24Mar

Deaths of Despair vs Lives of Hope

In a shocking study published in 2015 by Princeton University economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton, it was shown that mortality has been mysteriously rising for an unexpected swath of the populace, high school educated whites. The authors of that earlier study have further elaborated on their work, as reported today in the Wall Street Journal:

Driving the uptick are increases in “deaths of despair”—from drugs, alcohol-related liver diseases and suicide, as well as a slowdown in progress against death in middle age from heart disease and cancer, the nation’s biggest killers, wrote Anne Case and Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, her husband.

By the numbers we are looking a tragedy of proportions that would spur the nation into a froth if we were talking about terrorism victims, or casualties of a battle. Questions naturally arise: Why this is happening, and what can be done about it? Here are my initial reflections.

Globalization is partly to blame, as it has brought wage stagnation and loss of manufacturing jobs to middle class workers without a college degree. However, this disaster is not purely economic, but is also associated with social disintegration:

Those changes have come along with trends such as a decline in marriage, more temporary relationships and children out of wedlock, and a rise in social isolation that have made life less stable, they said.

Looking at the age cohort graph it is startling to see how abruptly things changed, beginning with the Baby Boomer generation, a group who really revolutionized society. Poverty–grinding and crushing poverty–has existed for whites before and after the 1960s. It exists for other racial and ethnic groups. Somehow, people have been able to cope better at other times. They had something that is missing now.

The Baby Boomers came of age at a time of postwar prosperity, when manufacturing blossomed and the “American Dream” came to include a good paying job, suburban houses with TVs in every room, multiple cars, and mostly the optimistic sense of permanent upward mobility. The old cohesive forces of family, community, and church were simultaneously dealt a body blow–for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of a short essay–thereby kicking aside a crucial support needed later when the “Dream” proved to be illusory.

But the problem goes deeper than merely lacking social support at a time of greatest need. A Sunday School teacher of mine was fond of saying that each of us has a “God-sized hole” that only God can fill, though in God’s place we try our best to fill that hole with other things–idols of our own devising. This may be part of the problem. Making an idol of work and a particular kind of lifestyle can only shatter you when those things are yanked away. Christianity doesn’t call people to be rich and successful, nor does it endorse the heretical view that wealth and status are the guaranteed symbols of a life blessed by God. Success that is merely an external papering over of an existential void will only be an illusion. It is like Jesus’ parable of the two builders, where the house built on the sand eventually collapses.

Work success and the illusion that this provides–take it away and what is left? A life that is not integrated with God at the center will be more likely to yield to identity crises. There will be a tendency toward loss of community, and fragmentation of relationships. It may be the culprit behind that overwhelming despair that is driving the suicides, cirrhosis deaths, and drug overdoses.

Of course, this is a lot of conjecture. It would be interesting to drill down deep into the data to see exactly what going on in the spiritual lives of these victims of despair. Only God knows.

Whatever the reason for this despair, it suggests a tremendous need for assistance, assistance that is not merely economic, but existential. This is a mission field. This is a wake up call to Christians reach into that void with God’s love.

17Mar

A Prayer for the Feast Day of St Patrick

God our Father
You sent Saint Patrick
to preach your glory to the people of Ireland.
By the help of his prayers,
may all Christians proclaim your love to all men.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.

(Christian Prayer: The Liturgy of the Hours, from the website www.churchyear.net)

(Image credit: Saint Patrick stained glass window from Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, CA. Posted to FLICKR by user SICARR, obtained from Wikimedia Commons.)

07Mar

White Woman Insists She is Transracial

Rachel Dolezal now styles herself Nkechi Amare Diallo. The white civil rights activist and former NAACP leader had lied about her past, claiming to be African American, which allowed her to rise to become a lecturer in Africana studies at Eastern Washington State University, and president of the Spokane chapter of of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She lost both of these positions, and gained a heap of notoriety, when she was outed by her estranged parents in 2015 for passing herself off as black. (Subsequently, investigations have suggested that 8 hate crimes she alleges to have been perpetrated against her when she was living in Idaho are also fraudulent).

Defiant to the end, Ms. Dolezal has borrowed from the debate about gender identity, insisting that race isn’t purely biological, but can be chosen.

For her part, Diallo is doubling down on her insistence that she is “transracial” — a woman who is the product of two white parents but identifies mentally, emotionally, physically and culturally as black. “I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it matches my anatomy and complexion or not,” Dolezal told The Guardian earlier this week. “I’ve never questioned being a girl or woman, for example, but whiteness has always felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn’t choose to feel this way or be this way, I just am. What other choice is there than to be exactly who we are?”

