The Other Jesus

This is an early false start on the U2 book, written at Canterbury Cathedral, where it made more sense as an opening chapter than it seemed to when I got home. Part of it wound up in a chapter in the new We Get to Carry Each Other, out in a week or so, but I thought people might like to see that the first stab at writing the book from this old music journalist came at it purely through the music. I added more on tension and resolution, including some powerful stuff from musician/theologian Jeremy Begbie, whose work I’ve loved for years, and put the result in a chapter on Belief, believe it or not. Hope you enjoy it. 

Beauty

Listening File:

Before (or while) reading this chapter, listen to these U2 songs. You can access lyrics for all U2’s songs on U2’s official website: u2.com.

“Gloria,” October

“Rejoice,” October

“Beautiful Day,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind

“City of Blinding Lights,” How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

“I Will Follow,” Live from Boston

            When Adam Clayton, Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. first got together to play music, they did so out of complex motives. Some of them were looking for something to belong to, to make them feel special. Some of them loved the feeling of playing music, felt they became most themselves when they were playing or singing. But all three agreed that what happened when they came together transcended their singular concerns, talents, and dreams. The legend goes that none of the members of U2 could play instruments when they began, which is why they developed their unique sound. This was only half true. As a guitarist Bono, knew only one chord, and he had yet to develop the powerful and expressive voice for which he is know. Adam, meanwhile, had the gear but little practice with it—although he looked good, which counted for a lot. But Edge could actually play some songs, and Larry played drums with confidence and power. Their lack of expertise was an early fact, but as they began writing their own songs and creating their own sound, only a part of it was shaped by inexperience. The Edge, particularly, was a sonic genius. Even in the early stages of the band, his interest in the use of echo created a sound that not only didn’t remind listeners of others bands, but that other musicians found difficult to reproduce. U2 was making music all their own, music that no one else could make.

            In their first recordings, they were casting about a bit for the music they wanted to play, perhaps. But there are powerful and beautiful moments from the beginning of their recording career. It would be difficult, for example, to estimate how many times the band has played “I Will Follow,” which continues to be a staple of their live set. Listen to “I Will Follow” performed in Boston, site of some of their very first American shows. During the bridge, when Edge’s chiming guitar turns the room into a holy place, Bono marks it, vamping around and between the sounds: “Ring those bells. Make those bells ring, Edge . . . Boston, lift me up on your shoulder. Let’s get to a place we could never get over . . . Paradise. . . Ring those bells. Those bells never gonna get old.”

            On one level Bono was remembering The Paradise, the club they’d played twenty years earlier. But on another, he was remarking on the experience, which you can participate in to some degree even by just listening to the performance. As is often the case at a U2 show, the experience takes the band and the audience out of themselves, lifts them out of this reality with our feet firmly rooted on the ground and deposits them—for a few minutes, at least—in another place. Words like “transcendence” are often used for this sort of experience, the ineffable and un-tellable sort of mountain-top experience we may also associate with religious or sexual ecstasy, with any experience in which we are taken out of ourselves.

            How does this happen, this transcendence? What lifted that audience in Boston (and millions like them, over the years) to another plane? Part of it has to do with the way music works. In U2 songs like “I Will Follow,” “Gloria,” and “Rejoice,” where Bono’s melody is often laid over the eccentric workings of Edge’s chords or notes, we find a substantial amount of tension. When we listen to “Gloria,” for example, the song is a continuing battle, of sorts, between tension and resolution. In the verses, for example, it seems as there will be no way for these dissonant tones to resolve into any sort of beauty—and yet at the end of each verse, that somehow, miraculously, happens. In the long instrumental break, Edge’s solo continues to build tension, and Adam’s solo flirts then chords, and the final “Gloria—in te domine.” It’s glorious, a musical healing of a broken universe, and the words here—“Glory to God,” emphasize what is happening in the music.

