Alive

Palm

Plumeria

Floss Silk Tree

Bombacaceae

Man

PARKING LOT THEOLOGY

Meaning is where you find it... or take it where you can get it... or “This makes about as much sense and anything else.” 

On my way to meet friends at Starbucks just before seven o’clock, I hurried my bike past a couple of stragglers going into St. Vincent’s Church for early morning mass.  A few minutes later I followed a pick-up (Hey!  Hey! Don’t go there...  I’m talking here about a Dodge truck) with BAD RELIGION stenciled on the back window. Dave and Clyde told me “Bad Religion” is the name of a punk rock band. It got me looking around and thinking about how and where religion happens.  Why not a Parking Lot!

All the elements are there. It’s October, and a grocery store has built an altar of pumpkins and flowers with an effigy which I guess is supposed to represent the great American deity around which the goblin and ghoul Halloween saints can be adored by old and young children who want more than anything to be frightened by the supernatural, the unreal, the otherworldly.  I imagined a worship service with genuine supplicants and pretenders.  In my fantasy there they were... gathered with Charlie Brown in front of the display waiting for the altar call.  Surely the Great Pumpkin will appear this year.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like Halloween.  I’ve always liked Halloween.  When I was a kid in Glenwood, Arkansas, the Halloween Carnival was one of the biggest events of the year.  A ten-year-old boy with mischief on his mind most of the time couldn’t find anything at the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church or the Presbyterian Church to compare with a Halloween Carnival.  I remember mostly that the jack-o-lanterns carved from huge pumpkins delighted everybody but scared nobody.  A plastic jack-o-lantern would have been as out of place at the carnival as a cheap plastic Jesus-on-the-half-shell would have been at the Baptist Church.  Only the real, the natural stuff, would satisfy.  And costumes:  You made your own.  None of the store-bought wigs and capes and fake fangs.  People in those days knew how to do religion.  

Now, I think I’m on to something here.  That’s obviously what “Gimme that Ole Time Religion” is all about.  Apparently we’ve got to believe people at some other time in the past, hopefully the near past that was clearly build on a memory of an even longer-ago past which could be revised and improved without changing anything, knew how to do religion; and all people who want to get it right and be true believers have got to do is try, try to understand and believe and at the right moment finally say so...  So why not find the old time religion in a parking lot...

After Dave went to work, Clyde and I got into a deep conversation about the difference between spirituality and religion... at the Starbucks at the edge of the parking lot. I think we agreed that sometimes the dividing line between spirituality and religion is thin and also that the gulf between religion and spirituality is sometimes very wide.  As Clyde talked with me about his hummingbird paintings, he put his hands together in a way that I liked; so as I often do when I see something that I like, I snapped the picture of his hands with my phone.  Now there’s something you couldn’t do a long time ago... take a picture with a phone.  Some of us are old enough to remember a time when the place where you’d find a phone was hanging on a wall... maybe in your grandmother’s house where you only answered it when it signaled that someone was calling someone at her house with two shorts and one long ring. If it was only two shorts, you didn’t answer because it was for somebody down the road... and you didn’t listen in on phone conversations between two other people even though you could because it was somehow not right.  (I was just about to launch into a tangent about Facebook and listening in on other people’s thoughts, but I’m going to save that for another day.) Same thing with religion.  You didn’t do some things even when you could because it wouldn’t have been right.  Of course, you did some things you shouldn’t do... just because you could, hoping to get away with it... which is a lot the way religion works today.  Not so much if the intent is to be spiritual. I can’t even imagine what she or my grandfather would have said if someone had suggested that one day a person would we able to walk away from home with a phone in the pocket from which you could talk with Moscow, Idaho, or Russia, if you wanted to, or you could take a picture of a friend’s hands in a coffee shop. Wow.  That’s deep... and if you look closely to the picture, you’ll see that my Phone picked up the word HOLY in the background. That wasn’t even intended, so it much be a religious thing.

So I rode my bike around the parking lot looking for other things with theological meaning.  It’s amazing how easy it is to gather stuff that might come in handy if you should want to make a religion.  Whoooah.  That’s not what I want to do.  We’ve got enough religion already.  Theology is something I’m still working on... even in parking lots.  I’m going to concentrate on finding things out in the world that encourage me to be more positively helpful and spiritual.

My Feet... My Bike...

Some would say,

"My religion."

