[+] 'Tis the Season to Be Fair and Equitable to All (excerpt)

by The Rev. Dale Turner

Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence and to suspend our judgment when we have not.

Unfortunately, it is easy for each one of us to fall into the trap of making sweeping judgments on important issues when we have not fully researched the facts. Winston Churchill once said, "There are those who occasionally stumble over the whole truth, but they get up, brush themselves off, and go on as though nothing had happened." We can all be entrapped into an acceptance of conclusions that are not fully documented.

A case in point: During this Christmas season, the "innkeeper" will again be maligned by thousands who will call him cold, heartless, callous and uncaring. The innkeeper who had no room for Mary and Joseph on a cold Christmas Eve is one of the villains of the Christmas story.

But how do we know that?

There is nothing to document such a conclusion. He could well have been a loving husband and a kindly father and a fair and honorable hotel manager trying to do his work in the best way he knew how. All the evidence we have is that he simply said that his inn was full.

If there was no room, what would we have expected him to do? Should he have evicted one of the tenants who already had a reservation?

Isn't it true that at least he or someone else found shelter for Joseph and Mary, crude as a stable might have seemed? The innkeeper could well have been the provider of shelter, and perhaps for free. Who knows?

"You dear people," he might have said, "you are terribly tired. You've traveled a long way. It is obvious that your child is soon to be born, and you need rest. Although no room is available in the inn, I will not turn you away into the darkness. I will provide shelter for you that is warm and reasonably comfortable, but I will not charge you for it. Come with me."

If we are inclined to blame someone, why is it the innkeeper? How about Joseph? Why did he not send word by one who was able to travel at greater speed who could make a reservation for him?

Why did he not start earlier, knowing that his trip would require more time?

There are many unanswered questions relating to the incident. How easy it is to believe the worst about another when that person is maligned or criticized before learning all that needs to be known.

We now stand 2000 years removed from the scene, trying to make a judgment when we do not know all that was involved. Maybe after all of these centuries it is time to repent of superficial judgments and join in shouting, "Let's hear it for the innkeeper."

One of the most memorable and to the point "sermons" I can recall was given by a Major League Baseball umpire at a sports banquet I attended. He said he was always amazed how spectators 300 feet up in the stands felt they could call balls and strikes more accurately than he who was immediately behind home plate.

It has been my observation that those most generous and merciful in judging the faults of others are those who are most free from faults themselves. They know, too, that judgment made at one time may not be valid at another.

George Bernard Shaw said, "My tailor is the only sensible person I know. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on expecting all the old measurements to fit me."

Not only love but justice entails the persistent habit of looking for the good and true, as well as what may be evil or false. A verse from the pen of an unknown author is worth remembering:

"Trust not each accusing tongue
As most weak persons do,
But first believe that story wrong
That ought not be true."

[ Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company - Thanks to Sky Jubilee for forwarding this article.]

Acts of evil test every generation

by Nicole Brodeur

Pressed, she couldn't remember where her 2-year-old was that day. Somewhere in the house, she said. Around.

I don't mind that my mom couldn't tell me exactly where I was on Nov. 22, 1963 -- the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

That I was home, with her, would have to be enough. And I would have to understand that the world she had built was blown apart that day.

She was a Syracuse graduate, a young mother of three who saw something in JFK that made her believe she was a part of something big and hopeful and new; something her mother's generation could only watch from a comfortable chair.

When the shots were fired in Dallas, though, all that remained were small, sad details: The radio station she had on (WOR-AM in nearby New York). The first person she called (her mother). The clothes she was packing for a trip to Massachusetts. The tears.

All that seemed as fresh to her as the morning's coffee when I called yesterday.

"I knew right then that there was evil in the world," my mom said. "This was such an attack on my optimism."

That explains why my parents keep a small bust of JFK in the living room. As a kid, I had to dust it every week, then run a cloth across a stack of books on his life and death; "Four Days" is among them.

Years of tending my parents' ideals helped me know my own when I heard them given voice by a man from Hope, Ark.

I was a young mother-to-be in 1992 when I walked to the polls to vote for Bill Clinton. What my parents' generation lost, I would try to find anew.