            Theologians might speak here about sacramental theology, for certainly one of the analogies we might make here has to do with the breaking of and reconstitution of the body of Christ. Perhaps more importantly, thought, sacramental theology also has to do with the ability of the things of this physical reality to mediate the things of God. While there has been substantial disagreement between denominations about what exactly happens in the Eucharist to the bread and wine, almost all agree that whether we view them as remembrance of Jesus’s own last supper, as symbol, as spiritual food, or as the actual body and blood of Christ, there’s certainly power in that act. In my tradition, the consecrated bread and wine are not considered to be changed into the body and blood of Jesus, but like all the sacraments, they are physical agents that convey the grace of God to those who participate in them. As Larry Mullen observed, this music has little or no power of its own—but when God walks in the room (when God gets involved, in the language of Pulp Fiction), these notes, drum beats, and guitar strums are charged with power to change those who hear them.

Graphic by Kostas Tsipos 

Last night I was on the Busted Halo radio show on Sirius/XM with Father Dave Dwyer, and he was asking me what I meant by the gospel according to U2? It’s a familiar question for someone who writes about religion and culture, and has been coming up for some forty years now, since Westminster John Knox published The Gospel according to Peanuts.

We’ve got four gospels in the Bible, right? Isn’t that all we’re supposed to need?

A lot of books purporting to be the gospel according to one thing or another have been published (and I have written a couple of them), so it’s good to know first that when we claim that something is, for example, the gospel according to U2, that doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily saying that something is the knowledge or dogma that will lead to salvation (although, with U2’s gospel, I think it very well might). “Gospel” comes to us through Old English and Latin from the Greek euangelion, which means, simply, “good news,” and it’s the root for our words “evangelist” and “evangelism” (which have not always been good news in my own life, but you can’t blame the Greeks for that).

The gospel according to U2 is simple, I discovered to my relief when Father Dave asked the question last night. U2’s songs (and the lives of its three Christian members) suggest this message of good news:
1) There is a God, a God who created and loves us, a God who wants a continuing relationship with us, a God who is worthy of praise and adoration;
2) We pursue this God in a community of others who are also on a spiritual path;
3) We serve this God best by loving each other and by doing works of peace and justice. 

If you’re a big fan of U2, and if you’ve been listening to lyrics over the years, then these three areas won’t surprise you much (although church folk might have some reservations about the second, since U2 have been notably critical of organized religion).

I think, though, that U2’s good news emphatically includes the message of communion and community, as I begin to suggest in this short excerpt from my new book, We Get to Carry Each Other: 

Perhaps it’s no wonder that U2 has been criticized by offended Christians for failing to embrace the full possibilities of Christian community. Christianity Today called Bono’s theology “light on ecclesiology” (ecclesiology is the theology of the nature and structure of the Church, from that Greek word ecclesia); more judgmental things have been said by others in print and on the Web.Some in the Church, however, are not taken aback by the band’s rejection of organized Christianity. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who gave a recent speech in which (as you’d hope) he affirmed the importance of the Church, actually responds to Bono’s oft-spoken criticisms organized religion with some sympathy:   

If we ask why exactly the religious is so unattractive in the eyes of many, including so many iconic and opinion-forming figures, the answers are not too difficult to work out. Bono’s remarks provide an obvious starting-point. Religion is a matter of the collective mentality, with all that this implies about having to take responsibility for corporately-held teaching and discipline; so religious allegiance can be seen as making over some aspect of myself to others in ways that may compromise both my liberty and my integrity. It may be seen as committing myself to practices that mean little to me, or subjecting myself to codes of conduct that don’t connect at all convincingly with my sense of who I am or what is creative and lifegiving for me. It may mean being obliged to profess belief in certain propositions that appear arbitrary and unconnected with the business of human flourishing. [1]   

  Religion, especially in community, requires the giving up of some autonomy, the acceptance of shared norms. When you have been hurt by a faith community—as U2 were, as I was, as almost everyone is, if they remain in one long enough—it can be hard to imagine ever trusting a community enough to want to return to faithful practice with one. For U2, it was an impediment that they have not yet overcome. After Shalom, The Edge went on to say that “I suppose I am a Christian, but I am not a religious person,” and Larry to say “I am a Christian and not ashamed of that. . . [But] I have more in common with somebody who doesn’t believe at all than I do with most Christians. I don’t mind saying that.” [2]

