 24:19-21).

Doing so aligns one with faith tradition. God has a special concern for the marginalized, establishing a “border for the widow” (Proverbs 15:25) and bringing “justice for the orphan and widow” (Deut 10:18).

It is a reminder to be humble. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” says Deuteronomy. You never know but that one day one or a loved one could be in that same place – crying out, as in Lamentations, “we have become orphans, fatherless, our mothers are like widows” (Lam 5:3).

Not caring, in contrast, sets one against tradition. “If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry” and respond with “wrath,” Exodus continues. Job, searching for explanations for his suffering, asks if he’s done harm to widows (Job 31:16).

Linking ethical acts with spirituality, as these texts do – the care of the vulnerable with “obligations to God,” the “humanitarian” with the “religious” – and making that bond “unconditional,” is significant, says The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Actions carry importance beyond being the right thing to do. They can be expressions of the sacred. They bring religion to human scale, showing it’s not just what we believe but what we do with that belief.

Many on Wall Street know all this. Many firms have charitable arms. Living in New York, one sees the results in the charitable giving, both from financial firms and individuals in the industry, supporting AIDS care, food banks, shelters, museums, education, parks, and the arts. Goldman Sachs is a case in point; its Goldman Sachs Foundation has given away more than $100 million in grants in 200 countries promoting education.

But the culture of Wall Street – the brusque, master-of-the-universe mindset popularized in books and films like Liars Poker, Barbarians at the Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street, Boiler Room, and Capitalism: A Love Story – can talk a different language. “Widows and orphans” is a case in point. Wall Street has its own take on the words, both benign (a “widow and orphan stock” is a low-risk stock that can be counted on to generate income “through difficult financial times,” says the website Investopedia) and aggressive (“widows and orphans” is “Wall Street’s traditional euphemism for unsuspecting investors,” notes the UK newspaper The Independent).  

Courts of law will ultimately decide whether Wall Street firms have committed fraud in the financial meltdown, as the government claims in the Goldman case. But there’s also the court of public opinion.

With the country trying to crawl back from the financial collapse and recession, and Main Street convinced that Wall Street has profited from its suffering – and speaks, literally, a different language – it’s an opportune time for the financial world to show that, at least, when it comes to words, it gets it.

**

The Wall Street Journal,  I think, has been particularly strong in its coverage of the Goldman case and the controversial emails. Here are two examples: 

“Goldman’s Tourre Meets with Senate Investigators,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2010:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704627704575203882067718088.html

“Goldman’s Take-No-Prisoners Attitude,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703441404575206400921118356.html

This American Life, the National Public Radio program, has done terrific explanatory work on the causes and consequences of the financial meltdown. “Inside Job,” a co-production with ProPublica, is, I think, Pulitzer-worthy – and closes with a wonderfully arch Broadway production number, “Bet against the American Dream.”

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job

Bible.com is a good resource for key-word searches of scripture:

http://www.bibleontheweb.com/

There is a wealth of good non-scholarly writing on the Web from individuals wrestling with scripture’s implications today. One that has stayed with me was from an evangelical videographer working in the Sudan. Reflecting on the conflict there, which has killed so many men, leaving behind wives and children, brings James 1:26 into the present: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: that WE provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.” See his videos, too:

http://pianoplayingdave.wordpress.com/2006/08/16/widows-and-orphans/

At Goldman Sachs' annual meeting on May 7, chairman/ceo Lloyd Blankfein, responding to criticism that the firm needed to better serve the public and economy, said events had created "an opportunity to be introspective," and promised that the firm would review its practices:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/business/08goldman.html?scp=1&sq=goldman%20chief%20promises%20review%20of%20bank%27s%20practices&st=cse

God in the Cubicle: Ecclesiastes and the Recession

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO, A FEW YEARS AGO, HAD IT ALL. HIS business was booming. His large, sprawling family was the envy of everyone with four beautiful, athletic kids, and a cherished, loving wife. They had a nice house. And a second house on a lake. They drove new cars.

