My Shifting Politics

My Shifting Politics

By Dan McDonald

 

            My political views have been uncertain in recent years. Maybe it is part of growing older. For many of us, as we grow older and get tired easier, we just don’t have the energy to argue over everything under the sun. We select our battles. We don’t even argue about the things important to us unless we believe we have the words and the spirit that will help make the difference with someone listening. We don’t want to waste words speaking into a megaphone to a crowd whose attention is elsewhere. Maybe that is part of the reason culture wars and issues crusades don’t enamor me like they once did. I am one of those people who became a Republican in the late 1970’s and while I always thought the concept of the silent majority was a farce, I did believe in limited government and Christian values as the Reagan revolution moved Republicanism from the minority status to a position nearing dominance in the latter portion of the twentieth century.

            I expressed to someone on a social media that the movement that once attracted me no longer shines so brightly for me now. I am trying to express in words where I am now, without necessarily trying to influence anyone else to join me. I am simply trying to be honest with the world where I am, inasmuch as I even understand where I am these days. I must if I am honest say that I am no longer a tenaciously committed Republican. In fact, it would be honest to say that what increasingly passes for Republican frightens me. I don’t know that I am ready to plunge into being a Democrat. I suppose I have become something of an independent but I am not sure what that means. I am trying to find words to explain to others where I am so that when they read me they will know where I am. It is so easy to hide trying to please others. I want to be done with that. There are certain experiences and thoughts that have led me to where I am today. Let’s begin with those.

            First let me express as I have in some other blogs how getting together for ale with a friend who worked in the same industry as I work in, helped changed my life views on politics. Ale is medicine when taken moderately and mixed with good conversation. I was this card carrying Republican who leaned to the libertarian side of Republican politics. He was a Democrat, who would not express it in public but appreciated the Social-Democrat model of Western Europe. But the more we talked, the more we realized that solid conversations with others who believed differently than we did led us to realize that we had more thinking to do on these issues. Perhaps one of the antidotes to angry radicalism is the ability to listen and ponder what an opponent is saying. Sometimes though, when we listen to others it is frightening. I began to find that there were people with whom I was basically in agreement that frightened me. I could tell they had never listened to anything someone who didn’t believe like they did had ever said. I could feel their sense of superiority as they viewed the opposition as dumb or stupid. I had sat down at a pub and thrown back an ale and enjoyed sweet potato fries and beef brisket or salmon and had listened to a soft spoken man tell what he believed, what sort of things he saw that led him to believe that way. He didn’t frighten me, but someone who agreed with me frightened me with my own beliefs.

            I still believe there are good reasons for limited government. But I believe we need a lot more quiet conversations. I also believe that we need genuine integrity and some originality if limited government is going to work. I remember reading of someone who became a city council member or maybe even a mayor who wanted limited government to work. He took the viewpoint that for limited government to work that people with real needs needed to know where they could obtain the resources to help with their needs. For him limited government didn’t make his office easier but more difficult. It would have been easy enough to throw public money at people’s needs. It was more difficult to commit to limited government and then try to facilitate people having the opportunity to find resources to help them in real needs. I am not so afraid these days of people wishing to use public monies to provide resources and opportunities to people.

            I was a student of history. I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in history sometime in the last millennium. The reality of human life is we are organized in communities, nations, tribes, families, go to churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and gather for music events and learning in schools. The idea that all of life is based on the individual has never ever, not even once actually happened. But the individual, you and me, each of us is important. A baby is born into a family and both mother and father want to see that baby nourished and able to reach his or her full potential. The reality is that in seeking the good of a nation, we need to begin to discuss how a nation best gathers together as a nation while providing for the opportunities and abilities and freedoms of individuals. Why can’t we discuss these issues in a quiet voice? Why must we have name-calling and treat someone with a different perspective than our own as if that differing perspective makes the person an idiot? But sadly on the side of the political aisle where I have stood for most all my life, I have found increasingly that the person with a different perspective is regarded as an idiot. I have found Christians, including myself at times, among the worst in treating others with differing perspectives as idiots. It is as if we had never read the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus describes the person who calls another person a fool, the same as a murderer. We always imagine ourselves to be on the side of the good, the true, and the just. But it never occurs to us that some of the people with opposing views have actually thought out their beliefs with a desire to discover the good, the true, and the just. It is to our own detriment that we do not listen, ponder, and then carefully respond.

