SERMON: The Debonair Disciple

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (5/27/07)

Text: Matthew 5:1-10

The other day at a dinner party, a friend asked me, “Do you mind if I ask you a theological question?” I said, “Not at all,” politely lying for fear I was about to be put on the spot. People often suspect that ministers are a little dull and try to set them up with difficult theological questions, such as predestination to which the answer of simple. In the encounters between God and man, God initiates. A real no brainer, or else a totem.

The friend said, “What is your definition of God?” I replied, “If I were to define God, I would be committing a deicide and creating a totem instead. God cannot be confined within the limitations of a human proposition. A defined God is either an oxymoron or an idol.”

Isaiah speaks derisively of the Babylonians chaining down their gods so that they can’t be stolen. “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? The idol! A workman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold, and casts for it silver chains. He seeks out a craftsman to set up an image that will not move.” And then he asks, “To whom then will you compare” God? There is nice word for the incomprehensibility of God, mystery, that whom we experience and is yet beyond our comprehension.

Faith is not a concept or an idea, least of all, a definition. As Martin Buber, the famous Jewish theologian said, faith is an experience, an experience in which people understand themselves. He told the story of Rabbi Susya to make his point. Rabbi Susya was elderly, frail, and in ill health. His friends teased him that at the Last Judgment God would accuse him of not being more like Moses. He replied, “No, you are wrong, it would be that I was not more like Susya.”

In other words, the experience of God’s presence is about our authenticity and integrity, not about trying to be someone else. Alfred North Whitehead, the great British-American mathematician and philosopher and author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, wrote that religion is what people do with their solitariness, when there is nothing but themselves, no supports, no illusions, no pretenses, the lies we tell and believe. Jean Paul Sartre’s phrase for those lies is “mauvais foi,” bad faith.

Martin Buber’s point was that in understanding ourselves we begin with that solitariness where no creed, canon law, church, ideology, state, or corporation can subdue us into being someone we are not. In short, in God’s presence we are free to be ourselves. Buber’s phrase for this divine-human encounter was I-Thou, when we come of spiritual age.

We do not speak about God, but rather our relationship with God. Theology, or Godtalk, is really talk about ourselves. Even in our human experiences, we don’t know someone else, but rather how we experience that person. I knew my father as a father. I never knew him in himself as himself. As a pastor and psychotherapist, I realized that I never really knew anyone else inside them as they were. All I knew was how they appeared to me. I’m sure many of us have had the experience of a counselor imposing a definition or diagnosis on us in a way that didn’t fit us deep inside. By the way, this is why diagnosis is always an on-going activity because good counselors are never sure they’re right, just as doubt is integral to faith.

The Beatitudes of Jesus are guides to that that I-Thou experience. It is important to understand that the Beatitudes are a Hebrew poem. Hebrew poetry did not use rhyme, rhythm, or meter as does English poetry. Being a highly inflected language, that is, a phrase is usually contained within one word, such as, “In the beginning” is one word as is “and the earth.” The Hebrew poetic style was parallelism, setting units of thought or phrases in parallels. For instance in the 23rd Psalm it reads, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures” with a parallel line following “He leadeth me besides the still waters.” The second line restates the first, and then a third line concludes with “He restoreth my soul.” Very powerful poetry.

The Beatitudes are a poem of eight lines in which each one re-enforces the others. It consists of two quatrains. The first quatrain speaks of our experience of God and the second of our experience of the world. This morning I would like to focus on the first quatrain of our experience of God.

The Beatitudes describe a spiritual process, using the indicative mood, rather than the commanding imperative. In short, they are not commands, but rather descriptions. Each of the Beatitudes begins with the word “Blessed” which means fortunate or happy.

The first Beatitude reads, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Jesus is describing a poverty of conviction. So much of what people believe is unnecessary and cumbersome. A lot of religious belief is tied up with the church and the church’s dogma. Many believers are burdened with an excessive baggage of doctrine and protocols. Some times they end up with “stuffed and stopped-up brains,” to use Robert Browning’s words.

Many years ago when I was taking an airplane from Los Angeles to Bishop to backpack the High Sierra, I happened by a couple in the airport who were surrounded by ten or twelve pieces of very expensive luggage. Helpless in their excess, they were waiting for a Redcap to rescue them. The women pointed to me and said, “Look at that poor man. All that he has is on his back.” Being believers and practitioners of excess, they were disabled and trapped. This is to the point of spiritual poverty. It is not the humility the church teaches to manipulate the faithful. It is the simplicity of solitude, believing only what is necessary to believe. Goethe’s remedy is clear, “The last and greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.”

One of my favorite college courses was on medieval philosophy, and especially two men, William of Occam and Nicolas de Cusa and his coincidentia oppositorum which means ‘Don’t get trapped by either-or arguments.” William of Occam made the point that one should not multiply ideas beyond necessity. It’s called the Principle of Parsimony. Keep it simple. The first Beatitude is something on the order of a spiritual principle of parsimony. Simplicity and economy mean lighter journeys. The more we believe in terms of content, the less we experience, the less life is allowed to filter through our excessive doctrines into our consciousness. Jesus promises the kingdom of heaven as a result of that simplicity, an opening to God’s varied wonders.

The next beatitude reads, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The word “mourn” here means a mourning of past sorrows which is a way of not dragging around the baggage of the past. One thing I learned in backpacking was to keep one’s pack as light as possible. Mourning is more than grief, that necessary sadness at loss, it is working through that loss to the other side. It is enough to learn from the past, not haul it around. It’s a way of dumping our karma. We are more than the accumulations of the past. We are also our hopes and dreams which can only come to pass if we leach ourselves of the debilitating messages of the past.

Many people carry around issues generated in the past. Years ago I officiated at the funeral of an elderly woman who had been active in the church and various social causes in the community. Her husband refused to come to the service. He hated the church because his father forced him to attend church services. He had issues which debilitated him and kept him from the immediate.