Since plenty of people cannot conceive of how they might connect (or re-connect) with the Church as they have come to understand it, the judgment that they are “light on ecclesiology” might not seem like a particularly damning phrase to apply to U2. Who, they ask, would want to be heavy on ecclesiology? But when church (as a gathering of believers, not as a building) is of paramount importance for your understanding of faith, as is true for most Christians, it turns out to be something very important.Steve Stockman, in his book on the spirituality of U2, said that one of the burning questions he would want to ask Bono if he could, would be “How have you kept the vitality of your Christian faith so vibrant in the world of rock music and in the absence of regular Christian fellowship?” [3] And Christianity Today, evangelical Christianity’s most important publication, published its editorial in 2003, when Bono was appearing in churches across the United States to talk about AIDS, debt, and trade in Africa, that asked how Bono’s commitment to Christianity could possibly be carried on outside of the Church. Christianity Today granted that “God may very well be using Bono to challenge the conscience of American evangelicals. It is well within God’s frequently evident sense of humor to use a brash rock star in the causes of justice and mercy. If that is so, we hope that God also uses this time to draw Bono into a deeper sense of what it means to be a Christian.” [4] It was a clear questioning, if not of Bono’s faith, then of its practice.

The central question for some Christians where U2 and Christianity are concerned, then, is this: How can Bono (or The Edge, or Larry Mullen, Jr.) call himself a Christian when he is not part of an established church, since ecclesia is how we have always identified other Christians and practiced our faith?From the beginning of Christian practice—even before many of the new gatherings of Jesus followers had separated from the Jewish synagogues in which many of them began—there was a very clear sense that people who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, God’s anointed one, were to join together with other believers to worship and work, were to pursue together the teachings that Jesus had left behind. And although some evangelical Christians may have an exaggerated sense of how important individual salvation might be, they still tend to gather together in small groups or large to worship and support each other in the faith.

So, on the one hand, perhaps the editors of Christianity Today were right to call into question whether Bono understands what it means to be a Christian without belonging to an ecclesia, a gathering of Jesus followers.

But on the other hand, I want to propose the idea that U2 might be thought of as a sort of ecclesia, a gathering of believers who support each other, who do good works as Jesus taught, and who, whenever they go out on tour, actually create an experience that—for many who join them—feels a great deal like worship. Brian McLaren has described the “worship” component many people have felt in relation to U2’s performances, but his description of the qualities of many emerging Christian communities might also help us recognize those qualities in the band: these new ecclesias are virile, courageous, nurturing communities that center their theology on Jesus’ revolutionary message of the kingdom and their lives on living out that radical message, and they are communities of spiritual formation whose transformed members seek social transformation. [5]

If we do envision ecclesia as a group of people rather than a building, then I think we can make a powerful case for U2 as a faithful community, and, in the process, can explore some important ideas about why and how we are saved in community with others once we have begun to come to belief in God.

---

[1] Rowan Williams, “The Spiritual and the Religious: Is the Territory Changing?” Westminster Cathedral, London, 17 April 2008. Accessed at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1759

[2] Jay Cocks, “Band on the Run,” TIME Apr. 27, 1987. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964182,00.html
[3] Steve Stockman, Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2, (Orlando: Relevant, 2005),  2.
[4] “Bono’s Thin Ecclesiology,” Christianity Today March 2003. Accessed at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/march/29.37.html
[5] Brian D. McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 299.    

And a non-U2 note: I’ll be leading a retreat in the New Mexico desert until June 30, then will be back with more on U2, spirituality, justice, and hope. 

I hope. 

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After long years of listening and writing (and waiting for U2 to finish No Line on the Horizon), my book on U2 is finally coming at the beginning of July. Here is one of the press release pieces we’re sending out. Since we live in the land of sound bites and tweets, it’s short and succinct, but I hope people will know that there’s a lot more substance in the book, and this isn’t just me prooftexting U2 songs (that is, cherry-picking a line here and there to prove anything I want). But this does seem to me to be a nice summary of the spiritual lessons in the book and what I think U2 is all about.

Ten Spiritual Lessons from U2  

1.     “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” (from “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” The Joshua Tree): Life is a journey, not a destination; faith is a means, not an end.

2.     “Hello, hello (¡Hola!)/I’m at a place called vertigo” (From “Vertigo,” How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb): Contemporary life is disconcerting, destabilizing; that is its nature. Don’t expect it to be otherwise.

