Essential

We’ve had to think a lot, over the past couple months, about what is “essential” and what is real.

As it turns out, CEOs are not essential, but grocery clerks are. Wall street bankers are not essential, but truck drivers are. Politicians are not essential, but epidemiologists are. Wars are not essential, but social services are. Restaurants are not essential, but food is. Realtors aren’t essential, but housing is. Clothing stores aren’t essential, but seamstresses who can make a mask are. Haircuts aren’t essential, but hospice care is. Physically showing up at a church or a bar or a stadium is not essential, but fellowship is. Travel to other countries isn’t essential, but leaving the house to walk around and exercise is. Many of our jobs are not essential, but having the means to get food and shelter is.

We’ve seen that “the economy” is a fiction that we’ve shared for ages because it was a more convenient way than bartering to keep track of who owes favors to whom. “The economy” isn’t real. Food is real, and starvation is real if you don’t have food. Viruses are real, and they will really eat your living lungs given an opportunity. Friends and family and neighbors helping each other in an emergency is real. People providing necessary goods and services to each other is real. Pieces of paper being used to measure whether an individual has worked hard enough to deserve food and shelter – that’s not real. And the holes in the story of “the economy” are now threatening to unravel every structure that human society has built around it, now that it doesn’t work anymore.

And death is real. It’s the one reality that everyone must confront sooner or later, no matter who we are, what we believe, or what we do.

And because death is real, the single most essential reality while we strive to delay its coming is this:

Human beings need each other.

We need each other for survival, and we need each other for comfort, and we need each other’s touch, and we need each other for meaning and purpose, and we need each other for beauty and art and music and poetry and laughter and love and being fully human. We need each other’s strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. We need each other’s knowledge to compensate for the areas where we as individuals are ignorant. We need each other to make difficult, even sacrificial, choices to keep each other alive and healthy. 

Most of all, we need each other to be fully ourselves.

That is real. That is essential. Everything else is a distraction.

How full is the Church?

Now.

Not Easter Sunday, but now.

NOW is the time that we see how full the churches are.

For being the church does not mean showing up on Sunday to sing old songs together, and have coffee together afterwards.

Being the church right now means showing up on Saturday to drop off a bag of groceries on the doorstep of someone who can't safely go to the store for themselves.
AND disinfecting the outside of the packages, just in case.
AND leaving before the people inside can come out to thank us, so we do not risk transmission even for that brief moment.

Being the church means NOT showing up on Monday to work, to protect the elderly and immunocompromised family members of our co-workers and customers.

The measure of the Church is not how full of people the buildings are.

The measure of the Church is how full of self-sacrificial love its people are.

Do we love our neighbors as ourselves?

Then do we love our neighbors enough to refrain from embracing them, when we miss their touch?

Do we love our neighbors enough to stay at home being bored, when we miss going out?

Do we love our neighbors enough to lose money by not working, when we desperately need money?

"Greater love has no one than this"...

Is our love great enough to lay down our normal lives for our friends?

Great enough to go ON laying them down, day after day after day, for weeks and maybe months?

By tradition the door of a church was painted red, in memory of the Passover.

Do we love our neighbors enough to stay in our own homes and wait for Death to pass over, and tell our neighbors to do the same?

Do we love our neighbors enough to heed the advice of doctors, and ignore our own deep desire for normalcy in favor of keeping each other safe?

Even if it takes longer than we can afford to wait, financially or emotionally?


Truly, when the Tempter comes, he comes offering not evil things, but good things.

He comes not offering us power to harm, or sex that exploits or betrays others, or dark forbidden magics, or even the knowledge of good and evil (for we already know what is good, but find it hard to do; we already know what is evil, but find it all too easy).

Temptation offers us no illicit delights, but the quiet delights of normal, good, and necessary things.

We are tempted by the quiet delights of going to a restaurant and sharing laughter with friends.
We are tempted by the quiet delights of taking our children to play at each other's houses while we have coffee with other adults.
We are tempted by the quiet delights of wandering around a store to buy stuff we don't really need.
We are tempted by the quiet delights of cracking jokes around the water cooler with our co-workers.
We are tempted by the quiet delights of gathering together in groups and being human together.

But to accept the Tempter's offer is, as in the beginning, to open a gateway for Death to enter the world.


If on Easter Sunday the big buildings with the crosses on the roofs are full of people embracing, and shaking hands, and singing together, and sharing a meal together, and sharing in all those necessary human things that we long to do so much that it hurts...

and thus sharing our air, sharing whatever pathogens are on our hands, sharing with the whole flock what it takes just ONE sheep, infected unawares, to begin spreading...