It lasted through his scandals and into a new administration, then crumbled two years ago, when the phone rattled me awake. "Turn on the TV," a friend said.

As I watched the people and smoke pour out of the World Trade Center, my hope poured out with them.

And, like my mother, there was nothing left but small details. NBC on TV, my sister on the phone. Tears.

Almost every generation faces an event that kills its purpose or tests it optimism. War rarely skips a beat.

But every generation also deserves someone who defines its role in the world and its place in history.

My mother had JFK, who stands out not only for how he died but for the potential he saw.

Many will mark this week wondering where JFK could have taken us, had his Dallas motorcade been just that.

"We would be living in a different world," my mom said. "And hopefully, a better one."

I marked my mother's memory by looking up Kennedy's inaugural speech. He spoke of war and peace, of the boom of technology and the decay of morality.

He could have given it today.

He called for the country to "begin anew," to "explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us."

"All this will not be finished in the first 100 days ... nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

Maybe that's the way every new generation must mark the end of an important life from the previous one: Begin again.


Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company

[Nicole Brodeur is a staff writer and columnist for the Seattle Times. Her column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Email her at nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. More columns www.seattletimes.com/columnists. Thanks to Sky Jubilee for forwarding this article.]

Everybody Loves Reagan

by David Greenberg

This is an interesting review of the cancelled Reagan miniseries on CBS. In it, Mr. Greenberg notes that "the program is in fact mild as criticism, silly as politics, and toothless as a weapon in the culture wars (if it were even conceived as such)" and concludes that "the general inanity of the whole miniseries is enough to keep it from being deployed either for or against Reagan's record. The only ones who should take offense are defenders of quality network television."

You may read the article at:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091175

Perhaps more interesting than Greenberg's article, however, is the actual script of the program, which is available at:
http://images.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/07/reagans_script/reagans.pdf.

NOTE: If you do not have the Acrobat Reader program needed to view pdf files, go to: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html where you can download it at no charge.

How Magnificent and Vastly Infinite the Universe Is

For you science people. This is very cool.

Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida has put up a very interesting Java applet on their site. It begins as a view of the Milky Way Galaxy viewed from a distance of 10 million light years and then zooms in towards Earth in powers of ten of distance -- 10 million, to one million, to 100,000 light years and so on until it finally reaches a large Oak tree leaf. But that is not all -- it zooms into the leaf until it reaches to the level of the quarks viewed at 100 attometers.

Click on the link below to view this.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html.

This is a fantastic representation of how magnificent the Universe is and how vastly infinite it is both in the macroscopic and the microscopic!

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Powers Of 10: Interactive Java Tutorial
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html

[Thanks to Rev. Dale Lloyd for forwarding this to Ecumenical News.]

[+] Reclaiming an Authentic Jewish Voice

by Penny Rosenwasser

Raised as an assimilated Jew in the predominantly Christian middle-class Northern Virginia suburbs in the ’50s, I breathed a silent but toxic form of anti-Semitism. I learned well how to blend in as a white person, struggling to belong.

My grandfathers immigrated from Poland and Hungary, and my parents grew up with strong Jewish identities. My mother had to fight to get a teaching job in South Carolina because she was Jewish. She was finally hired on the condition that she also sponsor the school’s Baptist youth group. My parents wanted us to blend in as Americans, in ways they themselves never had. They considered raising us Unitarian, until the Unitarian minister convinced them to let us keep our precious Jewish heritage. In addition to Jewish holidays, we celebrated Christmas and Easter, because they were “American holidays.”

Although I attended Jewish Reform Sunday School for 12 years, I felt uncomfortable around Jews who were “too Jewish” — too loud, too whiny, too pushy, too much — and drew attention to themselves (and, I feared, to me) in the paler, quieter, neater, calmer, whiter Christian world I inhabited. There were only two other Jews in my high school class of 450; I ironed my Jewish hair every morning in a futile attempt to looked like all the other straight-haired girls. When told I didn’t “look Jewish,” I replied “Thank you” — because that is how I thought I was supposed to feel.