Jesus is The Answer, and Ash Wednesday Tells Us the Question

“Jesus is the answer!” So proclaims numerous road signs, Facebook posts, and bumper stickers. For those posting such things, it is an expression of their faith, of their confidence in Jesus. It a touchstone of peace and happiness for them and perhaps also for many who see it–but not for everyone. To a great many others, this statement provokes rather a sense of bewilderment, and begs a follow up question: “If Jesus is the answer, then what is the question?”

This thought brings to my lips a smile as I recall the analogous situation in Douglas Adams’ humorous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a planet-sized super computer named “Deep Thought” was constructed and directed to come up with “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”. The program ran for millions of years, and finally returned an answer: “42”. Unfortunately neither the Deep Thought nor his designers knew what the ultimate question happened to be. The pan-dimensional beings seeking this answer were then forced to construct another planet-sized super computer to figure out the ultimate question.

Ash Wednesday is a Christian celebration that reminds us of the question for which Jesus is the answer. Or, more accurately, we are reminded of the problem for which Jesus is the solution; That is, the problem of death:

“Remember, o man, dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.”

Thus intones the priest in many a ceremony as ashes are imposed upon the foreheads of penitent Christians, these words echoing God’s curse in Genesis 3, pronounced upon humankind as punishment for sin.

Death is literally the bane of our existence. It destroys all that we hold dear. Try as we might to banish it from our thoughts, death catches us all. We recoil from it as we simultaneously yearn for permanence and significance. The idea of the extinction of our consciousness into an eternal nothing is difficult for us to fully grasp, for “God has set eternity in the hearts of men.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Death is universal. We all die, because of our sin. Death is universal because sin is universal.

Fortunately, Ash Wednesday is merely the prelude to Easter. Whereas Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality, in essence saying, “Ye are dead”, Easter tells us: “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

The good news of Christianity is that God has set eternity in our hearts for a reason. It isn’t a dreadful taunt, or a meaningless musing. Jesus, the Christ, has died our death, in order that we might live his life. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

As the old Easter canticle proclaims:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.”
(This comes from 1 Corinthians 15)

Jesus’ resurrection from death foretells our own liberation from it, and not only in the future, in an eternity after physical death. We may be liberated from its shadow, and its dread, and its power over us even in this life.

In the light of this good news, St Paul exults in his first letter to the Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

As John Donne, the 16th century poet we recently profiled, elaborated so eloquently:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
(Sonnet X)

14Feb

John Donne: Love Poet and Minister

(John Donne Effigy by Nicholas Stone, 1631, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London)

Valentine’s Day once again turns our thoughts to romantic love. Interestingly, one of the UK Telegraph’s “10 Best Love Poems” was penned by a man of seeming contradictions: A man who could capture erotic impulses in words that resound in elegance, he also embraced the Christian faith, becoming a priest and one of his era’s best spokesmen for the faith.

John Donne (1573-1631) was born in the Elizabethan era, a time of prosperity and of the flowering of literature in England. Donne’s writings shine along with those of his contemporaries William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Sir Francis Bacon.

The poem selected by the Telegraph for special honor is “The Good Morrow” published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. I love the second stanza:

If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.

For Donne it was a deep and abiding love that altered the course of his life. While working for Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, he fell in love with Anne More, Egerton’s niece. They secretly married without the approval of her father, for which Donne was fired and prevented from obtaining a government position. He lived in poverty, struggling to provide for a rapidly growing family (Anne bore him 12 children). In 1614, formally blocked by King James I from any employment outside of the Church, John Donne took on holy orders.

By all accounts, Donne was a very devoted husband. James Kiefer, in his online sketch of the life of Donne, has opined: From the above information, the reader might conclude that Donne’s professed religious belief was mere opportunism. But the evidence of his poetry is that, long before his ordination, and probably beginning with his marriage, his thoughts were turned toward holiness, and he saw in his wife Anne (as Dante had earlier seen in Beatrice) a glimpse of the glory of God, and in human love a revelation of the nature of Divine Love.

Donne was devastated by Anne’s death in 1617. He vowed never to marry again, despite the troubles that would cause in raising his children. He threw his energies fully into his priestly work, rising quickly to the post of Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. He gained fame for his sermons, and was regarded in his day as the best preacher in England. Phrases from his writings remain familiar to us today, such as “death be not proud”, “for whom the bell tolls” and “no man is an island”. Here is an excerpt:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promentory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death dimishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (John Donne–meditation 17)

He fell ill of stomach cancer, but managed to rise from his death bed on Feb 25, 1631, to deliver a final sermon entitled “Death’s Duell,” to a stunned audience at Whitehall Palace. Izaak Walton, in his The Life of Dr. John Donne, wrote: “When to the amazement of some beholders, he appeared in the pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice, but mortality by a decayed body, and a dying face.” His publisher called it “The Doctors Owne Funerall Sermon.” Donne exhorted his hearers with these final words:

There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen.