            These days I tend to listen a lot to those with whom I don’t agree. I listen because if I don’t understand their viewpoint maybe I need to listen especially to their viewpoint. It even goes for the people who believe something I feel I must oppose. I have leaned towards radical viewpoints at times in my life. A radical is basically someone who feels himself or herself to be marginalized outside of society. They want to change the system because the system is as far as they are concerned fubar – politely said fouled up beyond all recognition. The radical may be the most important person to listen to. Do they merely have a bad attitude? Or are they actually living where the system is unjust? It is important to listen to the radical whether on the right or the left, not necessarily to agree completely, but to understand the why of their radicalness.

            Let me express a case in point for listening to radicals. A study of counties where Donald Trump was supported most heavily, were predominately white counties. But counties where Trump received his highest percentage of support were also counties with higher unemployment rates. They were the counties where jobs had been outsourced to other regions or countries. The counties where he did the absolute best were counties where lifespan of the people in those counties were actually declining. Generally speaking American lifespans are growing longer, but in a number of counties where Trump did exceptionally well lifespans have been trending shorter. Radicalism is a cry of someone for whom the system is not working. That doesn’t mean I see Donald Trump as anything but a dangerous narcissist who exemplifies the worst in American politics. But it is essential that I begin to differentiate Trump from those supporting him. There are people who have lost hope and they are seething with helplessness which is frustrating and often leads to anger. They feel a sense of someone understanding who connects with their sense of frustration and anger. They may not be supporting a candidate I can stomach, but if we are unable to see their frustrations we will have learned nothing about their part of America.

            The same may be said for a movement such as “Black Lives Matter.” The proper response is not “all lives matter” but is to go beyond the angry signs in our faces and see if there are reasons for the pent up anger. Do we really believe that racism has so disappeared from American life that store clerks do not think any differently when a white kid with an attitude walks through the door or a black kid with a swagger walks through the door? Do we really think the same of an out of control Justin Bieber as we do an outspoken Kanye West? Or do we treat one as if deserving of extra contempt because they are too unlike us for us to understand them? Sometimes these are hard questions to answer.

            I have begun to look for the people who are trying to create a healthy America on both sides of the aisle. I am learning to listen rather than speak. But of course, I am one of those people who can hardly quit speaking. I know there are people who have seen everything I see about the Republican Party and have become Democrats. I am alright with that. I even find hope in that. I love that Elizabeth Bruenig is writing for a half dozen magazines at a time, is attacking conservative hypocrisy and simultaneously expressing her genuine desire to see a society where her Catholic social values are practiced in protecting and nourishing the poor, in helping to turn our culture from one of death to one of life, in promoting both life of the unborn and caring for the born. I want to make sure that someone like Kristen Day who heads up Democrats for Life knows I support her desire to see the Democratic Party see that its liberal values are not consistent until the values are more supportive of the lives of those in the womb as well as of those born into our society.

            This is where I am today. I haven’t figured out where I need to be politically. But I am grateful that for the first time in my life I feel like I can sit down with a person from varied points on the American political spectrum and have a decent conversation if that is what the other person wants. I believe I can sit down and talk to another person about what Jesus means to me without worrying about whether they have the right politics or not. I am pretty sure I haven’t always been there. For some I suspect you might think I have lost it. That is alright. Sometimes I am pretty sure I have lost something. But then at other times I think I have also gained something. As usual I have written beyond the recommended length of a blog. But I have tried to be honest about where I am.

            Where am I? I am in an unfamiliar place without my comfortable markers to call home. But the space before me is open, and full of possibility. I like the place. It isn’t home, but it is a nice place to be on the way to my finding home.

Discussing Job

Thoughts from a discussion on Job

 

            An Internet conversation, especially on a forum like Twitter can be good or bad. It can be a free for all, with unwelcome guests – on some days I have unwelcome guests into a conversation, and on other days I am afraid I have been the unwelcome guest. But the other day I entered a conversation where I mentioned something and before long a conversation was taking place between two people who had never had a conversation before.

