Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Mindfulness

As I walked, angry and afraid, brooding on the past and the future, I looked.

I saw the cherry blossoms, and the magnolias, and the lilacs, and the grass, and the sun.

I listened.

I heard birdsong.

I sniffed.

I smelled the sweetness of the air.

I felt.

I felt the gentle breeze on my face, the roughness of bark on my hand.

I tasted.

I tasted the air's sharp, crisp hexanol tang from freshly-mown grass.

I thought.

I thought: Here I am, surrounded by beauty and light, and I am blind to it, stalking through a dark valley that I bring with me.

I thought: I am here, and it is now.

I thought: I can let go of the darkness. I can breathe in light, life, joy and peace.

I am here.

It is now.

I am me.

But the past! The future!...

There is no past.

There is no future.

There is only now.

I am here. It is now. Here and now I can find beauty.

Here and now, it is enough.


© John M. Munzer

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Am I my brother's keeper?

Christians on both sides of the political spectrum are now, more than ever, having the debate that boils down to this:

Jesus commanded His followers to take care of those in need.

We currently have government programs that attempt to take care of those in need.

So: Should followers of Jesus defend those programs and ensure they don’t get cut? Or should we give the money to churches or directly to people in need?

I believe the answer is:

Both.

First, to reiterate what all Christians should agree upon:

There are hundreds of verses in which God demands that His people take care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, the young, the disabled, the aliens within our borders. And God does not only demand this of private individuals – He also repeatedly demands it of nations and their leaders. (Read the prophets – they hammer a LOT on the judgement that awaits nations and rulers that do not help the poor and oppressed). So it’s beyond question that Christians are to help those who are in need. All that’s really in question is how much we should do that by paying our taxes and demanding our government meet its responsibilities, and how much we should be doing it in person or through private donations to charity.

My own experience, having grown up in a rich conservative Evangelical church, and now attending a poor liberal Episcopal church, has been that the people attending both places really do want to follow Jesus, and really do try to offer help to those who need it; but neither is really able to effectively meet all the needs out there. Churches are great at meeting certain vital needs: people’s needs for a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and community; but not great at meeting people’s needs for survival and safety. That has to come from elsewhere.

And my own experience working for an agency that helps people has been that the government doesn’t do a terrific job funding us, but they’re still pretty much the only people who will fund us at all.

Rich conservative Evangelical church:

Lots of money coming in. Over a thousand people attending every Sunday; many of them doctors, lawyers, big business owners. The guy who owned half the McDonald’s franchises in the county went there. The guy who invented MRI went there. And they were good people, they really were. They’d give money to the church, offer their vacation homes for the youth group to use on retreats, fund mission trips to the Appalachians to repair poor people’s homes, or to Mexico to reach out to people living in the city dump. And I myself, being from one of the poorer families at the church, benefited from their generosity. The only times I’ve ever had an opportunity to leave the country were through youth group trips that were heavily subsidized by those rich people. There were times my family used the church’s little food pantry. There were Christmases when well-off church members brought us toys because they knew our parents couldn’t afford much that year. Honest to God, they were good people trying to do good things, and I’m grateful for that.

But: The way to stay a rich conservative church is to keep your big tithers happy. That means that far more of the money gathered each week went towards “church growth” priorities than towards helping the poor. They were spending lots of money making bigger, better buildings; buying bigger, better sound systems; paying a staff of several pastors, each in charge of “ministries” to people who frankly didn’t need a whole lot of ministry. A bunch of affluent young suburbanites gathering at the “TNT (Twenties and Thirties)” group to find like-minded people to date – that’s not a ministry, that’s a hook-up scene for people who’ve sworn to abstain from sex till marriage and therefore want to get married as soon as possible. The youth group’s week-long “mission trips” where we’d do skits in the park in hopes of converting people – wonderful experiences, I’m very thankful to have had those journeys, but a bunch of teenagers trying to get adults to join the church and become tithers was not what I think Jesus had in mind when He said to go forth and make disciples. The “outreach ministries” to get more doctors and lawyers and businessmen to join the church… sure, those people also need God, but this is hardly charity work happening here.