3.     “We get to carry each other” (from “One,” Achtung Baby): Our lives are for and with each other. We need each other to be who we are called to be.

4.      “The goal is elevation” (from “Elevation,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind): We are seeking transcendence for ourselves, our spirits, our world.

5.      “I can’t believe the news today/I can’t close my eyes and make it go away” (from “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” War): Ignoring the brokenness we see is not an option; we are called to bring healing and hope, to help transform the world.

6.      “It’s a beautiful day/Don’t let it slip away” (from “Beautiful Day,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind): We live in a marvelous creation. Pay attention to it.

7.      “What more in the name of love?” (from “Pride in the Name of Love,” The Unforgettable Fire): Risk everything for love; there is no higher value. Love changes everything, including us.

8.     “We need love and peace” (from “Love and Peace or Else,” How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb): War and cruelty destroy lives and demean the human spirit.

9.     “Sometimes you can’t make it on your own” (from “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb): It’s no shame to rely on others. We are made for companionship—especially in tough times.

10.  “Walk on” (from “Walk On,” All That You Can’t Leave Behind): You can lose everything but what matters most. Don’t despair. Don’t stop believing. Don’t stop working for the healing of the world. You are never alone. 

To speak with Greg Garrett, contact Emily Kiefer at (502) 569-5811 or ekiefer@wjkbooks.com.

So I started following the story of Sonia Sotomayor while I was on vacation with Chandler, but as I’ve come home to Austin, it continues to simmer, with some prominent old white guys saying that the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court is a racist and an intellectual lightweight (both claims I have trouble processing).

I am myself a white guy, and growing progressively older each year, but for reasons I will relate, I view Judge Sotomayor’s nomination with much less fear than joyful anticipation. I hope the Senate will confirm her quickly so that she can be involved in the choosing of cases for the coming court year, one of the court’s most important–and culture-shaping–duties.

At the heart of objections to Sotomayor–and implicit in any court appointment at the appellate level– is a disagreement not just about what legal opinions will emerge from the judges, but also about the role of appellate courts. On the one hand, people vilify so-called “activist judges” who try to interpret the law rather than let the law interpret them. Such folks imagine, perhaps, the judge as a CPU running some sort of Founding Fathers software, and moving inescapably toward the same conclusion that (they imagine) the Founding Fathers would reach. 

I’ll mention, briefly, that some of those who decry the work of activist judges really only think it’s a bad thing when those judges are handing down rulings with which they disagree. But I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat–who has the time or energy?

Here’s the thing–the Founding Fathers had a very different vision of the world than we did. And yet, it was a vision that made room for the possibility of change as the society changed. Thomas Jefferson, my candidate for smartest of the Founding Daddies, recognized that the laws they were putting in place, the cornerstone of our culture, were not a permanent thing, carved in stone.

In fact, carved in stone at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., you will find a slightly-abridged version of this Jefferson argument: 

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. 

Like others of the Fathers, Jefferson was an Enlightenment intellectual who believed that humankind might move toward perfection. Perhaps he imagined that today’s United States would be some sort of theme park of democracy marked by sweetness and light compared to himself and barbarians like Franklin and Adams. (If so, I’d hate to be the one to tell him about Dick Cheney, torture, and rendition.)

But even if we have not perfected ourselves or our democracy, we should note that Jefferson did recognize the importance of changing manners, opinions, and circumstances and how they might change law and even the constitition. At one time, America was a majority white nation in which old white guys ruled. (And I mean that as a statement of fact, not as surfer-speak.)

What was good for old white guys was good for the country (if not necessarily so good for black people, brown people, yellow people, Native people, and women people). So why not have old white guys in the White House and on Capitol Hill and in the Supreme Court?

But manners, opinions, and circumstances have changed drastically. Soon, white people will be a minority, not a majority. All of those peoples I listed have taken their rightful shared place in the sun.And government for, by, and of old white guys doesn’t get the job done in a more complex and diverse culture.

Now on some legal issues I think Sonia Sotomayor’s ethnicity and gender may be of little importance.

But on others, I think her voice could be a valuable corrective to 200 years in which women and current minorities have not had their experience represented in a consistent way on the nation’s highest court.