As I was getting out of my car in a big parking lot today, this Dodge pickup pulled into the space in front of my car .  The fellow driving the pickup smiled and winked when he saw that I was staring at the two human hands that had been left like smashed body parts on the grill of his truck.  He said, "Don't worry.  I saw that it was a politician but it was too late to stop."

Whenever I go to my neighbor Ben’s house, his live-in partner wastes no time in greeting me.  Miss Ashley isn’t constrained by inhibitions. I’m quite sure she isn’t religious, but there is definitely a spiritual quality about her.  She seems by every move to say, “What you see is what you get... no more and no less.”

I’ve been wondering lately what to do about something that is bugging the hell out of me.  That religion is the cause of much of the suffering in the world is an unavoidable fact, not just an opinion. Since 1969 when my family and I lived in Southeast Asia for four years, I’ve been a regular traveler to places all around the world.  Margaret and I are home again in safe, comfortable San Diego after a short trip to Eastern Europe.  One day on that journey, I sat at lunch with a family in their home in a small Croatian village that was bombed and shelled and burned almost out of existence eighteen years ago.  These friends have rebuilt and started over again after their home and many others were destroyed by repeated bombings and a marauding army.  They are hopeful that they won’t go through another period of loss, but their homeland has seen war after war after war.  The majority (88 percent) of Croatians belong to the Roman Catholic Church.  Their most recent war was with Serbia where the dominant religion is the Serbian Orthodox Church, another Christian religious group, not the Christian against Jew conflict of an earlier time.  In 1941 the Jewish population in Serbia was around 12,000; today only 1,200 Serbs describe themselves as ethnically Jewish.  The Jewish population of Croatia before World War II was 25,000.  Now there are around 3,000 Jews in the country, and most of them live in Zagreb.  Of the 82,500 Jews of Yugoslavia alive in 19041, only 14,000 survived the Holocaust.  More than 68,000 Jews were murdered.  Next door in Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims make up 45 percent of the population; Serbian Orthodox 36 percent; Roman Catholic 15 percent; and other groups 4 percent.  During the Communist period from World War II until 1992, the government disapproved of religion altogether, but religious practice was not strictly forbidden. Even then the various religious groups found reasons to dislike and distrust each other.

In case you are wondering, Hungarians are predominantly Roman Catholic; Romanians and Bulgarians are predominantly Eastern Orthodox.  Fourteen percent of Bulgarians are Muslim.  Three religions - Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism - have coexisted in Kosovo. The large majority of Kosovo Albanians consider themselves to be Muslim.  Of Kosovo Christians, ethnic Serbs consider themselves Orthodox at least nominally, and 60,00 Kosovo citizens are Roman Catholic.

For the purposes of this writing, specific details about religious demography in other countries aren’t necessary to make the point that religion is a problem all over the world.  The shooting in Pakistan of fourteen-year-old Malala Yousufzai by the Taliban got our attention this week. The Taliban is an extremely conservative Muslim minority, and Malala is a devout Muslim who simply wants education to be available for females as well as for males in the beautiful Swat Valley, Pakistan, where she lives.  Next week an equally horrific atrocity may happen in some other part of the world.  The perpetrators may not be Muslim extremists; but they almost certainly will be extremists claiming to represent the true expression of a religion group. 

At what point in my life is it appropriate, or perhaps a moral imperative, to say “enough already... enough with religion...”?  Is it time to try for responsible morality without religion? 

A Day Late... Journal for Saturday, October 13

The big event for Saturday evening was a fund-raising dinner for the San Diego Parkinson's Foundation... an altogether wonderful event built around the commitment of good people to support research seeking a cure for Parkinson's Disease.

We walked into the banquet hall of the Weston Hotel at Horton Plaza to fine half a dozen classic life-size marble statues from an ancient Graeco-Roman world.  At first nobody noticed that they were real people.  One of them seemed to be about to reach for John Lin's glass of wine.

ab·strac·tion  noun

1. an abstract or general idea or term.

2. the act of considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.

3. an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.

A ROMNEY-RYAN ADMINISTRATION

THE WAY I SEE IT...