Marshall McLuhan wrote about living through the rear-view mirror rather than the windshield. While it’s important to check the past’s rear-view mirror now and then to remember from whence we have come and who might be catching up with us, to use Satchel Page’s phrase, our attention is better spent on where we are going to avoid running into a tree.

The key is, of course, forgiveness, not only of others, but, more to the point, also of ourselves. This is especially poignant for people who’ve been victimized. Many define themselves as victims for a lifetime. The most effective way to rid oneself of victimization is to relive the experience not as a victim but as a victor. We can move from the roles of victims, to survivors, to prevailers, and finally to pilgrims. Ridding ourselves of the ravages of the past is spiritually efficient. The promise of this cleansing is comfort which in the biblical sense means being strengthened. It is akin to the relief of a released burden, a feeling of lightness, a renewal of energy.

The next beatitude is “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” In some ways this is the most intriguing. The word for meek in Greek is πραΰς (praues) which was used for the training of race horses, Olympic athletes, and the aristocracy. The French translate it, “débonnaire.” When Queen Elizabeth visited Jamaica some years ago, the crowd often shouted, “She meek. She so meek.” The Jamaicans speak a dialect of English not far from Elizabethan, the time of the King James Version.

Meek meant gentle, as in gentleman and gentlewoman, and in gentling a horse. Breeding out the wild and focusing the energy, making the person or animal more morally graceful and efficient.

A great athlete makes it look effortless and graceful because there’s no wasted motion. It is simple, uncluttered, and unencumbered. Of course, the word is discipline. All the energy is devoted to the task, an effortless grace, unencumbered by excessive ideology, past grievances, trivial pursuits.

Accomplishing our lives with grace requires discipline, the ability to get rid of those things that really don’t matter. Robert Browning’s “less is more” is to the point. Even in writing, it is important to keep it lean. A simple “I love you” is more powerful than “I really love you a lot.”

One of my nephews was a major league pitcher. He said the first thing he had to learn was to “keep my eye on the ball rather than the stands.”

Each beatitude re-enforces the other. The simplicity of the poor in spirit, the freedom of having mourned the past, and the discipline of ridding oneself of life’s sideshows are part and parcel of spiritual integrity and authenticity.

The last beatitude in the quatrain is “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” While it may surprise many of you, righteousness does not mean doing right, it means the graciousness of God in the Old Testament Hebrew. God’s righteousness meant God’s grace. We even pick it up in our daily speech, as in “it’s the righteous thing to do.”

In terms of morals, there are at least two kinds, reactive and active. Reactive is the anti-vice morality of not doing the wrong things, such as getting drunk, stealing, adultery, discriminating racially, homophobia, etc. Reactive morality has a vindictive quality, while active morality is graceful, doing justice and loving mercy. It is doing something rather than not doing something. Righteousness is the active morality of justice and mercy, that is, actually reaching out to help someone else.

Hungering and thirsting are fundamental human experiences on the order of spiritual simplicity, freedom from past grievances, and discipline. As W. N. Murray wrote in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition 1951, “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.” So it is with hungering and thirsting for justice and mercy, a life of grace. Think of all the hesitancies created by excessive ideologies, conflicted values, past grievances, irrelevant concerns that have kept us from moving forward.

The promise is satisfaction, a world opening up. The word for sin in the New Testament is ‛αμαρτία (hamartia), missing the target. An archers term, it means a life of irrelevance, of missing the point, or frittering away one’s life. Hungering and thirsting means staying on point, keeping your eye on the ball, going somewhere worthwhile.

John Bunyan was right. Our lives are a Pilgrim’s Progress. We need to travel light, not lug the past, keep focused, and stick to our destiny which is a life of righteousness, a life of grace. Amen

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2007

THOUGHTS ON RICHARD YOUNG'S DEATH

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/22/08)

In his book, Religion in the Making, Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "Religion is what individuals do with their solitariness." John Donne said it more elegantly in his Meditation 17. "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and, therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

Although we are surrounded by a host of friends and loved ones, we, the bereaved, are still alone in our solitariness because grief is a solitary business, as Saint Paul said, "with sighs too deep for words." The bell has tolled.

We're no longer living with syllogisms, validations, demonstrations, and proofs, that is, with things we know because we are no longer in the preliminaries, but in the final event, that last round.

We're now dealing with faith and belief, those experiences we cannot validate yet which underlie what we know. As W.T. Stace pointed out, the statement "I am an atheist" is a creed, a statement of belief in which people in a curious anomaly proclaim their beliefs by saying they don't have any which is, of course, a belief.

We have moved from what we know to what we believe. We have gone from fact to value, the fact of death to the value of life. Richard's death makes us come to terms not only with the value of his life, but also the value of ours.

Now, Richard, as with all of us, had his idiosyncrasies, partly due to his massive intelligence. What we saw of his mind was but a sliver of what was going on inside of him.

However, unlike most massively intelligent people he was aware of the common and the everyday, of trees, of sports, of animals, of politics, loving it all. Even though his theology was a bit slim, he could still mount a spirited argument by which he affirmed that which he disputed.

In short, Richard loved life and valued it which is the legacy he left us, challenging us in his death with his love of life which is, of course, but an act of faith. He was a kind man which is a sure sign that he loved life. He didn't want to piss it away in anger and resentment and bitterness. As the Psalmist said, "Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

Again, Whitehead said there is always a quality of life that underlies the fact of life, and the measure of that quality is in our beliefs, not our knowledge. Richard had a beautiful quality and his death challenges all of us with that beauty.

A Presence, which is not an object in our minds, but an incomprehensible Presence, abides and infuses the allness of our lives. Not quantifiable, experienced in Elijah's "still, small voice," as the Hound of Heaven, that Presence pursues us down the hallways of our years.