I’m not worried that old white guys like myself are going to be adjudicated out of business. We still rock the world, rule the roost, drive multinational conglomerates into the ground like there’s no tomorrow.

Instead, I’m comforted to think that when all three branches of our federal government are more representative of the people they serve, the welfare of all those in our great nation will be considered.

So when our first African-American president–editor of the law review at Harvard and a constitutional law scholar–chooses to nominate the first Hispanic candidate to the Supreme Court–herself an editor of the Yale law review–I think I can just fold my arms, close my mouth, and nod my head.

I like to think Thomas Jefferson would agree.

 As I was driving up towards North Carolina, where I find myself this week, I was listening to a show on public radio about aging and death featuring the British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. This Cambridge-educated scientist is convinced we are no more than thirty years away from defeating aging entirely, from a time when no one need ever die of natural causes again. He wasn’t speaking of immortality, he assured us; people would “still be hit by trucks.” But through a variety of technological, medical, and genetic means, he argued, we can continually repair and renew the body so that we can remain young and vibrant—and alive—in his words, “indefinitely.”

There’s no reason anyone should have to die of old age, de Grey argues, and certainly not as a decrepit individual who has lost her ability to enjoy life. So de Grey and other scientists in his field have devoted their careers to studying the ways we grow old and grow ill—and how we might reverse them. This isn’t simply a scientific desire, he says; ending suffering and aging is a “moral and psychological imperative.” His responsibility as a scientist is to alleviate pain and suffering—and what causes more pain and suffering that chronic illness and old age?

Such a desire for healthy long life is only a logical extension of what Stanley Hauerwas has called the myth of chronicity, the belief that longer lives are better lives, even if they are not necessarily accompanied by vigor. So a nine-hundred year (or more) life that would be experienced as an energetic and vigorous thirty-something sounds like, well, paradise, doesn’t it?

So why am I thinking this is not such a great idea?

Well, first, of course, there’s the practical objection: This planet is finding it difficult to support its population now, and that’s with an average lifespan of around 70; without corresponding reductions in births, this planet certainly can’t cope with billions of people sticking around for hundreds of years, all of them in the prime of their desire to consume.

You might argue—as I would—that only the wealthy would be able to take advantage of these technologies for some time. Thus, only those in first-world countries or with huge Swiss bank accounts would benefit from these treatments at first, so perhaps we’re only keeping alive indefinitely the richest five per cent or so.

But this sounds like the Titanic all over again—the wealthy in First Class and the poor in Steerage, and will the vast majority of people on this sinking ship really watch the rich ride away in their lifeboats?

Still, the practical is less important to me than the ethical and theological problems surrounding the death of death; even if we could do this for everyone, would ending illness and death be a good thing?

For humanitarian reasons, I concur with Dr. de Grey: In general, I believe we have a responsibility to alleviate pain and suffering, and I try to live my life around this belief.

But Chandler, my eleven year old, and I have been listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows again this week as we drive, and it’s become clear to me as I think about this issue that the bad guy in the Potter story, Lord Voldemort, does most of the horrible things he does in these books because of his fear of dying; his name is drawn from French words meaning “flight from death.” He’s willing to kill, steal, and overthrow the established order so that he can go on existing—

And I think existing is all we’d be doing after awhile, even if we are not driven by fear to the same extent Voldemort is. How many times can you reread The Brothers Karamazov or watch a sunset or sip a single-malt and not begin to go starkers? As Umberto Eco said, the Bach Goldberg Variations is among the most beautiful things he knows, but he can’t imagine listening to Bach for 3000 years.

Indeed, the great American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote that “death is the mother of beauty,” and certainly our awareness of the transitory and impermanent nature of all things—including our lives—can and should make us thankful for all that is—

Including our lives.

What would we be thankful for in lives that extend indefinitely?

What would be the place of faith in a life concentered in risk avoidance and continual self-maintenance?

What would be the meaning of life when life no longer means that our span is spun without our control over it?

I don’t want to live forever—and I say this as someone who has come to love life deeply. But I’m ready, when the time comes, to go, even if it’s messy, or painful, or tragic.

Because I believe, ultimately, that I am not the most important thing in this universe, and that I am not (and past experience suggests that I should not) be in control of my destiny.