We were talking about two perspectives on the Book of Job. One perspective said that unless you accept Job as a blameless man from the beginning of the book you will misunderstand the book’s message to us. The person on our Twitter feeds that had begun the conversation was especially pointing out that most of us at times, reading through the book of Job find ourselves agreeing at some point with Job’s friends, or even with Elihu who seems like the cold arrogant theologian type who has no sense of humanity in his bones. All he has is answers with little compassion. This first perspective, a wonderful perspective in my opinion, leads us to look at ourselves when we are tempted to join in with Job’s accusers and find ourselves tempted to point the finger at Job. This view certainly speaks to us. How often have we seen someone suffering and then began to think about what they did wrong and how they got to that point of suffering that is in their life. We also do it with ourselves before we do it with others. Job refused to do it to himself in his suffering. He had lived what in the Hebrew Scriptures was called a perfect or blameless life, and he claimed that as the truth about himself. That is what offended his friends about Job. We wish to enjoy a sort of benign tolerance for shared mediocrity. After all, are we not all sinners and good ole boys? It becomes an assault the joy we have in our shared mediocrity when someone boldly says, no my suffering isn’t because of my sin – I am a righteous man and this suffering isn’t about my sin.” Such a clinging to one’s righteousness in the midst of his suffering shatters for all of us the illusion of our joyous celebration of shared mediocrity. We are all sinners becomes less a confession and more an excuse for the collective. Job shatters the bonds of our sameness based tolerance. He defies convention and claims to be a righteous man rather than accepting the role of sinner.

With our English language backgrounds, we quickly want to speak to Job and say “Hey no one is perfect. No one is blameless. How dare you speak that way? You are supposed to admit “hey we are all sinners, and then you can glibly claim phrases and announce to the world “I am okay, you are okay.” Job if you had done that, your friends would have shared like mannered phrases with you and everything would have been okay-dokey smokie. But you refused to take that view. Instead you said, “I want God to explain this. I have lived a good life. I have provided for the poor, treated my servants with dignity and respect, have been legs for the lame and eyes for the blind. I want God to explain.” Perhaps he wasn’t interested so much in God giving him a rational answer to his question of why. He was looking I believe for something else. He was looking for God’s presence in his suffering. He was willing for God to slay him as long as he could see him in this time of his suffering. He was a blameless man, and he wasn’t willing to let go of his blamelessness.

 The Hebrew usage of the word we translate into either “perfect” or “blameless” doesn’t fit well into our English language vocabularies or how we speak of one being blameless. In our English vocabularies and usage, we think of someone who is blameless as someone who has arrived and fulfilled the standard of the law. What more can there be once they have arrived at blamelessness or perfection. But that doesn’t capture so well what being blameless meant within the Hebraic Scriptures. In the Hebraic understanding of holiness, the life of the righteous was a continual walk passing through varied stages of life. A two year old’s blameless way is not the same as a twelve year old’s blameless way, is not the same as a twenty-two year old’s blameless way, is not the same as a forty-two year old’s blameless, is not the same as an eighty-two year old’s blameless way. Blamelessness was to walk in basic harmony with God in the stage and development of life in which you were passing.

This viewpoint opens up a second way of reading the book of Job that had been mentioned by one of the persons in our conversation. He described a book written which instead of viewing Job as a work primarily showing us the fallacy of Job’s accusers, set forth to show how Job entered a difficult season in which through his perseverance, his clinging to righteousness, his hunger after God, he actually grew to be a more complete man with a more perfected faith in the end of the book than in the beginning. The reality is that the Book of Job can be read both ways. The reality is that sometimes we are tempted to accuse and we need to ask ourselves if we really want to join Job’s friends in pointing with our accusing fingers to a man grieving and suffering? The reality also is that we are sometimes in suffering and the way of glibness and easy clichés is not the way to develop spiritual wholeness or to most obtain the wisdom of God from the experience. It would seem that a proper appraisal of one’s own station in life including holding on to our basic if not perfect righteousness is part of our dealing with suffering. These are not easy situations and they do not call for easy solutions either from the sufferer or from the onlooker.

The Book of Job actually opens the door for the experience of a relationship with God that speaks more boldly to us than clichés, perfect theological statements, and sound doctrinal conclusions based on our understandings of verbal inspiration. I am not denying that these experiences are to be viewed through the prism of Scriptural wisdom, but relationships are always more than codified agreements with declared principles of conduct. This is why the New Testament is insistent that law could not produce righteousness. Rather there was a need for a human being to enter the world and through his humanity to fulfill the righteousness of God. There might be a possibility that one could keep all the commandments of the law. But the Hebraic concept of perfection or blamelessness upon reaching one stage of perfection would ask, “isn’t there a next stage, surely we have not exhausted what it means to be image bearers of the living God?” Perhaps this provides us a way to understand the Book of Job, as a blameless man asking questions his friends did not understand as he reached forward to hearing from God, to knowing the presence of God in this experience of suffering.