As an adult for 65 years, spent as a soldier, laborer, spy, student, jail bird, writer, teacher, columnist, minister of the gospel, and psychotherapist, I have something to say on these matters. We either believe in life or death. We're either lovers of life or lovers of death. Behind it all, the quality of our beliefs transforms the fact of our lives into an aesthetic experience which once embraced yields a life of joy. Richard was a beautiful man, exemplifying the aesthetics of his beloved, elegant mathematics.

As I was thinking about what I was going to say, I was listening to Mozart's Requiem which is a great place to begin when thinking about death because Mozart explores the meaning of death and faith with a profundity of feeling and clarity of mind. Now, I would like you all to stand and bow your heads as I conclude with the opening words of its chorus, Requeim aeternam dona eis, Domine, O Lord, grant him eternal rest. Amen.

CREATION AND EVOLUTION

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/16/05)

Fundamentalists and evolutionists have worthwhile concerns. The fundamentalists are concerned with the sacred value of human beings and a purposeful world. The evolutionists are concerned with the integrity of the scientific method. However, their conflict is based in a confusion of types of knowledge.

The confusion lies in categories of knowledge or types of knowledge. These categories are answers to basic questions inevitably asked about anything important. As Bertrand Russell pointed out an idea or term has meaning only within a framework of understanding. Evolution as a type of knowledge or scientific theory tries to answer the question "how" human beings developed. Such a question leads to other questions, such as, "what", "when", and "where."

Theology is different. It deals with the "why" question of the mystery of the human condition, the mystery of human’s grand potentialities and deplorable actualities.

For instance, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of the Manhattan Project, the producer the atomic bomb, wondered after the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, about the consequences of such a bomb. He became deeply disturbed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he said, "physicists have known sin." The potential for good in atomic energy produced the mass slaughter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spent his life answering "how" questions but then had to ask the "why" question. He answered the "why" question with the classic theological term "sin."

Comparing the scientific and theological questions is akin to asking the question "what’s the best way to get from Chicago to Los Angeles" and getting the answer, "To make big it in Hollywood." It gives a "why" answer to a "how" question. They are different types of knowledge as is controversy between the creationists and evolutionists.

The modern scientific method did not arise until the 17th century while the second narrative of creation in the Book of Genesis dates from about 1,300 B.C. With about a 3,000 year difference any attempt to compare one with the other is a fallacy of irrelevance. The ancient Hebrews who wrote Genesis 2-4 had no concept of science. They were telling a story about the mysteries of the human condition, as in a parable.

The fundamentalists make another mistake when they insist on literality as a test of divine inspiration. Such an insistence eliminates the Psalms, the Parables of Jesus, and the Apocalypse as being divinely inspired. For an unknown odd reason, many of the evolutionists suffer the same literal affliction when they try theology, but then the scientific method requires literality.

The two narratives in Genesis are not about the "how" of creation at all. The first narrative (Gen 1:1-2:4a) dates from about the 5th century B.C., some twenty-one centuries before the rise of modern science. The second narrative (Gen 2:4b-5:32) dates about 1300 B.C. or thirty centuries before the rise of modern science.

The difference between the two narratives is easy to see. The first narrative uses ‘elohim which is translated "God." The second narrative uses the phrase yahweh ‘elohim which is translated "LORD God" and the word yahweh which is translated "LORD." Yahweh was the Hebrew’s name for God, as the word "John" is a name while the word "man" is a noun.

The name yahweh, often called the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was thought so sacred by the ancient Hebrews that they wouldn’t pronounce it for fear of blasphemously mispronouncing it. They used the word ‘adhonai instead and still do today. When they came across the word yahweh, they would say‘adhonai. As a way of reminding them to say ‘adhonai, they wrote the vowels for ‘adhonai underneath the consonants for yahweh. Ironically, this produces the non-word Jehovah. In the English versions yahweh is translated "LORD" with all the letters in upper case while ‘adhonai is translated "Lord" with the last three letters in lower case.

Yahweh is derived from the verb hayah, "to be." When God called Moses in the wilderness to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, Moses asked God for his name, reflecting an ancient Semitic belief that if one knew a person’s name, one had power to influence the person. The reply was, "I AM WHO I AM (Ex. 3:13)," which was an elegant way of saying, "none of your business." In a sense the name yahweh is subtly points to the mystery and unknowablity of God.

Another difference between the narratives is style. The first narrative follows a repetitive formula which indicates the mind of a priest. The second is a set of highly figurative stories which indicate the mind of a story teller who’s writing in parables.

The first narrative was probably a litany with a series of antiphonal chants used in the worship of Second Temple. One can hear in it the echoes of priests, choirs, and congregations.

For instance, a possible liturgy might be:

Priest: And God said, "Let there be light."
Chorus: And there was light.
People: And God saw that the light was good.
Chorus: and God separated the light from the darkness.
Priest: God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.
People: And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

The liturgy was developed by priests in response to the catastrophic experiences of the Israelites. After returning from the Exile in Babylon about 500 B.C. and building the Second Temple, they were subjugated again by a series of tyrants who tried to wipe out their faith and identity. It’s liturgical profession of faith in God’s providential power, not about a method of creation. Such a faith in God’s providence in large part accounts for the survival of Judaism and Jews over the centuries.

In addition to being a powerful affirmation of God’s sovereignty, the first narrative is also a powerful affirmation of human value. In an age of a technological disvaluation of human beings such as ours, any affirmation is counter-culture. The priests used the word for mankind, ha’adham, in the liturgy, meaning mankind or Everyone. The phrase "image of God" literally means shadow, as in a connection between God and human beings.

The second narrative is a couple of well-told stories, something like parables. As we have seen,‘adham in Hebrew is not a name as in a person, but a noun meaning mankind. The definite article ha, as in "the man" (Gen. 2;15), turns the figure into something like the figure of Everyman in medieval English. In today’s rhetoric we would say Everyone. As in a parable, when we read about "the man," we are reading about ourselves, not an ancient, mythic figure. The story invites a look in the mirror.