Unlike the experience of many less-assimilated Jews, I did not grow up experiencing overt discrimination, hatred, or violence. The toxic attitudes I ingested were more subtle and less visible, but equally potent — that I as a Jewish girl was “bad” and unwanted, and that I needed to do all I could to please non-Jews in order to ameliorate this. My first encounter with anti-Semitism was at a small mid-western liberal arts college in the late ’60s. While pledging a sorority, my sophisticated and glamorous upper-class WASP roommate told me that another sorority had discussed whether or not to admit me because I was a Jew. I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that my Jewishness was an issue — though it was silently affecting everything I did.

Immersing myself in social justice activism after college, I avoided “Jewish issues.” Without realizing it, I accepted the belief of many activists that addressing anti-Semitism isn’t an important part of the progressive agenda — thus again internalizing the anti-Semitism around me. It was only when I read Nice Jewish Girls, Evelyn Torton Beck’s lesbian feminist anthology, at age 30 that I finally found stories I could relate to, awakening feelings of emotional connection to and pride in “my people” and initiating a journey that led me to positively embrace my Jewishness.

Jewish poet Muriel Rukeyser speaks of the gift of being a Jew in the 20th century — the pain, the responsibility, the possibility. Nothing has taught me more about the complexity of being a Jew, or a human being, than my work for peace with justice for Palestine and Israel. On my first trip there in December 1989, I fell in love with the ancient terraced land and the golden afternoon light as I prayed for peace at the Western Wall, toured the Masada fortress ruins in the Judean desert, and bobbed in the Dead Sea.

But it was heartbreaking, infuriating, and excruciating to experience up close the brutality of occupation by a Jewish government — checkpoints and curfews, demolished Palestinian homes, massive land confiscations, children shot for throwing stones or for doing nothing at all.

I struggled to reconcile my new-found positive Jewish identity with Israeli oppression of Palestinians. I have learned that the fear that fuels Israeli brutality toward Palestinians is a direct response to our history of persecution as a people.

But I don’t believe, morally or practically, that Jewish security comes from taking away Palestinian freedom. Rather, I think as Jews we have to examine and heal the source of our fear, so that we can think clearly and act justly, as called for by our prophetic tradition.

Assimilation was how my parents learned to respond to anti-Semitism, at the cost of cutting me off from my Jewish self. By reclaiming that precious heritage — so rich for me culturally, politically, spiritually — I am also regaining my full humanity. My loud and proud Jewish voice shouts for my people as strongly as for any group who is oppressed, who needs allies and a home.

From the Jewish Voice for Peace newsletter, which may be found at www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org.

Penny Rosenwasser is a well-known Jewish peace activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have had the privilege of hearing her more than once and support her work with the Middle East Children's Alliance. One of the most persuasive points Penny makes is that opposition to the policies of the Israeli state is not anti-Jewish. In our polarized world, that is often the assumption, just as some would claim that opposition to United States foreign policy is somehow Anti-American. Millions of loyal Americans (and millions of Jews, I am told) do not believe either onerous proposition. Quite the contrary, one's concern and advocacy for more enlightened policies are the hallmark, in my opinion, of intelligent devotion and love of country.

[+] Words of Wisdom

by Sigmund Freud and Thich Nhat Hanh

"As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude."

-- Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)

Does one or more of [the current presidential candidates] warm your peaceful heart? ... + Sky Jubilee (a correspondent of EcumenicalNews)


From Thich Nhat Hanh:
"The antidote to violence and hatred is compassion. There is no other medicine. Unfortunately, compassion is not available in drugstores. You have to generate the nectar of compassion in your heart.

If we are too busy, if we are carried away every day by our projects, our uncertainty, our craving, how can we have the time to stop and look deeply into the situation ... ? Looking deeply, we find out that not only do we suffer but also the other person suffers deeply. Not only our group suffers but the other group also suffers. Once awareness is born, we know that punishment, violence and war are not the answer."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, "Listening Deeply for Peace" in Shambala Sun magazine, November, 2003. The article is an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hahn's new book, Creating True Peace (2003).

[Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen teacher, poet and leader of the engaged Buddhist movement. A well-known antiwar activist in his native Vietnam, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. Thanks to Sky Jubilee, Seattle, WA, for forwarding this.]

N Y Times: Believe It, or Not

by Nicholas D. Kristof

[August 15] marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

So this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. (For details on the polls cited in this column, go to www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds.)