So as much as I want to alleviate suffering, I find that I don’t want to eliminate it, because I think it’s a vital part of who we are and who we can become. Socrates—who chose to die when he might have lived—said, “The philosopher is the person who is ready to die.” And without that knowledge that we are not all in all, and that our lives do not belong simply to us, perhaps we will miss the meaning of life—even if we live forever.

(from “The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate,” The Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, April 29, 2009, http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=156) 

What does it profit a nation to gain its life, but lose its soul?

That’s what I’m wondering this week as I ponder the results of the new Pew Forum survey on religious attitudes toward torture. As you look at their chart above, you see the disturbing news that not only do most Christians believe there may be circumstances under which torture is acceptable, but that less than a third of any of these groups believe torture is never acceptable, and the proportion supporting torture actually seems to go up based on the more pious one is.

Do Christians understand that the author of their faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was tortured and executed by agents of a powerful state?

Do they understand that those who were using torture and violence to preserve their nation are the bad guys of the Gospel story?

Do they understand that when God raised Jesus from the dead, he was saying an emphatic corrective “No” to that torture and violence?

Call me un-American if you must, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that America is God’s favorite nation and that our survival justifies any actions we must take to preserve it. All I keep reading—even in that Old Testament people keep insisting justifies the violence they want to do—is that God doesn’t want the worship even of his true chosen; he wants lives centered on him and filled with justice and mercy.

In my forthcoming book on U2, We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel according to U2, I quote sayings of the Hebrew prophets that seem entirely too applicable to this moral debate we should not have to have:

Listening to the Prophets

In the Christian tradition, a faithful attention to social action actually begins with the words of the Hebrew prophets, faithful outsiders who spoke truth to power and uncomfortable words to the comfortable. We sometimes get hung up in the supernatural aspect of prophecy, the idea that the Hebrew prophets could see the future or channel the Almighty; what’s more important is that the prophets were people of love and compassion and faith who could also see what needed to be changed in individual lives and in society for God to be truly honored and served. They were people like Jeremiah, who told the religious people of his day that God was fed up with their simultaneous religiosity and cruelty to others:

Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Israel, says this: Amend your behaviour and your actions and I will let you stay in this place.

Do not put your faith in delusive words, such as: This is Yahweh’s sanctuary, Yahweh’s sanctuary, Yahweh’s sanctuary!

But if you really amend your behaviour and your actions, if you really treat one another fairly,

if you do not exploit stranger, the orphan and the widow, if you do not shed innocent blood in this place and if you do not follow other gods, to your own ruin,

then I shall let you stay in this place, in the country I gave for ever to your ancestors of old.

(Jeremiah 7: 3-7, NJB)

The prophet Isaiah, best known to many through the beautiful words and music of Handel’s Messiah, was also a take-no-prisoners preacher who proclaimed that faithfulness had to be more than just faith and worship, and his message from God too was powerful and painful: that worship was an abomination to Him as long as the actions of the worshippers remained unjust:

Trample my courts no more;

bringing offerings is futile;

incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—

I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals

my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me,

I am weary of bearing them.

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow. . .

How the faithful city

has become a whore!

She that was full of justice,

righteousness lodged in her—

but now murderers!

Your silver has become dross,

your wine is mixed with water.

Your princes are rebels

and companions of thieves.

Everyone loves a bribe

and runs after gifts.

They do not defend the orphan,

and the widow’s cause does not come before them.

(Isaiah 1: 12b-17, 21-23)

….

 Finally, Micah (and I could cite plenty of other examples, but I think you’re seeing how central this issue of faith and action was to the Hebrew prophets who made up a great chunk of the scriptures Jesus studied and embodied) also asks whether God wants worship or right action, and in one of the most succinct faith statements in the Hebrew Bible . . . Micah says this:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

(Micah 6:8, NRSV)

In the Hebrew tradition, as the prophets explain it, faith should lead to justice: God requires both. But the “justice” called for in the Hebrew Testament is not what we normally think of as justice in our culture, the punitive treatment of those who have in some way violated the laws and statutes we have set up. It’s a positive behavior, not simply a punishment. If you look up “Justice” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, you find this: “Justice. See Righteousness.” This is how it should be: the same Hebrew word is used for justice and righteousness (sadiq or tzedek), and it encompasses all of life under God, what we are supposed to do as well as what we are not supposed to do. ^[1] The Hebrew prophets embrace this idea: What you imagine God wants you not to do is not enough; you are also called to do the right thing, to help those less fortunate, to avoid making their lives any more difficult.