The story of the man’s creation in which the LORD God forms him out of the dust of the earth is not at all alien to the theory of evolution. The parabolic story of the LORD God first shaping the man as a mud pie and then breathing the breath of life into the mud pie conveys the great irony of human earthiness and the possibility of spirituality. Some Hebrew linguists believe there is a connection between the word ‘adham and the word for red earth.

The man and the woman are not tempted by immorality, as in the ordinary meaning of temptations, such as lying, cheating, adultery, or killing. The temptations in Genesis symbolize the human reach for ultimacy as a means of achieving security. It is as though the temptation were for immortality rather than for immorality. The fruit of the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desired to make one wise, in other words, goodness, beauty, and truth. They are a means of becoming like God, knowing everything, which is the meaning of the ancient idiomatic phrase,"knowing good and evil." The purpose of the temptation was to make the God irrelevant, either by means of a practical atheism or a deicide.

This is the very problem with which J. Robert Oppenheimer wrestled at the explosion of the first atomic bomb. He quoted the Hindu text about the god Vishnu, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." Human achievement was a means of rendering God unnecessary or irrelevant.

The meaning of the narratives in Genesis is often missed in tedious arguments about the origins of the earth and of human beings. The fundamentalists do the Bible great disservice by torturing it into a false interpretation and thereby missing the messages of God’s providence and human malaise.

As far as evolution is concerned, the significant issue is whether or not evolution can include within its meaning a purposeful universe, that is to say, God’s providence. The answer to that question does not lie within evolution itself, but in assumptions brought to evolution. The fact is that some biologists believe in a purposeful design brought to pass by evolution and some believe in a random chaos and chance. As always, belief is not a matter of proof, but an assumption brought to the facts to organize them or make sense out of them.

The concepts of chaos, chance, and randomness have no meaning in themselves in that they point to something known. They point to something not known, as no pattern or design has been observed. As such, they are words to cover ignorance, not knowledge, much as the word mystery.

As much as many moderns do not like the idea, everyone begins with a faith or a set of presuppositions. We do not begin with a tabula rasa. The most obvious one is that the world is a universe, not a multiverse. The chemist’s Periodic Table is the same throughout the world, even in space. Physics does not change from place to place, or planet to planet. Everyone assumes without proof that we live in a universe about which we have incomplete knowledge. Chance and chaos are as much presuppositions or articles of faith as is design. As a matter of fact, since the concept of chaos does not mean anything other than no design has been detected, the article of faith is unknowability.

An evolution by chance does not necessarily lead to atheism or to a repudiation of design. As both modern physics and astronomy seem to say, chaos was at the beginning. Oddly, even Genesis attests to the chaos of origin. Genesis 1:2 reads: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The phrase "without form and void" in Hebrew is a delightfully onomatopoeical tohu wabohu.

The word "deep" in Hebrew is tehom which is not a Hebrew word, but one borrowed from the Babylonian Creation Myth during the Hebrew’s exile in Babylon. In the Babylonian myth, the world was at first a waste and a chaos. Tiamat, the female goddess who brooded over the waste and chaos, was slain by the male god Marduk and cut in half into heaven and earth. No design appeared as‘elohim brooded over the face of tehom, but a divine purpose begins to unfold.
Paradoxically, design is a penultimate concept. Purpose is the the ultimate concept. Designs arise out of purpose.

The priestly author of Genesis 1:1-2:4a was not writing galactically, but historically about the chaos of experience. So it would seem that both the evolutionist begins and the ancient Hebrews began with a sense of chaos.

Purposes and designs seem to emerge from a primordial chaos not only in the universe, but in history as well, and finally within the human soul. Whatever they may be, they are certainly ironic, as if there is a universal law of unintended consequences. In short, purpose and design are a lot more subtle than everyone believes and are generally only perceived in retropsect.
The early theologians in interpreting Genesis 1:1-2 used the phrase ex nihilo, out of nothing, to elucidate the meaning of tohu wabohu. As a scientific friend of mine says, creation "appears to be the result of a self-organization out of chaos." "Even more miraculous, self-organization out of the void." The experience of faith begins with the experience of the Void.

The words used to understand faith either speak to the experience of God or to ideas about God or godtalk, that is to say, impersonal words and personal words. The words of the experience of God are words as "father" and "shepherd." On the other hand, the words about God are all negative in that they point to human ignorance. "Infinite" doesn’t mean anything because all humans beings know is finitude. "Eternal" falls into the same category. Human beings experience only time. Theologians have an elegant word for this unknowability. It is mystery, just as chaos covers the unknown. It sounds like something is being said, but mystery and chaos really mean nothing is known. Alfred North Whitehead called the negative words for God "metaphysical compliments" thrown at God. Finally, everything that human beings know about God is God as Void.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber delineated two types of relationships, both valuable if used appropriately. They were I-Thou and I-It. I-Thou is a relationship of subject-to-subject, as in a personal, internal relationship. I-It is a relationship of subject-to-object, as in a impersonal, external relationship. Scientific thought is obviously I-It, impersonal, external to the subject, and objective and thus literal. The heart of faith is an I-Thou relationship or encounter with God and uses phrases and words out of human, personal relationships. One of the best examples of this is Psalm 103:13.
As a father pities his children,
so the LORD pities those who fear him.

An I-It relationship with God is knowledge about God which inevitability leads to the experience of the Void. It is an experience of awe and wonder, as in Psalm 8:3.
When I look at thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars
which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful of him
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

One surefire way to experience God as Void is in Monument Valley on the Navajo Nation in a thunder and lightning storm at night.