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number
of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

Some liberals wear T-shirts declaring, "So Many Right-Wing Christians . . . So Few Lions." On the other side, there are attitudes like those on a Web site, dutyisours.com/gwbush.htm, explaining the 2000 election this way:

"God defeated armies of Philistines and others with confusion. Dimpled and hanging chads may also be because of God's intervention on those who were voting incorrectly. Why is GW Bush our president? It was God's choice."

The Virgin Mary is an interesting prism through which to examine America's emphasis on faith because most Biblical scholars regard the evidence for the Virgin Birth, and for Mary's assumption into Heaven (which was proclaimed as Catholic dogma only in 1950), as so shaky that it pretty much has to be a leap of faith. As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng puts it in "On Being a Christian," the Virgin Birth is a "collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary" narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world.

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian and theologian, says in his book "Mary Through the Centuries" that the earliest references to Mary (like Mark's gospel, the first to be written, or Paul's letter to the Galatians) don't mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do say Mary was a virgin, but internal evidence suggests that that part of Luke, in particular, may have been added later by someone else (it is written, for example, in a different kind of Greek than the rest of that gospel).

Yet despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91 percent of Christians say they believe in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians.

I'm not denigrating anyone's beliefs. And I don't pretend to know why America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of the world. But I do think that we're in the middle of another religious Great Awakening, and that while this may bring spiritual comfort to many, it will also mean a growing polarization within our society.

But mostly, I'm troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly because of the time I've spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain.

www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/opinion/

[+] Respecting the dignity of every human being

By Vincent W. Warner


The Rev. Gene Robinson

This weekend when the Rev. Gene Robinson becomes the first openly gay person to become a bishop in the history of Christianity, the effects will be felt worldwide. I hope the ultimate meaning of the event is that the world realizes that in the Episcopal Church, absolutely no one is barred from full participation.

Why is the world paying attention to the consecration of a priest in New Hampshire as a bishop of the Episcopal Church?

It is my hope you will pay attention to the event not because Robinson is an openly gay priest, but because his consecration is a signal that the Episcopal Church acts on the promise made in baptism "to respect the dignity of every human being." It is in our relationships that we learn the true meaning of this phrase.

I have known Gene for 20 years as a friend and a priest and a human being. The Diocese of New Hampshire elected him for the person he is, not just as a symbol for the church.

The election of Robinson by the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, which was confirmed by the Episcopal Church's General Convention this summer, has brought into the forefront both the way the church functions and the vast differences of opinions within the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church around the world. Ultimately, it rests on our understanding of the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The Episcopal Church is an inclusive church where all are welcome. Scripture, tradition and reason are held together as the foundation for the way we understand God working in the world. The struggle comes when the views of understanding Scripture collide.

One view is that several statements in Scripture simply make it impossible for the church to embrace a gay person in ordained leadership. Not now, not ever.

The other view sees Scripture as a living guide for our lives, which, along with tradition and our God-given human reason, serves to help the church and its members faithfully live into God's new future.

As a church leader, I have always followed this second way of understanding God's will for the church, and I believe in our own time God's will is that the church put no obstacles before faithful gays and lesbians as they seek to serve in the church.

Our church has engaged in 30 years of study and dialogue about this issue. We can talk and debate but at some point we have to take a stand. That is what the Episcopal Church did at its convention. We approved Robinson to be a bishop and we recognized that in our church some pastors are offering same-sex blessings to lifelong homosexual relationships.

With the consecration of Robinson, the challenge to the church is to move beyond this event and to take up the work we are called to do in the world. It is our work to help the homeless, bring care and compassion to those who are marginalized or oppressed, to work for justice and peace and to truly see the world at our doorstep as the neighbor we are called to love.

In my role as bishop of the Episcopal Church in Western Washington, I am clear that we are about ministry and mission. Our primary energy in the days ahead will be poured into bringing the reconciling Gospel of love to the world. We want to say to the wider community that in the Episcopal Church, absolutely everyone is welcomed and affirmed.

There are no outcasts. There are no second-class citizens. That is Gospel truth.

The Right Rev. Vincent W. Warner has been bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, covering all of Western Washington, since 1989.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company