We can almost see that the Book of Job is a book that is waiting for an answer. Even when the book of Job is over, it seems like nothing is really answered. Then we read of another suffering servant who takes up where the Book of Job ends. He is the umpire that Job asked for, the one who could stand between God and man. We express in our faith that he was tempted in all ways as we but that he was without sin. We imagine that meant he was perfect and nothing could be added to his life or understanding that he had arrived. Yet the writer to the Hebrews tells us that he learned obedience through his suffering. He learned. He grew. He experienced. He moved forward from infancy to the point of ascending to heaven and inheriting the authority of His Father vested in him as an equal, something he had given up for a time to be our redemption.

I cannot begin to explain these things. But there is no end to the perfection we were meant to learn in relationship with God. We were created in the image of God. The more I understand about our creation and our redemption, the more I am moved by an explanation of what it meant for God to create us in his image. God created us, male and female, to be image bearers of the living God. But moreover God created us as image bearers so that the day would come when God himself would fill our image bearing forms with his eternal presence. What does this mean for our desires to grow, to mature, to be blameless, and to be perfected? Our goal is not the keeping of a law which could show sin but not bring about perfection; but the filling of our beings as image bearers with the very presence of the God who became flesh and dwelt among men.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                       

Saturday at last

Saturday at last

(Written by Dan McDonald)

 

            Saturday is an idea as much as it is the seventh day in a calendar’s week. For many of us, Monday through Friday is owned by our jobs, Sunday by our church, and so Saturday becomes the day for chores, family outings, enjoying nature, any number of pursuits. I haven’t had a Saturday like that for a while. I have been working Monday through Saturday, 12 hours a day. But today is Saturday, really Saturday in spirit as well as name. A day I get to relax, do some chores, probably take my camera for a walk, and write, and perhaps go to the art museum that is free on the second Saturday. Maybe this evening I will go to the little restaurant serving food in the style of the small Caribbean Island known as Domenica. I hope everyone finds their own special way to savor and enjoy the specialness of a Saturday.

            I am grateful that my six weeks of long hours of work have drawn to a close. But I am also grateful that this season of long hours has not been as grating upon my soul as these seasons have been in the past. I have to give thanks to God for preparing my soul to wander through the wilderness of these long hours that are not particularly suited to me. I am a dreamer who feels an extra need to reflect and contemplate, or I feel myself becoming a lunatic feeling invaded by a hostile world seeking to possess me until I howl in the night. I need down time to retain a semblance of sanity. I need down time the way some need to be busy.

            Several books have helped prepare me for this wandering in the wilderness of long work hours. These are the books I have been reading this year. Each of these books has helped sustain me in my wilderness.

 

 

            Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster was written to help Christians learn the ways Christians have always sought to meet with God in the many means to that end at our disposal. It is a classic now, although written in the 1970’s. I had been told long ago that this would be a good book for me to read. I imagined it was a book that it was not. I’ve always felt the weakness of my meandering ways, the dreamer in need of discipline. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be disciplined, but that each attempt failed and left me more miserable than before. But this was not a book about getting your life in perfect order, but instead was a work about developing the habits that enable you to commune with God and discover the grace of his communion. This was the sort of book that helps a dreamer to integrate his meandering lifestyle with a discipline that really matters.

            Heavenly Participation by Hans Boersma is written to an Evangelical world discovering mystery as part of the Christian inheritance. He is trying to encourage those pursuing mystery to realize that in the history of the Christian tradition the roots of understanding the world as a sacramental tapestry, a tapestry where God is discovered in connection with and not severed from his creation. There is real knowledge of God but it is a knowledge wherein we know in part and our joy is that we are known fully. The world in which we live was created in and through the Word, and the Word became flesh. God is present as much in a 72 hour work week as in a reading from the Scriptures, but to be understood in a way that neither diminishes the Scriptures or our labors. The book was written by an Evangelical theologian who has appreciated insights from Catholic theologians who have sought to call the church back to the insights of the Church Fathers. One of the insights I have most appreciated is a view of our Christian lives within the Living Tradition around the table of our Lord. The banquet served at the Lord’s Table is participated in by men and women and children from all times and places. There is significance in each participant’s experience of the life of Christ whether one comes from a medieval European setting, a modern New Yorker’s experience, or that of a convert in a third world country. The Living Tradition is not merely a creed preserved through history as important as that is, but it is also what each of us brings from our experience of life to the table as we participate in the grace and mercies of God. A 72 hour work week does not separate me from the Lord’s Table. It simply becomes something I bring to the table as I partake of the Lord and his mercies. Our places in life are a part of our participation in the life of Christ. That should be a comfort to know as we face the struggles, sorrows, labors, temptations, and difficulties of life not only in our individual lives, but alongside the lives of others sitting at our Lord’s Table.