At a deeper level types of knowledge point to a paradox between the scientific world view and that of faith and belief. At first glance, these categories of knowledge appear contradictory and incompatible, but they are really dealing with two profoundly different human impulses, the desire to understand and manage the physical world in which we live and the desire to understand and manage the world within ourselves. Both begin with tohu wabohu.

Adam and Eve, that is to say, Everyone, were tempted to replace God in an act of deicide so that they would be secure without faith, doubt, or vulnerability. As a result, Everyone is a wanderer on the face of the earth (Gen. 3:23) without any security, always in doubt, and constantly vulnerable. It is hard to find a more acute analysis of the human situation than the one told by these ancient Hebrews.

Copyright © 2005 Dana Prom Smith

ON INSIGHT AND RESPONSIBILITY: taking charge of oneself.

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/11/05)

Many years ago a new client on her first appointment came armed with a small paper-back book, entitled Living with Bi-polar Disorder. As though the paperback were a shield and buckler, she announced, "I’m a bi-polar with episodes of depression." She used a diagnosis as a personal identification akin to being a Republican or a mother or a Methodist. She transformed an insight about her personality into a justification for her behavior rather than a reason for change. She defined herself by her disability.

She went on to say that her previous psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, had recommended that she see me because I might be able to help her through hypnoanalysis. One of the reasons for psychotherapy is change. If there is no change, it means either that the patient resists change, that the psychotherapist has failed, or, worse yet, both.

After introducing herself as a bi-polar, she went on to point to her husband as the chief culprit in her life. He was an aero-space engineer who every morning before he left for work tacked a graph paper flow chart on a large cork board in the kitchen. His alleged concern was his wife’s inefficient use of her time.

By way of retaliation, she always told him to be careful on his drive to work as he walked from the kitchen to the garage. Sure enough, he would become enraged at her admonition and drive off in anger. Affecting innocence, she said, "I don’t know why he gets so angry. All I was doing was telling him to be careful."

Of course, her husband interpreted the admonition as an infantilization, recalling his mother’s similar admonition when he went off to school as a boy. He interpreted the comment as one more extension of female control, recalling his mother’s attempt to control him by hinting at his incompetence and questioning his masculinity.

They had been married 30 years. They had repeated this morning ritual for 30 years which meant repeating the ritual about 6,750 times. I concluded that no one could possibility fail 6,750 times and that more than likely they succeeded 6,750 times. After a while, "if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again," will change into "if you fail a lot, try something else." It is not unreasonable to assume that the outcome of a repetitive behavior is more than likely also its motivation.

People can possibly fail a few times but not 6,750 times. As a small boy, I pulled a girl’s pigtail sitting in front of me in school as a way of charming her with attention. She turned around saying, "That hurt! What’s the matter with you?" She wasn’t smiling and dismissed me as a "bad boy." I repeated the pigtail pulling the next day, but my motive was not win her favor but to irritate her in retaliation for dismissing me. I stopped the maneuver when she threatened to tell the teacher. "I’m going to tell Miss Foxx on you."

Of course, the engineer’s motive was to subordinate his wife by treating her as an employee. She liked to see him lose self-control. A dysfunctional family, it was closely held together by mutual retaliations and recriminations. Psychotherapists have a fancy word for it, "homeostasis," which means that the situation remains the same, constantly destructive. They sabotaged each other, and, sadly, sabotage is a tactic used best against enemies.

Negative emotions are stronger bonds than positive ones. Positive emotions tend to release couples from each other’s grip, but negative emotions are like Super Glue. A pleasant lunch with an old friend is soon forgotten, but a bitter one is cause for endless cud chewing.

Somewhat of a horse’s ass, in the days of slide rules he even wore his slide rule in a sheath holstered to his belt to church and parties as a kind of penis enhancer. His face never showed a trace of emotion or reaction. He was not a fun guy but real load.

His wife justified her admonitions "to be careful" as expressions of affection and care. She was the epitome of the grey lady, grey hair, grey skin, grey eyes, and grey clothing. She cocked her head, giving the message that she was not a threat by exposing her jugular. A female cocked head may be cute in children, seductive in adolescents, but in adults it is akin to a dog rolling over on its back and exposing its belly as a sign of submission. She was slightly stooped with down-cast eyes. Her mouth turned down at the edges which made it difficult for her to smile. In short, she was an emotional sufferer. Her redeeming quality was that she tried to assert her dignity in the face of his constant humiliations, but she paid a frightful price and did not succeed.

As did her previous psychotherapist, I failed. With hypnoanalysis we were able to identify the unconscious motivations, but the rewards of recriminations were greater than those of release and change. We found that she had been subordinated as a child by a domineering mother who was constantly displeased with her. Her father was indifferent. The trigger for her was not so much the flow chart, but a condescending tone in his voice and the phrase "now, look" with which he always began his explanation of the flow-chart. Her mother also used the same phrase when beginning to admonish her.

We also found that he had been controlled by a single mother who had invested her life in her son, seeing him as an extension of herself. She was especially invested in his success. He felt he had to assert his masculinity, fearing he was wanting if he did not dominate other people. His work as an efficiency expert in a large aerospace firm was well suited to his need to dominate others.

My client’s self-diagnosis was wrong as are almost all self-diagnoses. If self-diagnoses were worth a damn, the patient would not be coming to a psychotherapist but improving and changing on his or her own. Self-diagnoses are generally self-justifications which means that they are reasons for stabilizing the dysfunctions or, worse yet, the malfunctions. With her self-diagnosis as a bi-polar she was able to validate her depression as endogenous to her personality and, therefore, a behavior for which she was not responsible. In short, she implied she couldn’t help herself.

