Rx for Fear-based Religious and Political Paranoia

There is a better response by people of faith to political change than playing a victim being denied basic rights.

I hear what political right-wingers and evangelicals foment in fear of losing liberties. I’ve endured this paranoid hype since I was young preacher’s kid. But, honestly, as an ordained minister working over 35 years in the church and community, I have not had a single right or expression of faith challenged or diminished—not one.

On the other hand, I have repeatedly witnessed right-wingers and evangelicals impugn and deny rights to my LGBTQ neighbors, use privilege to deny equity and equal justice, ignore or fuel racism, demean immigrants, blame poor neighbors for their poverty, and align themselves with a godless ideology based on greed and exploitation.

Right-wing and evangelical paranoia and conspiracy theories are based on false fears and a choice to see oneself and one’s religion as a victim whenever individuals or groups arrogantly try to breach the separation of church and state written into the US Constitution.

The Constitutional separation of church and state has been extremely breached during the Trump years. Both faith and government of, by, and for the people is diminished because of the power grabbing by some evangelical groups. Ultimately, they have just been used by an authoritarian tyrant.

Reestablishing a Constitutional separation of church and state after four years of mutual exploitation between Trump and evangelicals may feel, by comparison, like a rollback or denial of rights to them, but it is merely restoring basic separation for the common good of all US Citizens and our neighbors.

Perhaps right-wingers and evangelicals disgruntled because their candidate legitimately lost the election and lashing out with paranoid notions might consider a different response—a genuinely faith-based response. Try this: there is no law against loving one’s neighbor as oneself. This is, in fact, the fulfillment of faith’s highest aspirations and most basic daily opportunity.

The Adequate Gift

These four stories help me get over gift anxiety 

GIFT ANXIETY  What shall I give?  Will it be enough?  Will it be right?  Will it be what my loved ones desire?  Will they be pleased?  Such thoughts go through my mind as I think about gift-giving.  I scroll through online items and walk the aisles of stores with questions circling.  You do this, too?  We're not alone.  

Some of my favorite imaginative Christmas stories and songs revolve around gift anxiety--and its resolution.  Leaving alone the more perplexing story woven in the Twelve Days of Christmas song, you may know the following stories quite well.  I recall them here and set them in context of this question: what is an adequate gift?

LITTLE DRUMMER  The most popular of the stories I have in mind is embedded in the song, "The Little Drummer Boy."  It sings first-person of a little boy who has nothing he thinks is fit to bring to the baby who is born to be the King.  "I have no gift to bring," he sighs.  He decides—innocently, naively, hopefully—to offer the only thing he has or can do: he will play his drum the very best he can for Jesus.  In the song, the baby Jesus smiles at him as he plays.  The gift is adequate.

LITTLEST ANGEL  "The Littlest Angel" is a familiar childhood story about a troublesome little angel who, learning that God's Son is to be born on earth, manages to hide away such common things as a butterfly, a bird’s egg, stones, his favorite dog’s collar in a rough-hewn box--things that he loved as a little boy on earth—to offer the Christ child.  His items, however, pale grossly in comparison to the other angels' magnificent, shining gifts.  He feels humiliated and runs to hide.  But, to his surprise, his choices are things the little boy Jesus relates to and loves.  As the Christ child looks approvingly upon his gift, it rises and transforms to become the star above the stable, giving light to all.

GIFT OF THE OF MAGI  "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry is the touching story of a young couple with very limited resources trying to offer each other a significant gift at Christmas.  Unbeknown to each other, they sacrifice the best they have for the other's best. She sells her beautiful long hair so she can purchase a golden chain for her lover's valuable watch. He, in turn, pawns his cherished timepiece to buy a golden comb for her beautiful hair.

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER  Christina Rossetti’s carol "In the Bleak Midwinter" concludes with a verse that compellingly underscores the only adequate gift we really bring is the gift of our heart: “What can I give Him, Poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. Yet what I can I give Him--Give my heart.”

GIFTS WE RECEIVE  Christmas is really not about what you can give to Jesus or to others. It is about what God has given to us. All our gift giving is a simply response to and reflection of this gift. Whatever it is you choose to give to others, let it be joyfully and from a grace-gifted heart.

Sleepwalking Advent

Shifting gears into Advent may take some time...but don't lollygag too long!

Advent begins
in a fog of unreadiness,
as if by dull surprise
or in a twilight zone,
we groggily hang the greens.

Hardly with awareness
much less anticipation
good people sleepwalk
through the prophecies
and Annunciation.

We may finally stir
by the time children sing
“Away in a Manger”
the Sunday before Christmas,
their raised voices spark
a light in our slumbering souls.

Is it only children and prophets
who grasp the urgency,
sense the passion;
whose hearts are rended
and readied by the
promise of Light shining
in the darkness?

Is it only to them that Advent
becomes no mere repetition
of myth-laden past events,
but days of embracing
the living Mystery,
the ground of all hope?

By God’s mercy and grace
children and prophets are
only the first to hear,
the first to recognize,
to proclaim that
it is, indeed, Mystery.

The Light ever dawns,
beaming its rays into the
eyes of the groggiest saints,
the hardest sleeper
among us.

Only those who refuse to rise
amid many urgent shakings
and light flooding their beds
sleep through the
Incarnation.

“Wake up, O sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”

COVID-19 and Star Wars

At the risk of sounding trite, I’ve been thinking today of the Star Wars saga (It WAS May the 4th earlier this week, right?) in relationship to the pandemic and efforts to grapple with it, limit its deadly impact, wipe it out, and return to sanity and the good life.