WOW!  Here’s the situation:

The Republican representative Paul Broun of Georgia is a medical doctor. He serves on the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He believes he is a scientist because of his training to be a doctor and because he has an undergraduate degree in chemistry... and because he believes he is a scientist he says he is qualified to serve on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which has among other critical responsibilities the task of reviewing what the nation’s schools teach about science.  In a taped video made at a Baptist Church Representative Broun declares that he is informed by his scientific expertise that evolution, the Big Bang theory, and embryology are all “lies straight from the pit of hell,” designed to keep people away from the Christian savior. Broun says that “as a scientist” he has found data that shows the earth is no older than 9,000 years and was created in six days. 

That’s the scary situation.  My question: Are there really very many citizens out there who want these people to be in charge of our country?

SOME THINGS JUST DON’T MAKE SENSE... Like the Death Penalty, for example.  It’s odd that  often the same people who support the death penalty as punishment insist on an absolute ban on all abortions, even abortion of a fetus that results from rape or other sexual abuse.  Logic plays no part in a death penalty supporters argument for killing the killer.  To argue that it is morally right to become a killer to kill a sentient, living person is equally absurd.  PLEASE VOTE TO END THE DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA.

September 9, 2012

WHAT IF THE TEA PARTY RULES THE AMERICAN POLITICAL WORLD...

Epiphany!!! Early this morning as I walked along a Bucharest street, I had a vision.  What I experienced was not a religious experience but rather sudden insight concerning what could happen to my own country. I had walked out of the relatively opulent Bucharest Intercontinental Hotel into the working world of a typical large Eastern European city struggling with the realities of a global economy gone ballistic.  One very large region of Bucharest is a tightly packed congestion of old Communist era, Soviet style decaying apartment buildings which haven’t had any renovation or renewal for at least two decades and won’t get help in the foreseeable future.  The Intercontinental Hotel is part of a cluster of city center buildings that separate two cultures.  One obvious contrast between them is an opulent order on one side and barely contained disorder on the other.  The Office of Tourism says nothing about the poor part of the city characterized by poverty and decay, but  It describes the other side as the Paris of Eastern Europe... complete with a facsimile of the Arc of Triumph.  

In Romania today pensioners who worked during the old Communist days are struggling to get by on about $100 U.S. a month.  Working folks, laborers and professionals, are paid from $300 to $700 a month.  Life is hard. The more affluent, usually those who could game the system when the revolution came, live in comfort on the affluent side of the cultural divide.

So...  What if the Tea Party revolution is successful in overthrowing and dismantling the government of the United States?  My guess is that something like the conditions in Romania will be the result.  Already in America the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is wider than it has been since World War II.  If the right wing in the American political landscape prevails, the gulf will become wider.  The majority of voters who have bought into Rush Limbaugh’s and Grover Norquist’s vision are ignorant of economic and governmental forces. They are convinced that government is the problem. The typical far-right Tea Party voter clutches a dream of more personal benefit at less personal cost.  A dream of something for nothing motivates the right-wing voter.  Their distain for mothers who quality for food stamps and other forms of welfare assistance as “welfare queens” is a sad irony.  The typical ultra-conservative knows only the barest outlines of history if they know anything at all about it.  Few Republicans acknowledge, if they know, that it was during the presidency of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower that American income tax rates were higher for those who earned above-average incomes than at any time before or since.  Eisenhower knew that a leader must know and the cost of reaching goals in a campaign. When he was a general before he was president, he knew the importance of anticipating end results.  His goal of a strong America depended on developing a strong middle economic class that would be educated for responsible citizenship.  He and the people he appointed to administrative posts knew that a civilian army must be made made up of workers who would build highways and other infrastructure that could serve commerce and would meet the needs of all Americans.  Eisenhower recognized that the wealthy didn’t need help conserving their wealth.  He knew, as did the administration that followed him, help would be needed to build and strengthen the nation’s middle and lower economic base.  Eisenhower’s emphasis was not on preserving wealth of the richest Americans but on building a strong base.  It wasn’t until later that a Republican administration would promote a trickle-down economic plan that clearly favored the wealthiest Americans; and the line was swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by less informed Americans who assumed the richest people must also be the smartest and surely must know what was best for the country.  They believed in the brand of capitalism that is free from any governmental restrictions.  Although they decline to call it greed, they assumed that greed and unbridled ambition are powerful motivators to make everybody rich who works hard enough.  When a movie star president came along who insisted that a person who is rich already must surely know how to get rich and would lead all those who worked diligently to a personal fortune, the seeds of the Tea Party revolution were sown. We were encouraged to trust the wealthy to manage more and more of the nation’s resources.  The overflow would surely trickle down the rest of us. To meet their needs the rich would make work for those of us who recognized that we had bootstraps; and if we learned how to pull ourselves up by them, we would become rich too.  The idea was that we ordinary folks could build our own fortunes and eventually only the lazy would be left behind in poverty.  