Proponents of torture justify it pragmatically as necessary to preserve our way of life and maintain our position among nations—often at the same time that they speak of us as a Christian nation or more broadly as a moral nation. But I am appalled that anyone can so confuse these two things—Christianity and country—that they may say, looking past the torture and execution of their own savior, that torture and execution may sometimes be necessary.

When I was younger, I used to be appalled at reading Thomas Merton’s argument that rather than violate the tenets of our faith, America should be allowed to collapse into ruin.

Now I say, if torture is considered to be necessary to maintain the United States of America as the world’s pre-eminent power, then the United States of America is not what I thought it was, and it is not worth preserving.

I would rather be a faithful Christian seeking justice in a second-class nation than allow acts that might—might—preserve America’s position at the cost of her soul.

[1] The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford, 1993), 405.

I just got back from three days in Oklahoma, talking to people about my novel Shame, which is set in Watonga, Oklahoma, a small farming town in the northwest part of the state. My mom and her family are from Watonga, and on Wednesday, I spoke to a group of about 30 mostly older women in Watonga who belonged to my Grandma Rose’s book club, which was both fun and a little intimidating.

The assembled wisdom in the room was stunning—I’d guess about 2000 total years of living staring back at me—and they were a challenging audience for this book, which is not only set in Watonga, but about a farmer and his family, a world they would know even better than I. While my grandparents were farmers and ranchers, and I did spend time growing up doing chores, loading hay, and driving a tractor, I was talking with a roomful of women who have mostly spent more time on a tractor, more time cleaning out chicken houses—and more time living, loving, and regretting—than I have.

So it felt a little strange to be standing in front of all these wise women pretending to be wise, although in thinking about Shame and its characters, I believe I discovered some universal human truths, as true in Watonga as they will be in Austin as they will be wherever I talk about the book:

1)    We all have regrets and questions about the past. When John Tilden, my book’s narrator and hero, reflects on his regrets for the life he thought he was going to lead, he is living out a universal urge. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Taken,” one of the poet’s best and most popular, recognizes how potent that drive can be when we think about those moments in our lives when things—when we—might have turned out differently. We often look backwards, even though we understand rationally that, as the poem’s narrator says,  “knowing how way goes on to way, /  I doubted if I should ever come back.” In Shame, although it doesn’t fix everything, John discovers dramatically that you can’t go home again—at least not in the way we sometimes hope, by reliving it. As Kierkegaard said, We can only understand life backward—but we must live it forward.

2)    So you can’t go home again—not in the sense of going backwards. On the other hand, you can—and perhaps, should—go home again, at least in the sense of recognizing home and being appreciative for it. As I came back to Watonga for the first time in over a year, I felt myself touched by a feeling that was part familiarity and part gratitude. No one would mistake Watonga for Paris or London; it is a small town, and some would say, a dying town. But it’s where my family comes from, where people I know and love lived or have lived most or all of their lives, and where I know that I will be welcomed and loved and reminded of stories of my life I may have forgotten. Remembering can be a painful thing, too, as I’d be the first to admit. But when you can look at home, and see it as such, you can be honest about the life you’ve been given. John’s decision in Shame—whether to stay or to go—is all about this issue: Can he look at the life he has and love it?

I know I’ll be reading from and talking about Shame a lot in the next few months. But to go back to the place it came from—to its home, so to speak—and to think about the narrator’s journey has made me again grateful for my own life.

I don’t know that I’ll ever live in Oklahoma again, although, clearly, that’s no longer the point.

Oklahoma will always live in me.

 This isn’t a post, so much as a newsflash:I’ll be signing my new novel Shame in Fairhope, Alabama May 15 (4-6 at Page & Palette Books), and we’ll be holding a release party at BookPeople in Austin, Texas, June 5, 7-10, with live country music and St. Arnold’s beer.  And I’ll be hitting just about every region of the States (plus England and Ireland) this summer, so come out and say hi if you can! –Greg 

Shame, by Greg Garrett

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