    Then the recession hit. The business folded. They lost the lake house. They lost the home. They gave up the second car. They moved into a small apartment. Money is tight.

    But the family is good. The kids – now out in the world, in college and first jobs – are still beautiful. My friend has had a few fits and starts in the job market; so far nothing’s worked out. 

That’s left him time to cultivate life. In a few weeks, he plans to run a half-marathon with his oldest daughter. On weekends, he and his wife take walks in the state park. He checks in on his mother-in-law. 

They’re not rich, but they still have a rich life.

I’ve been thinking of my friend the past few weeks since reading the biblical book of Ecclesiastes for a class I’m taking at Earlham School of Religion. Its message of adjusting and accepting seems to speak to what my friend, and the 15 million others in this country displaced by the recession, are going through.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time for war, and a time for peace.

    Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

    Biblical scholars say Ecclesiastes was written in a time much like the present. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) says the period after the Israelites returned from exile, about 2,500 years ago, saw “tremendous economic activity.” Money became prized, “a commodity desired for its own sake.” It was a time of opportunity; even the poor “could become wealthy.”

    But with that came economic volatility and widespread insecurity. Some became wealthy, while others lost out – raising questions of why and how this was happening. Into this gap, the NOAB says, the author of Ecclesiastes – the title translates to “Gatherer” or “Acquirer”  – offered an explanation of a world, that was “contradictory, if not altogether absurd,” and of human attempts to control life. (The image at left is by the artist Gustave Dore.)

    The world, says Ecclesiastes, is larger than our understanding. Sometimes our efforts pay off. But other times it is not “the season,” and there is no easy explanation. Trying to explain it, says Ecclesiastes, in what becomes a recurring theme, is “vanity and chasing after wind.” (Ecc 2:11).

Instead, Ecclesiastes extols accepting and appreciating the gifts that life gives. That can mean simple pleasures – savoring “your bread with enjoyment and…your wine with a merry heart” (9:7). Appreciating the light of the day; “light is sweet, and it is pleasant…to see the sun” (11:7). Being there for loved ones; “enjoy life with the wife whom you love” (9:9). Not getting caught up in possessions (“eyes are never satisfied with riches,” 4:7) or worry (“banish anxiety,” 11:10).

It must have seemed like a radical message in its day. The dominant message of the Old Testament is to strive. Seek the promise land. Be fruitful and multiply. Do good. Hard work produces results. “Honor the Lord with your substance, and…your barns will be filled with plenty,” as Proverbs 3:9-10 says.

Ecclesiastes is not exactly arguing against striving. One of the most-quoted passages in the book (and the motto of my daughter’s high school) encourages that “whatever your hand finds to do, do with thy might” (Ecc 9:10). We should “take pleasure” in our toil (3:13), “enjoy” our work (3:22), and “follow the inclinations” of our heart (11:9).

    But it is saying to check your motivation. Don’t do something for a the result you hope it will bring. As another famous passage says, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecc 9:11). Or, as a 12-step friend says, we’re not in the outcomes business. (Ecclesiastes resonates with many friends in 12-step programs.)

    Some people see Ecclesiastes as the odd-book-out in the Bible – too gloomy and world-weary. But, reading it, then rereading it, these past few weeks, I think it’s well-rooted in the spirituality of the Old Testament. Its message that we humans are not as in-control as we’d like to think is like the lesson of the Tower of Babel. Its connectedness to God and Creation in places sounds like Genesis. Nature and God's majesty play large roles in this book. Ecclesiastes' pronouncement of “vanity” seems like God’s message to Job. When we try to fill in God’s blanks, we come up empty-handed (vanity’s Latin root is “empty”).

        Better, when we’re disappointed, to step back, reflect, be humble. Remember, says Ecclesiastes, that it’s God’s work that “endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.” Sometimes what we’re supposed to do just to “stand in awe” (Ecc 3:11-14).

     That may be hard in times like this. But I think it would be reassuring for my friend to know that someone in a time like this 2,500 years ago struggled with questions he’s struggling with now, and found hard-earned wisdom.