A marble effigy of Donne made soon after his death can be viewed at St Paul’s cathedral, where it survived the 1666 Great Fire of London. He is remembered with a feast day in the Anglican Church calendar, on March 31.

12Feb

Who Can Banish Our Trogglehumpers?

One of the more charming movies I’ve recently seen is last year’s “BFG”, directed by Steven Spielberg. It tells the story of the magical adventure of an orphan girl named Sophie, who befriends a big friendly giant (“B.F.G.”).

A moment that caught my interest occurred midway through the film. Sophie is taken to a mystical tree where dreams are born. These primordial dreams float around like colored fireflies, and can be caught. Most of the dreams are happy, or silly. However, Sophie learns that not all dreams are benign. She catches a glowing red dream and the B.F.G. solemnly warns her to leave that one be, for it is a Trogglehumper. The particular dream that Sophie found was summarized thus:

“Look what you has done. There be no forgiveness.”

Now this is downright biblical. It encapsulates a sense of shame that many individuals feel, and can’t easily shake. On an even deeper level, this Trogglehumper represents the collective nightmare of fallen Humanity.

Who can free us from such a Trogglehumper? The Christian answer is that God can give us a new dream, a better dream, one whose narrative is “Here be forgiveness; here be love.”

To such a wonderful change in the narrative, our response echoes King David’s song of praise (recorded in Psalm 103):

Praise the Lord, O my soul
and all that is within me praise his holy Name.
Praise the Lord, O my soul
and forget not all his benefits;
Who forgiveth all thy sin
and healeth all thine infirmities;
Who saveth thy life from destruction
and crowneth thee with mercy and loving-kindness

22Jan

2016 Saw 90,000 Martyrs for Christ

Nearly 100,000 people gave their lives as a witness to the faith. The majority of the deaths (60,000) were due to tribal violence in Africa. Most of the rest can be attributed to the activities of Islamic terror groups like ISIS.

A new study has found that Christians are the most persecuted people on earth today. A research conducted by The Center for the Study of Global Christianity shows that every six minutes a Christian loses their life because of their faith in Jesus Christ.

Read more at World Religion News: “A Christian Was Killed for Their Faith Every Six Minutes”.

14Jan

For Many, Quackery Fills Vacuum Left by God

This is so true:

It seems to me that for a large proportion of people, particularly people on the political Left, pseudoscience has become a secular religion, complete with creation myth, demons and ultimate salvation.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of pseudoscience on the political Right, too. But often that is motivated by adherence to standard religious philosophy, the idea that the Bible is the world of God and that anything that contradicts it cannot be allowed to be true. On the Left, where many abjure religion, quackery has become the new religion.

Read it all at: the skeptical OB.

09Jan

Baptism of Jesus

As an inauguration approaches in 21st century America, the church calendar takes us back to another inauguration in 1st century Palestine. Jesus began his public ministry by being plunged under the running waters of the Jordan river.

(“The Baptism of Jesus”, by Antoine Coypel, 1661 – 1722)

It is a deep mystery why the Sinless One would submit to being baptized by his cousin John. John’s baptism was one of repentance. It was a purification rite to ceremonially cleanse people of sin. Baptism was not something a perfect God-man would require.

John said as much when Jesus approached: “I should be baptized by you.” Jesus’ answer was short and cryptic: “Let it be so, to fulfill all righteousness.”

One Rev John Watson, a 19th century Scottish Presbyterian, described Jesus’ motives this way:

What Jesus desired was to forget His perfect purity and Divine dignity, and to plunge into the very depths of ordinary sinning, sorrowful human life. In His pity and sympathy, Jesus desired to lift the burden, which would be on His own shoulders, but could be no part of Himself. According to the excusable idea of the Baptist, his Lord should have gathered His white garments around Him with fastidious care and stood alone on the banks, while at His feet the waters were stained with the sins of poor struggling humanity. But according to the heart of Jesus He must descend into the midst of the river so that in the end what neither the water of the Jordan nor any other could do would be accomplished by His lifelong Passion and His death. This baptism was a sacrament of the messianic love–a pledge of utter devotion to His fellow men, a symbol of identification with Humanity. (The Life of the Master. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1901).

Today, we celebrate this great mystery. Jesus didn’t need baptism, but he chose to undergo it as a way to identify with us, and to inaugurate his ministry.

Brother James’ Airs

Author: BrJames