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.  The majority of the wealthy want to stockpile and secure their assets rather than to rain down on the lower economic classes some of their excess.  A friend told me how the people in Malaysia catch a monkey. They take a coconut and make a hole in it and put in some rice.  A monkey comes along and puts its hand into the coconut to grasp the rice.  It remains caught because it is unwilling to turn loose of the handfull of rice, and with its fist clinched around the rice it is unable to get out of the hole.  

While some, of course, are not, many of the rich are trapped in their excess. The poor remain trapped in their poverty.  There is a way out for all of us.  It is appropriate, effective education that informs and sensitizes those people who have enough to the plight of people trapped in poverty... education that gives even the poorest Americans a chance to realize the traditional American dream of financial success and security.  We can do this. Si se puede.

From Romania... Thinking about America

I had an interesting conversation this morning with an American who self-identified as being very well-off who said he had done it without any help from the government.  He liked the “up by the bootstraps” phrase and used it several times to explain how superior he is morally to Bill Clinton (heavy emphasis on the cloakroom tryst), Lyndon Johnson (emphasis on Johnson’s getting rich from sucking at the government tit rather than “up from the bootstraps” efforts the way he, from Virginia coal mining country did).  He and his friend were in a particular rage about “the government conspiracy” to convince Americans and the world that there is such a thing as man-caused global warming.  They were talking about spotted owls and logging and gun control and what they generally consider the government’s insistence that they “give more” of what they have to the poor.  My friend Ted and I had a few things to say in favor of giving spotted owls a fair chance at survival, and the fellow from Virginia remarked that all of us “tree huggers” are all alike.  

After half-an-hour of discussion, Virginia fellow said he could always know which side of political issues school teachers are going to come down on because five of his brothers are school teachers and they are all “liberals.”  He said 95% of school teachers are liberal and the other five percent who say they aren’t are probably lying just to keep their jobs.  I asked if he knew that his friend’s career in an Oregon fire department and before that the Forest Service was a career working for “the Government.”  His friend was clearly not eager to comment.  The Virginia guy said school teachers have time to be liberal.  “People who work for a living” don’t have time for the foolishness that teachers have time for.”  I asked him where he got his education and if school teachers had anything to do with it.  He didn’t want to go there.  I asked him if he had ever though about the possibility that the reasons many school teachers are “liberal” is that they may have more education, may base their opinions on real, verifiable information than some people do... like the people who prefer to remain ignorant of facts and trust Fox News and obnoxious radio talking heads to tell them what to think.  He wanted to know what I don’t like about Rush Limbaugh.

We climbed by bus up from Ruse on the River through the Bulgarian farmland to Arbanasi and Veliko Tarnovo...  Amazing country.  The fact that the Communist system couldn't make this beautiful, productive country work for the people means the Communist system won't work anywhere.  More than two decades after the breakup of the Communist government and Bulgaria's separation from the old Soviet Union (which was breaking up at the same time), this country is still struggling to find its way to prosperity for its citizens.  We go on to the Black Sea tomorrow.  I've never been there, so I am eager.

Margaret wandering through a market street in Veliko Tarnovo.

In Arbanassi... in a house that once was the home of an Ottoman Turk family... I wandered into a room with a mirror and took a picture of myself.

I think I finally have a sense of the difference between Croatia and Serbia.  As I write this,  I am sitting on the deck of a river boat in the harbor at Belgrade; and the commercial energy of this place is many times that I felt anywhere in Croatia.  Serbian armies battered the hell out of Croatia to an extent that the infrastructure can’t be mended completely for a long time.  A bridge spanning the Danube is crowded with all sorts of vehicles, including trains that run every five minutes... both directions.  These people obviously have places to go and things to do.  In Vukovar, Croatia, almost half of the people can’t find employment, so half the people who are out and about meander rather than rush.  Partially renovated building sit waiting for owners to get enough material and money to continue work. Hundreds of homes that were partially destroyed in the war have been left to crumble.  Many lots where houses once stood are nothing but weed patches.  Here in Belgrade, everything seems finished... all crisp corners and fresh paint.  I think I remember that NATO bombed the city in the mid-90s.  They’ve obviously recovered.  Later today I’ll learn from Serbs themselves what they think happened during the “Homeland War.” 