I think of long, dark phases of the epic Star Wars episodes that I’ve been viewing since I was 18 years old. We know this story. The Empire/dark side repeatedly asserts deadly, overwhelming, seemingly irresistible grips. Rebel leaders are frequently deeply conflicted and divided about how best to address the Empire (even the wise Jedi counsel gets deceived).

There were no guarantees for a way out—neither are there now. Just grit and guts and loss and grief and intelligence and ingenuity and perseverance and hope and love and the force. And always, of course, the refusal to let anger and fear control.

We are in for a long haul with many twists and turns. Hang on, it’s likely to get worse. This appears to a primal, global test of our lifetimes. There are no prepared plot lines. We are writing the script with our lives every day. It strains and exposes all our securities and insecurities, strengths and weaknesses, capacities and vulnerabilities, solidarities and divisions. There is no way out—only through. Together.

We already know many first-response, frontline heroes are tending our wounded and searching for a vaccine. We know and salute essential workers who are holding our fragile systems together with their lives on the line—voluntarily and involuntarily.

All of us, in our own ways, are called upon to make a difference—even if it is, for now, staying at home, social distancing, masking, sanitizing, checking up on neighbors, supporting causes, and sharing information and inspiration. Let’s do what we can with what we’ve been given.

And may...

Silent Saturday

Maybe the best thing we could do on this in-between day is just be silent

I don’t know what to do with the Saturday before Easter.

Not even sure what to call it.

Holy Saturday? Dark Saturday?

Or, should I take a more post-resurrection approach:

Joyous Saturday or Saturday of the Light (as the Copts)?

How about Silent Saturday?

It’s this odd day between Good Friday and Easter.

We tend to put all our eggs in those two baskets,
engaging in somber services on Good Friday and
jubilant--even braggadocios--outbursts on Easter.

But this day?

We’ve got nothing.

Maybe that’s how it should be.

Completely wrung out and undone by Friday’s
procession of confusion, denial, pain and death,
and with no realistic hope of anything beyond,
Jesus’ followers scattered--speechless, witless,

utterly alone.

The more silent this day, the better.

What do deniers and deserters have to say, anyway?

People who’ve mistaken his ministry--be quiet.

Those who think hope is based on coercion and might
in Jesus’ name were dead wrong--

and still are.

Mute, especially, thoughts of resurrection.

That wasn't on the radar screen of the dismayed

when the heavy stone was rolled into place.

Don't take comfort in what you think you know.

Don't count your chickens when you

don't have chickens to count.

Wouldn't it help us all to just shut up for a few hours
and let whatever Grace wants to say or do

sink in

or rise up?


Note: 

I wrote this about 10 years ago and revised it a bit early this morning. 

It seems no one ever instructed or informed me about Holy Saturday (even in seminary). It was just a day to get ready for Easter hype—choir rehearsals, egg painting, basket-filling, clothes readying, lilies buying, sermon writing.

There’s not much to say about Holy Saturday as part of the story of what really happened. There is nothing in the Bible. Not much has been written across millennia.

I’ve tried to put my head and heart into one of Jesus’ earnest followers on that day. Who could bear such disappointment, loss, and self guilt/shame? It was over. Done. Defeat. Finis! And they had denied and deserted and scattered.

It seems to me that going there in our minds and hearts personally is perhaps the only—or at least the best—way to awaken to startling, head-spinning reports on the third day. Resurrection was the last thing the first followers could have expected. Maybe in our imagination we would benefit from going there, too.

There will be a day to celebrate. Silent Saturday is not that day.

John Franklin Hay 
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 
www.johnfranklinhay.blogspot.com
www.twitter.com/indybikehiker 
indybikehiker@gmail.com

Panic Attack re COVID-19

Full disclosure: this pandemic gets to me. It has taken a physiological toll on me.

I watched it develop in China via Twitter in January and February. I went down numerous wormholes and my eyes cannot unsee what I saw. Citizen journalist accounts (now silenced by the Chinese Communist Party) revealed horrors and heroics. But it seemed distant and we in North America were safe. I wrote and spoke of the contagion and our urgent challenge of prevention then—to no avail.

So, the virus is now spreading globally—it is in our city and our neighborhoods. It will take the lives of people we know—perhaps our own. We just don’t know with this thing. It’s not just a threat to older and physically compromised neighbors.

Thus, the fodder for my panic attack earlier this week. It was terrifying. I’m grateful for some friends and temporary meds to get me through and over.

Daily, I challenge myself with basic self-care practices, which absolutely include serving and supporting others—some of whom are on frontlines and at high risk for our sakes.

We know what each of us—and all—can do to reduce infections and spread and care well for ourselves and—distantly, safely—for our neighbors.

Let’s take care. Stay put. Stay safe. Stay human.

Ten Commandments for the Pandemic

Ten Commandments for the Pandemic

1. Stay out of the way. Stay put. Maintain social distance. 

2. End or reduce unnecessary visits to the grocery, etc.

3. Lower all consumption. Conserve.

4. Exercise your capacity to encourage and connect with others distantly.

5. Demand government agencies and officials step up.

6. Support frontline workers.

7. Call out exploitative and negligent corporations and companies small and large.

8. Check in on your neighbors via phone, text, email.

9. Take a walk/bike ride outside. Steer clear of close encounters.

10. Wash or sanitize your hands before and after every contact. Be meticulous.