And the big tithers were Republicans. That meant that the church had to push the idea that being a good Christian meant voting Republican. If you voted any other way, then you were helping those godless liberals kill babies, and those gay perverts have their sin normalized. There were far more sermons preached on the evils of abortion and homosexuality (which Jesus never mentioned), than about the parable of the sheep and the goats, or the Beatitudes, or the parable of the Good Samaritan (which Jesus most emphatically DID hammer on). And anytime Scriptures such as “It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven” DID get mentioned, these people who normally took the Bible at face value and preached that it was meant to be taken literally… they suddenly got REAL into “Well, some things were figurative… and you have to consider cultural context… When Jesus said that, here’s what He REALLY meant…” Because, after all, you can’t make your big tithers uncomfortable.

And when people had real, devastating needs that couldn’t be fixed with a prayer or a one-time act of giving – when people experienced mental illness, addiction, disability – they were no longer welcome at the church. After all, if they had enough faith, and worked hard enough, those problems would go away. So if the problem didn’t go away… well, those people must not be real Christians. Might even be demon-possessed.

So all told, very little actual charity work was happening there. Mostly, it was a community that existed for a bunch of fairly comfortable suburban white people to remind each other they were loved, by God and by fellow members of the church. Not a bad thing … but not a good argument for the camp that says “Get rid of government charities, the churches will take up the slack”.

Poor liberal Episcopal church:

Never had much money or lots of members – at its peak, maybe 100 people, all working-class – blue-collar workers, or social service workers. Currently down to just a handful of people, mostly Latino immigrants who have even LESS money than I do with my almost-pays-the-bills-if-I-also-do-consulting-on-the-side social services salary.

And yet: Every week we feed 50-plus homeless people, with help from other small local churches. Some of them sleep on our lawn. (Full disclosure: We ask them not to. We get tired of cleaning up their poop and their used needles. But we don't actually call the cops to MAKE them leave, unless they're currently doing something violent or threatening.) Every week we give food and condoms to the prostitutes working the street right outside our door. Every week, we help people to be warm, safe, and well-fed who do not get those things anyplace else. Every week, we do our best to help our own members with their physical and mental health challenges, and we let them know it’s okay to admit having those challenges, that their welcome here is still assured.

But we don’t have the money to do much. There’s far more homeless people in our neighborhood than we can feed; and we haven’t got the means to help them stop being homeless. We can’t pay medical bills for our ailing members. We, also, are not a good argument for the idea that the church will do it if the government doesn’t.

In my experience, poor churches can’t do the job, and rich churches won’t do it.

Maybe other people have had a different experience. If so, great! But I suspect my experience is the norm.

Social service agency:

I work for a non-profit. It started out, a century ago, as a privately funded charity founded by a rich businessman; but the need quickly outstripped the resources that one rich dude was willing to donate. The agency serves children and adults who have developmental disabilities.  Many are without families; many struggle with chronic physical or mental illness; all have significant enough impairments that they need assistance from trained staff 24-7. This is exactly who Christians ought to help and reach out to, if we're serious about obeying Jesus. And yet: Over 95% of our funding comes from the government. That means that only about 5% comes from people giving voluntarily to charity. And most agencies like mine see similar numbers. In a nation where the vast majority of people are Christians, who have read the parable of the sheep and the goats, there’s not enough voluntary giving to make a dent in the budget of agencies that serve the hungry, the sick, the fatherless, the people who are often as isolated as prisoners.

Why not start with Christians on both sides of the political spectrum demonstrating that we mean what we say about loving our neighbor? Why not start with both liberal and conservative Christians giving of our time, talent, and treasure to agencies that are doing this kind of difficult work? Why leave society’s most vulnerable people to depend entirely on the increasingly slender mercy of the state?

But also: Why aren't more Christians demanding that their government, which they elect and pay for, should use its resources and power to help people that the church cannot? A church can feed homeless people once a week and let them know they’re not invisible while they’re here; but a government can give them shelter, job training, rehab, mental health services. A church can give a prostitute some coffee and fresh condoms, and most of all assurance that God and the community still love her; but a government can jail the pimps and the johns, help the girls train for another trade to support themselves and their kids, provide addiction counseling if they’re doing it for drug money. A church can make sure that immigrants are safe and welcome for an hour a week; a government can make sure they’re safe and welcome all the time, by changing our policies about immigration. A church can be a safe and welcoming place for people with disabilities; a government can provide them with a group home, medication, adaptive equipment, staff to assist them, training and oversight to ensure their staff know how to effectively meet their medical and behavioral support needs. A church can ensure that elderly people have a community that checks in on them and keeps them connected; a government can ensure that they have food, shelter, and medication.
We need to be doing BOTH things.

We ARE our brother’s keepers. And we must use all the tools available, both secular and religious, to keep them.


© John M. Munzer