If we do not love our neighbors enough to endure hardships both small and great to defend the most vulnerable among them...

If we do not love our neighbors enough to be still, and wait...

Then the buildings may indeed be full.

But the Church will be

Empty.





- John M. Munzer

Trump isn't the disease. He's the symptom.

He’s the most visible, ugly, and virulent of the tumors. But he isn’t the cancer.

The disease is fear, and both liberals and conservatives are riddled with the infection.

Fear that if those God-hating gun-grabbing tax-loving welfare-loving America-hating SJW libtards get into power, they will take away everything we hold dear – our values, our freedom, our livelihood, even our lives if they get the chance.

Fear that if those dumbass redneck ammosexual racist sexist homophobic climate-change-denying Trump cultists retain power, they will take away everything we hold dear – our values, our freedom, our livelihood, even our lives if they get the chance.

The biggest problem with Trump is not the stuff he’s bad at. It’s not that he has bad policy ideas. We’ve had lots of presidents with bad policy ideas and survived. It’s not that he’s bad at diplomacy, makes volatile situations even more volatile, and is pushing us into an unwinnable war – we’ve survived that before. It’s not that he’s incompetent – we’ve had incompetent presidents and survived. It’s not even that he’s corrupt – we’ve had corrupt presidents and survived.

The thing we may not survive is the one thing he’s good at: Deepening division and contempt between liberal and conservative Americans. The relationship between our two groups, like any relationship, can survive conflict, even heated and angry arguments; but it can’t survive contempt, and that’s what he sows all day, every day.

Evangelical Trump voters often explain their choice by saying they voted for a politician, not a pastor. But in fact, choosing a President is a lot like choosing a pastor. You need someone who can take a bunch of prickly, opinionated people and get them all on board with the same message, the same goals, the same plan, the same budget. You need someone who can convince the unconverted. You need someone who’s good at resolving conflicts between people who ordinarily wouldn’t talk to each other, by appealing to common ground between them. You need someone who won’t compromise on issues of personal integrity but will compromise on ways and means to achieve common goals.

What you DON’T need is someone who goes out of his way to attack and insult half the congregation (and half the church’s staff) every Sunday, who shouts about how evil and stupid and unhinged everyone who disagrees with him is and how they’re a threat to the church’s values. When you get a pastor like that, you very quickly stop having a church and start having a schism.

Likewise, our country needs a leader who can get people that disagree about means to at least acknowledge common goals such as strengthening the economy, preventing wars, ensuring that everyone gets a fair shot at making a decent living, ensuring that everyone can afford health care, ensuring that everyone’s rights are upheld, ensuring that we are safe… and come up with a plan that ensures that everyone’s needs and concerns are at least respected and taken into consideration, even if they can’t all be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

What we have instead… is Donald Trump, a guy so abrasive that even a number of his own voters and party members dislike him. A guy who can’t keep staff because no one wants to work with him. A guy who attacks anyone who disagrees with him, even if he hired them to give him advice. A guy who goes out of his way to make liberals and conservatives angry at each other, every day, because he can’t stand to not have his name in the paper for even a moment and has learned that negative attention is easy to get. A guy who would rather threaten civil war if he’s removed from office than simply try to defend his actions if he can, or admit that they were indefensible if he can’t.

That’s the real threat he represents. That’s why he’s the most virulent of the tumors in our increasingly angry and fearful society… because he doesn’t try to decrease the anger and fear, he feeds it and feeds on it.

But:

Getting rid of him, whether by impeachment or by voting, will not cure the disease. It’s a necessary first step, but by no means the last. Removing the biggest tumor doesn’t cure the cancer, not when the body is riddled with the damn things.

We’re going to have a LOT of work to do, treating the disease itself.

It will take a hell of a lot to get us to stop attacking each other and start trying to work together to make a better society, especially since on several hot-button issues (abortion, LGBTQ, guns, the environment, how much government regulation is helpful vs getting in the way, how we ought to spend tax money, etc) we now have very different ideas of what making a better society MEANS. It will take a hell of a lot to get us to stop being afraid that the people who disagree with us are going to destroy us, stop assuming malicious motives from each other, stop being contemptuous of each other.

It will take a hell of a lot to even start bringing the disease into remission. It may even be too late for a lasting cure at this point. It may be that it’s progressed too far to eliminate, and that we will always have this disease and will always have to pour a lot of time and resource into treating it.

But we must either get busy treating it, or get busy dying from it.

© John M. Munzer