            I read Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. It was a wonderful story of a woman who wanted to see a world where life, labor, worship, and community were not opposed to one another, as they often seem to be. I found her reflections helpful for our own times. She was wary of seeing the needs of humanity taken over by the state and its bureaucracies. She felt the state too much tended to the needs of the empowered to sustain a life where wage slaves were kept from creating freedom and communities by making a system of exploitation livable instead of reshaping community life away from the system of exploitation. She understood that at times there was usefulness helping the poor alongside Communists and anarchists, but that always the Church in Christ’s name should offer a distinct enabling and nurturing of our humanity. There is a lesson for us in this political season. We may favor one political agenda or another as the best means to enable a free and just society, but ultimately our Gospel is a Gospel that reaches out to humanity in the fullness of our needs so as to confer upon us both the forgiveness of our sins and the ability to hear the command to get up and walk. This comes through incarnational life. God, in Christ, entered our worlds to bring us forgiveness and to teach us to walk, and the Church and we as Christian people are never any more fruitful than when we set aside our privileges and enter the world that too often we are content to describe as “those people.” The story of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day is that they chose freely to live as the poor among the poor to bring hope and encouragement and fullness to the poor.

            It has been a strange and fruitful season for me. Three seasons of life have coincided in an enriching manner. As a Christian who tries to live at least a bit according to the Christian calendar it has been the season of Lent where we recognize Christ in the Wilderness, and we seek to be shaped by his Wilderness experiences as we participate in little ways in his experience. I realized that my six weeks of long hours were for me, a sort of time in a wilderness. It was also in addition to the Lenten season a political campaign season. It should transform how we as Christians view the political realm when we have gone out to meet Christ in the Wilderness. We hear messages, sermons, and homilies on how Satan tempted Christ in the Wilderness by taking him up to a high mountain and revealing to him the glory of the kingdoms of the earth. He offered him all these kingdoms for the small price of losing his soul. Then we see the spectacle of political campaigns, and sometimes you can see men and women wanting to use government to help others. But often you can see and feel the hunger for fame, power, glory, control. Do we believe that a desire to have America would have been something Jesus would have said – O yes give me that and I will honor your name and say whatever I have to say to have control of America? Yet don’t we feel how that is happening as we become obsessed with who controls the reigns of power on the Potomac? Life in the wilderness leads me to reflect upon the lust for power which is a spiritual disorder injected into our veins by the strike of the serpent whose nature has always been to maim and kill. When I vote for a candidate it will not be so much because of his ideology as it will be because I feel there is a decency about this man or woman’s humanity.

            I have been keeping up this Lent with a Lenten book of meditations called Giving it Up written by Maggi Dawn. I enjoy her way of writing to incorporate the wholeness of the Christianity that surrounds her. She has lived the Christian life among conservative and progressive Christians and her writing reveals someone who refuses to set aside what she has learned in Christ from both. Her reflections on the Scriptural passages illuminating the season of Lent have always been brief, thoughtful, made to order for the lives of modern men and women, and yet full of Christ and reflective of the tradition of our ancient faith.

            Finally, I have enjoyed reading through Christie Purifoy’s Roots and Sky. It is a memoir of her family’s first year of living at their home in Pennsylvania called Maplehurst. The book is a sort of memoir of a unique but ordinary Christian living in the world. She explores discovering God in a garden, or building a picket fence, or having an Easter egg hunt, or taking chainsaws to a fallen tree after a storm. Christie Purifoy is one of the people whom I think of as an internet friend. We have never met. We have only exchanged a few brief words on occasion but her blog site is a special place where a tired person can read a simple expression regarding life focused on a subject that seems perhaps common place. But the common place is not a trivial place, rather it is where one meets God who meets us unexpectedly in the common places. I like to describe Christie’s website as a haven where she offers a place of rest. You will do well I think to make the journey over to Christie’s website home at http://www.christiepurifoy.com/

            Six weeks of 72 hour work weeks has given me too many pages to write. I don’t do brief well. Still I hope if you have had time and patience to read these words that there may have been a blessing for you in these pages. It is time for me to get to things other than writing. The trees in front of my house were beautiful this week with white petals, but the white petals are dropping off while green leaves are appearing. So there is stuff to see and do here.

 

And

 

            God bless and thank you for stopping by.