I failed to destabilize her self-diagnosis She was not a "bi-polar with episodes of depression" as she was want to claim. She was frustrated, angry, and depressed because she was paying a very high price for her failures. She was living a miserable life of mutual recriminations to maintain her dignity in the face of her husband’s humiliations. She was unwilling to find other mean’s to assert her dignity, largely, I believe, because it was easier to become angry and indignant than to assert herself positively. One way was to develop an interest outside of her marriage which would render his attempts at subordination irrelevant. However, such a project would take work. Positive is always harder than negative. She had been invested in her role of retaliation for so long that nothing else seemed possible to her. The two of them were dancing a danse macabre.

She reminded me of the Lord’s admonition in the Book of Jonah in which Jonah is angry at the inhabitants of Nineveh. The Lord asked Jonah, "Do you do well to be so angry?" Jonah replied, "I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." The issue was the Lord’s graciousness toward the Ninevites which pissed-off Jonah who had a whining, off-pissing personality.

The whole story of the belly of the whale in this delightfully witty allegory is not about the feasibility of living in the belly of a whale, but about the futility of running away from God’s graciousness even as far as a whale’s belly. The point of the story is that eventually God will puke us up on some foreign emotional shore.

In his poem, "The Hound of Heaven," Francis Thompson wrote,

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days,
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat--and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet--
All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.

There is no running away from the self-betrayals of our self-justifications. Insight used as a justification for behavior is a form of self-betrayal. People pay incredibly high prices to maintain the illusions of their self-diagnoses. Maintaining angers, resentments, grievances over the years as a self-justification is a high price. It eats away at the soul and self as it draws us back into repeating the past.

Knowing why we are angry is not enough. Insight is futile unless it begets responsibility and, as a consequence, freedom. Responsibility is simply the awareness that we are accountable for our emotions. We choose them. We are not helplessly caught in their webs.

Some people are stimulus-bound. They allow themselves to be controlled by the stimuli of their environments and histories. They see themselves as helpless. Others are respond-bound. Their responses to stimuli are bound by their intentions, by what they want to do with their lives. The stimulus-bound personalities are perpetual victims. The response-bound personalities are victorious, even in adversity and defeat.

In a sense, we are not free to choose our destinies, but in how we respond to them. With what sex we are born, where we are born, into what kind of families we are born, what abilities and talents are given to us are all matters over which we have no choice. Our freedom is in the way we respond to whom we are and what has happened to us. All of which means that insight is not an end in itself but a means to manage ourselves more effectively. Rather than an identification, insight gives us the power of choice, to remember who we are and what we want to do with our lives. It’s called freedom.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2005

ON EATING SOUR GRAPES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8\18\05)

I bought a bag a grapes the other day, and before I bought them, I tasted one of them. Sweet it was, ambrosial, but when I got the grapes home, Gretchen said, "You bought sour grapes." I was devastated. Sure enough, a few sour grapes were cached on the same stem with the ambrosial grapes.

With an ancestry of farmers on both sides of my family, I was trained to waste nothing. Farmers are the custodians of bits and pieces of nearly everything, busted machines, broken spades, and scraps of food, especially scraps of food. "Waste not, want not." "A penny saved is a penny earned." "You’ll never know. It might come in handy some day." My father, a dentist and a son of the soil himself, even insisted that everyone in the family eat the burned toast asserting that carbon was good for the teeth. Now, of course, we know that as with nearly everything else, carbon is a also carcinogen.

Being true to my heritage, it fell to my lot to eat the sour grapes in addition to the burned toast since Gretchen, her forbearers being merchants, railroad men, and politicians, would have none of my sour grapes eating project. I justified the project not only on the basis of familial loyalty, but also on the notion that eating sour grapes would clarify the mouth’s taste buds and make eating everything else that much clearer and enjoyable, something akin to munching on a kosher dill pickle before tying into a corned beef sandwich in a Jewish deli. Not so. The sour grapes didn’t clarify anything, much less whet the appetite. They left a sour taste in my mouth, just as one might reasonably expect from eating sour grapes.

One of my favorite Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, set the whole "sour grapes" thing going with his radical idea that children should not be punished because of the sins of their parents. He said, "Each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set one edge (31:30)." Ultimately, if we take Jeremiah’s idea to its conclusion, we end up with a socially level playing field.
Apparently, the Christian right does not read Jeremiah. On hearing the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Luke without identifying the source an elder in a church I once served said that they sounded like communist propaganda. He also reported on leaving the committal service for his late wife, "Well, Sarai, she was a good woman. Never crossed me."

For a long time "sour grapes" have been symbols for envy, one of the seven deadly sins. They well might be symbols, being as they are enticing of appearance, but sour of taste. Sin is almost always attractive, witness the story of Adam and Eve. First, the serpent induced Eve to question the authority of God’s Word. Then the serpent promised that she and Adam would be like God, knowing everything, if they ate the fruit of the tree. Eve doubted God in a fit of envy, saying to herself, "Oh, yeah, who says?" Seeing that the fruit of the tree (probably a date, not an apple) was enticing of appearance, being good for food, a delight to the eye, and making one wise, she and Adam ate, thinking they would hoodwink God. Then they knew they were naked which was a vivid way of saying they vulnerable and way beyond their depth.

So temptation is almost always attractive, but what is the sin of "sour grapes?" Out of the seven deadly sins, pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth which one fits "sour grapes?" Without much wit, easy it is to see that envy is the culprit, being the only sin without a serpentine promise.

Pride promises the illusion of importance. Greed promises wealth. Lust promises the pleasures of the flesh. Anger promises the avoidance of pain by spewing our pain on others. Gluttony, an American favorite, offers the promise of satisfaction. Sloth promises relaxation and ease.

And then there is envy which promises nothing at all. Envy is akin to jealousy, only envy is about place, power, position, and possessions, commonly called things, while jealousy is about people. As sins, they offer no rewards. They do not entice with false promises, that is, unless one likes yellow bile and dyspepsia.

Medieval psychology offered four diagnoses, sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic, and choleric. Built upon the theory that four humours, blood, black bile, phlegm, and yellow bile, flow through our bodies, affecting our personalities. Envy and jealousy are choleric, yellow bile personalities.

