What the World Needs Now

The last week has seemed full and busy to me, leaving me feeling tired. But I am aware that the coming week also weighs on me and that that can make me feel tired. My mother used to urge me, sometimes badger me, to let go of worry over the future. That worry was not going to help whatever was going to happen. Other things might; preparation, relaxation, even prayer. At New Beginnings training last weekend we did a warm up exercise. I was surrounded by teenagers. One of the questions we responded to was, "What do you wish you did better at?" I answered, "Do my homework." I think the comment was lost on the teenagers. But it was heartfelt on my part and worthy of a post in itself.

Over the last week I read The Looming Tower. I had heard the author I think on Fresh Air (NPR) and appreciated a certain freshness that he brought to his analysis of Iraq. As reflected below, I am interested in trying to understand what is going on in the world today, and what is going on seems to be colored a lot right now by Islam and Iran in particular. I have been repeating the name of the President of Iran to myself, almost like a mantra for the last 5 days. Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad. ... I still can't pronounce it at all correctly. Part of me wanted to learn how to pronounce the name of this prominent person. But there was also a part that was trying to understand by means of the silly repetition.

The news seems to me exceedingly depressing these days. "Temperature of earth reaches a million year mark." "What war with Iran would look like." "Secret CIA report says that the war in Iraq has made the world less safe from terrorists."

I have often repeated that I think that the slippery road to succumbing to terrorists was begun when Yasser Arafat spoke at the United Nations in the 1970's, brandishing his gun and warning the world. And the world blinked, as if to say, "Oh, we'll be good, don't you worry."

I know that's too simplistic and terrorism goes back centuries or even millenia and that none of the world's nations are innocent. But there seem to be so many "no-brainer" decisions that have been avoided over the past decades in the name of ... I don't know what.

Ahmadinejad. It makes me think of Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" -- the tale of a crippled shepherd boy and his widowed mother who receive a surprise visit from the Three Kings en route to Bethlehem. Remembering back to those years when I first viewed the show, 1960's, seems like an innocent time in retrospect. And yet at the time I remember, e.g., thinking that the Vietnam War had always been and always would be.

Day after tomorrow my oldest daughter turns 24. I haven't seen her in over a year. She is the most wonderful person. I wish you could meet her. She was born on St. Michael and All Angels. As if the angels sang and danced around her birth.

So it is that we go on, in the midst of global warming that may well destroy life on earth, in the midst of threats of nuclear war and talk of "annihilation" of another country -- in this case a people that I am convinced are in fact God's chosen people. I am a Christian, but the Messiah I follow was a member of that "chosen people."

Little phrases have stood out this week. "Whenever a government strives to impose purity, terror results." I wonder to myself is that true? I know that I have long criticised the enduring Puritanism that subtly governs the people of The United States. Probably it has seemed oppressive to me because people no longer recognize its presence. When things work on us below our consciousness they are most powerful.

The state in which I have lived since Ahmadinejad's compatriots blew themselves up against the looming towers was westernized by Puritans. The effects of those efforts, almost 200 years ago, are still felt pervasively, in a variety of ways, some positive some negative. Someone asked me the other day about the impact of the early missionaries here in Hawai'i. I was only partly ficitious when said that my sense was that they made themselve wealthy. I quickly added that wasn't true of all of them and many of them were noble-minded and made great sacrifices for the good of the people with whom they lived.

Another book I have begun this week is by Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant. I haven't finished it yet. But as with everything he's written I am sucked right in. In spite of his vast learning, he seems to speak the language of the ordinary person. Someone the other day paid me that compliment after hearing me preach. I graciously accepted the words. Unfortunately the impact was colored by the fact that English was not their first language and I'm not at all sure how much they actually even understood.

But something like what Garry Wills has achieved in his life is what I have striven for during my adult life. I read my first book by him when barely out of my teens, Bare Ruined Choirs. Quickly I followed with Nixon Agonistes and I have followed with probably a dozen of his works since then. But his writing production is monumental, so I can't even say I know his writing all that well.

But his approach to the church and to his faith is one that I find compatible and inviting to my own. He is profoundly -- and learnedly -- critical of the powers-that-be in the church. But he is also not ashamed at all of his own faith. Conservatives and liberals both find fault with him. He must be doing something right.

One chord he strikes early in his book is the claim that seems so self-evident to me, but is so strongly rebutted by many, that the way to read the New Testament is entirely to find its meaning and not its historicity.

I'll write more about the book later.

For now another daughter is calling for me to "put her to bed." Off I go.