I wrote the first paragraph before actually going about Belgrade, and when I rode around the city on a tour bus in the middle of the day, a beautiful young Serbian woman showed us bombing damage done by NATO, and it’s true that the damage to buildings was/is extensive; but the difference is that the targets were military buildings and not residences or nonmilitary targets.  Belgrade is beautiful and alive with people who seem to be meaningfully engaged in the life of the city.  I had a conversation with Slobodan Stetic who prefers not to talk about the possibility that Serbia was at fault.  He wants the blame for the war to be shared equally by Croatia and Serbia.  He says correctly, I think, that it is governments that go to war, not people; but he avoids acknowledging that governments are run by people.  He admits that Slobodan Milosevic is not a nice guy and that he had grandiose dreams about an enlarged Serbia that could happen only if other republics of the former Yugoslavia could be annexed.  He stops short of acknowledging that Milosevic was actually the monster that he was.  Mr. Setic and I didn't even discuss Kosovo and the genocide there for which Milosevic was responsible.

What do I think.  I believe Serbia and Croatia will not only survive but that they will reconcile.  I talked with young people of high school age, and they seem to want to get on with their neighbors and with their lives.  Who could possibly look at the faces of these young people and not believe things will get better.  Ironically, they wanted to know if I believe President Obama will be reelected for a second term.  They obviously know more about American politics than the average American high school student knows about any other country, even our closest neighbors in Canada and Mexico.

These are the faces of the Serbian future.

Today I learned about a war that I probably thought of as “distant” when it was happening between 1990 and 1995.  It is sometimes referred to in casual conversation in Croatia as “the Greater-Serbian aggression (Velikosrpska agresija), and is almost always called the Homeland War (Domovinski rat) when it is spoken of formally.  Almost twenty years after the fact of that war, the country where it happened is still scarred, both physically and psychologically.  In Vukovar, where we began a drive through the countryside to Osijek, about half of the homes were destroyed in the conflict. In Osijek the devastation was systematic and vicious.  I had lunch with the Kelemen family who live in the village of Laslovo a few miles from Osijek.  All the building in the town were damaged, some completely destroyed.  The Kelemens have rebuilt from nothing that was left of their former home.  After the death of 20,000 people in Croatia with many thousands more left wounded, what amazes me more than anything else is that the Kelemens are not consumed by hatred of the neighboring Serbs who caused their great suffering. They say they can’t forget, but they know they must not let their culture take the ugly shapes of anger and vengeance.   Times are hard.  The average monthly income of families in Croatia today is $400.  The Laslovo villagers grow as much of their food as possible.  They are resourceful.  They dance.  They work.  They go to school.  They love life.  

The Croatian Tambura Band in concert this evening lifted my spirits.  Even after terrible things happen, people try to be good.  Amazing...

We are out on the Danube (definitely not blue these days) headed down river from Mohacs, Hungary,  after spending most of the day at Pecs, which I had been mispronouncing until today.  The Hungarians say the name with a syllable that somewhere between Page and Petch.  Whatever you call the city, Pecs is a place determined to recover its beauty after the brutality of World War II and then decades of Communist gray drabness.  The people, as good people do time after time, are succeeding in overcoming hardship.  My favorite images are those I took away from the city center.  A cathedral built on Christians ruins dates back to the early days when the Romans brought Christianity to town.  The crypts under the church have been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

Pecs is a city that has seen cycles of brutality triggered by the hatred and intolerance of one religious group toward another.  The most recent outrage was the murder in World War II of virtually all Jews by Nazis, with some complicity by Christians.  Jews were taken concentrations camps where they were gassed.  Those who didn’t make it to the camps were shot on the streets of Pecs.  A beautiful old synagogue dating from 1868 stands at one end of a small square.  Services are held there once again, but the population of Jews is now very small even after more than half a century has passed since World War II.  

There is also a beautiful old mosque that was originally built by the Ottoman Turks who drove out the Christians and then were themselves driven out.  The mosque became a Christian church.  Beautiful bell towers and steeples rise all over the city, but there is little assurance that eternal peace has settled over the country.