Although envy and jealousy offer no rewards, they are the most widely practiced of the seven because of their hidden agendas. While sins can promise rewards, they can’t promise virtues; however, they can imply them. Envy and jealousy imply dignity through indignation. In a sense they try to baptize sin and turn it into a virtue. The question, "Just who does he think he is?," implies that the questioner is better than the offender. "Where does she get off doing that?" implies that the questioner is more virtuous than the accused. In short, envy and jealousy pretend virtue without actually having to be virtuous. They are morally slothful.

Envy and jealous let a person pretend to be good from the sidelines without the ardor of virtue. Envy and jealousy require no effort, only indignation. They allow the illusion of moral accomplishment without accomplishment.

They are part and parcel of Plato’s distinction between appearance and reality. They have the appearance of virtue without its reality. The reality is yellow bile. All sins have a consequence, and envy and jealousy’s consequences are choler.

All of the deadly sins exemplify the New Testament word for sin, hamartia, which literally means missing the mark. A term of archery, it is a word fit for the experience. All the seven deadly sins miss the mark, but jealousy and envy miss it with a vengeance. They not only have no promises, they have consequences a plenty. In addition to their vanity, they leave bitterness, a sour personality.

Faith is a form of finding the mark.

Copyright © 2005 Dana Prom Smith

ON THE DEATH OF A BIRD

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/15/05)

In the morning damp Gretchen found a fallen hummingbird lying on the cold stones of our front patio. At first we thought it dead, but when I went to pick it up, I saw it quivering with its long peak twitching as if it were thirsting for nectar. For a moment I did not know what to do, but then I heard the words of Jesus reminding me that God the Father kept his eye on the sparrow. If God did that, then the least I could do was to keep my eye on the hummingbird.

The hummingbird was beautiful with a bright bronze breast almost as though it were a miniature of an ancient, bronze-breasted Roman centurion. I took it off of the cold stone and placed it in the sun’s warmth on the railing of our deck in the backyard. It began to move a little more, trying to fluff its wings. Finally, Gretchen saw it fly off, and we were jubilant. Shortly she saw it lying on the ground below the deck. I brought it back to a table on the deck in the sun, and Gretchen gave it a cap full of nectar. Soon there was no movement. The bird was dead, and I buried it amidst peonies, a butterfly bush, and larkspur. I thought the burial plot fitting with enough nectar for the bird’s flight into the next world, something akin to the provisions left for the pharaohs in the pyramids for their journeys into eternity.

We felt helpless at the death of the hummingbird. We wondered why we were so moved at the death of a bird, but that soon became clear. It brought to mind our helplessness at the death of our mothers. We began Sigmund Freud’s "free association" and William James’ "stream of consciousness." Gretchen at first mentioned the death of her mother and that brought to mind the death of my mother.

Gretchen’s mother died just short of her 96th birthday, just after she had eaten breakfast and had decided the time had come to finish her journey on earth. She wanted to die alone, having made it clear to Gretchen that she did not want nurses hovering around her bed or Gretchen making a special trip east for her parting. She exemplified Alfred North Whitehead’s conviction that religion is what individuals do with their solitariness. If anything, dying is solitary and religious, and she quite appropriately wanted to die in God’s presence without the fuss and feathers of ministering distractions.

My mother died, her body riddled cancer, near Thanksgiving in her 67th year. In her dying moments there were those involuntary gasps, as the hummingbird’s, trying to hold onto life. Perhaps, I thought later that the gasps might have been gasps at the threshold of eternity. I held her hand as she died and kept speaking with her past the nurse’s futile attempts to usher me from the room. I suspect at the last she had gone within herself on that journey into the unknown, into the silence of eternity. That deep within ourselves is the only place to which we can repair when we are dying.

Then began a flood of associations, the death of my father of leukemia in his 58th year, the death of my grandfather of gangrene in his 85th year, and then a long line of parishioners with whom I had kept vigil at their deaths, children, adolescents, adults in their prime, and the old. The overwhelming sense was a dumbfounding helplessness. Nothing can be said or done. Whitehead was right. It is a solitary journey into a Void, the Void of God, and, therefore, silently a journey into faith.

What remains for the living is grief, the immense sadness of loss, an experience for which there are no words, as Saint Paul said, "with sighs too deep for words." Grief is an experience which, too, is ultimately solitary, and, therefore, a journey by faith into the Void.

I wonder what people, particularly journalists and newscasters, mean when they say "closure." I think they mean nothing at all, except they want to walk away from someone else’s grief, leaving the grief-stricken unattended, afraid, as they are, of the pain of their own grief. There is no closure. If there were, we would be nothing more than machines, automatons without heart and soul.

The death of those who bore us, nurtured us, and abided with us in far more than the death of someone else because we are in their lives and they in ours. They shaped our identity, our sense of ourselves, and with those losses there is never any closure. We are more than a being. We are a becoming, and for that there are no closures, only openings.

It does not take much to scratch a person’s surface to find the openings, the openings to depths. All it takes is the death of a bird.

Copyright © 2005 Dana Prom Smith

ON FAITH

(a sermon preached at the Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship, Flagstaff)

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (01/8/06)

Texts: Genesis 3:1-13, Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-10.W

When I was a small boy learning to swim, my grandfather took me down to a cove at the beach to practice. The water near the shore was chest high with a sandy bottom, but it soon dropped off into a darkness. All I could see were the tendrils of kelp lazily waving in the deep. They looked like the arms of an octopus from the Black Lagoon.

As he sat on a small jetty, my grandfather encouraged me to swim out beyond the shore. I didn’t want to go swimming beyond my depth. I wanted the security of touching bottom. A former Norwegian mariner, he laughed and said, "Oofdah, you’re never safe until you’re beyond your depth. Else, you’ll be running aground."I had a sense he was right but didn’t know why. I wondered how I could be safe if I couldn’t touch bottom. Well, now that I’m approaching his age at that time, I’m beginning to understand what he meant.

If we keep paddling in the shallows, we’ll never go anywhere. We’re always safer beyond our depth. Some people stay in the shallows. They crave security. The uncertainties of life are so emotionally overwhelming that they’ll grab for any security they can find no matter how flimsy.

In my backpacking days I was often tempted to reach out for a branch or root while climbing a precipitous trail, especially if I were stupid enough to look down. Of course, the roots or branches often give way. If I sought the security, I’d lose my balance and fall. As my father used to say, "Always look up."

Seeking security, many people confuse faith with ideologies and theologies, sets of doctrines, lists of morals, or, worse yet, social and economic values. Craving certitude they feel safe only when they can touch bottom or grab for an ideological twig. Living within the boundaries of doctrines, they paddle in the shallows, staying safe in home port, never going beyond the perimeter of their fears.

Fundamentalists are a prime example, but these rigidities of belief seem to afflict everyone. Some might even be lurking right here amongst the Unitarians and Universalists. They all crave to live without doubt. The most egregious are the fundamentalists because they claim faith and have no faith, believing their own lie that ideology is faith. Roman Catholics and Mormons also replace faith with doctrine.

Jean Paul Sartre said that bad faith is believing one’s own lie. Well, the fundamentalists are guilty of bad faith. They’ve believed their own lies.When people claim to know the truth, that their ideology is the final truth, they shut off further investigation and thought. Talking to them is akin to speaking with a steel wall.

The politically correct do the same thing. They shut off conversation as though certain phrases or words are the only way to think or speak. In my lifetime I have gone through five or six generations of political correctness and am always about a generation behind the currently correct. If we live by what we think we know, we’ll never go anywhere. Saint Paul said it best, "We walk by faith, not by sight."

I remember in my freshman logic class in college that the professor took us through the four traditional tests of truth, and all of them in one way or another were found wanting. Waving his cane in the air, he said, "No matter what anyone says, ‘The truth has to be interesting.’" The fundamentalists and the ideologues are cognitive drags. They are not interesting. They’re boring.

Faith is not a theology or an ideology. It is a process, as in an assembly line. The assembly line determines the product. The product is the doctrine or conviction. The assembly line is faith, not what a person believes, but the way that person believes. Faith is not a what but a how.We live by faith and memory. Knowledge, belief, or conviction are products of our memories.

I doubt that many here read Saint Augustine, he pointed out in his Confessions that knowledge of the world and ourselves is a function of memory. Just as memory is the way we experience the past, so faith is the way we experience the present and anticipate the future.We don’t remember raw data but recall the past by means of metaphors which are ways we perceive. Faith is a metaphor by which we experience the present and anticipate the future. These metaphors are the sextants of which my grandfather spoke.

Most of us don’t realize the depth of metaphor in our experience. Our only literal thinking is either mathematics or symbolic logic, where the symbol stands for itself and nothing else. Everything else is metaphor which is the way we process our experiences, anticipations, and recollections. Most often we think of metaphor as a literary illustration and device, but the linguists have pointed out that our experience of life is always governed by global metaphors.

The best analysis I have read on this point is George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Physicists speak of elegance. Botanists and biologists study communities, some monarchial and some democratic. Some people have to defend themselves as though they are at war, living with a military metaphor. Others justify themselves as though they live in a court of law.

The Bible said it best in the Epistle of the Hebrews, "By faith, Abraham went out, not knowing where he was to go. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land." "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." In other words, life’s journey is much like a mariner’s journey with sextant, compass, and fathom line taking a fix on the stars, holding one’s direction, and checking to make sure of the depth. Today, the Global Positioning System has replaced the sextant and a fathometer the fathom line. Mariners feel safe when they’re beyond their depth, when the fathoms are deeper than their keels.

The substitution of morals, doctrines, or social values for faith is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "cheap grace." As substitutes for faith, they are frauds, knock-off faiths, manufactured in the sweatshops of anxiety. If we live only by what we know, we are trapped in the past.The story of Adam and Eve illustrates this point. They were tempted by the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which meant they wanted to know everything before they began. The fruit was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and made one wise, in short, the classic Greek virtues of goodness, beauty, and truth, the sum of all knowledge. They wanted to live by knowledge rather than faith.

As a result, they fell from grace because they wanted to commit a deicide, a killing of God by making God irrelevant. They wanted the security of controlling their destiny which means that the opposite of faith is security, the security of knowing everything. In short, they wanted to live without doubt and, and such, wanted to live without faith.

Doubt is often thought of as the opposite of faith. Actually, it can be the growing edge of faith. No thoughtful person can live without doubt. Doubt makes us explore more deeply the meaning of faith. More often than not, people doubt dogma, doctrine, correct ideas, not faith. Faith is the way we experience, not ideas about that experience. In astronomy it’s called the Parallax Principle. What we observe depends upon where we stand. With each passing day we stand in a different place just as the world changes every day. We never experience anything the way we experienced it before because both we and the thing we’re observing have changed.

Belief is not a settled and mixed set of ideas, but an ongoing exploration of the meaning of our experience. The metaphor for faith used by both the Epistle to the Hebrews and Saint Paul is a journey, not a destination. Faith as a pilgrimage is more a process than an idea, more of a how than a what. Process is the way people think, the way people experience life, with what kind of metaphor they perceive their experiences.

I am a Trinitarian and a Calvinist, a minority. As a Christian, I believe the metaphor of God’s grace toward us in Jesus Christ and thus the faith of grace. One of the names of the Christ Child in the Gospel of Matthew is Emmanuel, which means God for us. He was God’s presence amongst us and gave us a metaphor of God’s grace toward us, a metaphor by which we process our recollections and our anticipations, shaping our memories and our faith. Amen.