The Other Jesus

   
This week at Ghost Ranch I went for a long hike around the rim of the Mesa Montosa, a long, dusty, exhausting, and sometimes difficult climb up to the top of the 8000 foot mesa, and then a cross-country trek through piñon pine and scrub grass and shifting rocks underfoot. I hike up a trail at the very beginning, down a trail at the conclusion, but in between, most of the trek is through bleak landscape traveled only by deer and elk, foxes and rabbits, ants and sandflies.

When I bushwhack across the mesa, I keep my bearing by the location of the sun in the sky, by the distant flat-topped mountain Pedernal, and by my knowledge that even if I could not say precisely where I am on the map I should be but am not carrying, I will know where I am supposed to finish because I will recognize the landscape when I get there.

And somehow, that always seems to be good enough.

 It’s my second week at Ghost Ranch this summer after my intervening week in Germany, and it’s great to be back in the desert, where the colors are vivid and the air crisp and dry. When I came two weeks ago, I led a retreat on desert spirituality, looking at the wisdom of the desert and its amazing relevance for us in the here and now. Ten of us gathered at the Casa del Sol retreat center for a hard and holy week as we tried to listen to these lessons and figure out how they might help us make our own way in the desert.

Some of us were wrestling with past brokenness, some with present crisis, but all of us had the sense that God had led us into the desert so that, as has always happened in the story I hold sacred, we could be refined and renewed, darkness could begin to be made light, and brokenness could begin to be made whole.

We began and ended the week in familiar places; you might say that there were trails at the beginning and end of our week, as there are on my mesa trek. As we came together on Monday night, a group of strangers, we made polite conversation, talked about our lives back in the world. We were on familiar ground, at the edge of the desert but not yet in it.

At the end of the week, on Saturday, we were again on familiar ground as we closed our experience with a desert communion, familiar words and gestures and the life-giving body and blood of Jesus to feed and sustain us as we went back out into the life we had known.

And we needed to be fed, because in the middle of the week, we had been wandering, as people are prone to do in the desert. We did have landmarks, and I tried my best not to let anyone feel as if he or she was becoming lost, but even so, it can be a nerve-wracking thing to walk through the desert with no clearly-marked trail. When I hike the Mesa Montosa, I still sometimes wonder if perhaps I’ve missed the place where I should have veered right, if I will keep walking forever, if I’ll be stuck up there alone in the dark.

And I’m sure parts of the retreat felt like that for those who were wrestling with the demons of the past, present, and future. The desert strips away everything we use to avoid seeing ourselves as we truly are; it takes us down to the essentials, which sometimes means the necessity of our coming to grips with our demons: our appetites and lusts, the places where we have been hurt, our guilt and shame, our knowledge that we have and do and will fall short of what we are called to do.

But the desert also shows you secret joy, the possibility of life where you had not imagined it. The Psalms talk about water springing up out of the sands; this week the purple and yellow blooms of cactus dot the desert.

When you are walking in the desert, there is no place for sentimentality or romanticism, for anything less than honesty. If you don’t take the desert seriously, it will knock you down.  The desert makes you face up to things–but it also gives back to you.

And the gift the desert gives back to people who enter it and face it is a sense of reality: yours, the world’s, God’s. 

This week at Ghost Ranch I ran into Sarah, a young woman I last saw here in 2003. The week our paths crossed that summer, I had just gone off my anti-depressants, and for the first time I thought I had found a way out of the desert. I even began to imagine that I was recognizing the place I needed to be, that the landscape was starting to become familar. It was a startling and life-giving moment talking with her this week and realizing that in the five years since we last met I’ve entered the desert solely of my own free will rather than being forced into it and left lost, wandering, hopeless, close to perishing.

I have spent most of my life in one desert or another. 

So I am thankful for bearings and landmarks, for the wise guides who have walked alongside me at points, and for the chance now to be a desert guide to others. To that end, let me remind you that even when you may be lost in the desert, you can keep your bearing by the location of the Son, by the distant and unchanging mountain, and by your knowledge that even if you cannot say precisely where you are on the map, you will know where you are supposed to finish because you will recognize the landscape when you get there. 

Or the people waiting there to welcome you home.

 A new poll on American religion was just released by the Pew Foundation, with the results reported in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other places. It found that Americans (still) overwhelmingly identify themselves as religious people, if such a thing can be measured by belief in God, which 92% of those questioned do, in some recognizable sense. A majority of Americans say that they pray at least once a week, and of course, a fairly large percentage of Americans say that they worship in a formal way at least once a month.

These results are unsurprising to me, since I have been following similar results for some time, although they do come at an odd time for me, as I tour in Germany, a nation in which only a tiny percentage of people would identify themselves as worshipping Christians. Last night I stood in front of an audience in Munich talking about religion and American film, and knowing that I was speaking to them in more than one foreign language.

I could write a cute and faintly jingoistic travelogue about how odd the Germans are, how strange it is to pay $1.50 for the chance to use a toilet (although there have been times that seemed like a bargain), how Germans think you’re touched in the head if you drink tap water instead of the bottle of mineral water they’ve provided, how all the stores and restaurants except biergartens and street cafes seems to be closed up by 8 pm. What if you desperately need a Hot Pocket or some hairspray at 8:01?

But Mark Twain has done that sort of thing with some facility—What ignoramuses these furriners are!—and anyway, the big things I’ve noticed have less to do with superficial differences, and more to do with temperment and worldview. First, German children—at least since the fall of Hitler—seem to have been trained to be self-sufficient, to assert themselves, not to let other people overly influence them. And self-sufficient Germans surely are, as judged by the omnipresence of the surging throng, as opposed to the polite queue you find in Britain (where I’ve also spent several weeks this year) or the US. When I catch the train to Stuttgart in half an hour, I’ll be pushing my way on board just like everybody else, although my sensibilities are “Can’t we all just get along?” and I hear my elementary school teacher in my head saying “Wait your turn.”

But if I wait my turn, I’ll end up on the platform as the train pulls away, so by God, you’d better get out of my way.

Although I have met Germans on this trip who have treated me with kindness, including a man at my talk in Munich/München who clearly loved me simply because I am from “Taix-sas,” what I observe at large here is a lack of common courtesy—Germans on speeding bicycles on the Munich sidewalks, Germans singing at the top of their lungs in the train cars, somberness rather than greeting smiles—that makes me wonder what has replaced religion (or more properly, what has replaced Christianity, since I don’t know if the vast immigrant population from places like Turkey has stepped away from its faith traditions) as a shaper of character.

(Now I know I am a person here on a brief sojourn, and these are rash generalizations, so please accept this disclaimer: as I wrote last week, plenty of religious people hurt others through selfishness, wrongheadedness, and sheer arrogance, although the point of the religious systems with which I am familiar is to try and get one’s self out of the way and serve others. And this disclaimer: Germans are smart, funny, and industrious, and a number of German women are just plain hot. So it’s not my intention to slam Germany or its hot German women—just to record my observations from this trip.)

We may differ in the way we look at the world and perhaps even in some of our core values. All the same, some ideas clearly got through last night when I was giving a lecture about good and evil in some of my favorite films of 2007 to an audience at Munich’s Amerika Haus made up largely of Germans who speak English as a second (or fourth) language. In talking about Jason Bourne’s (Matt Damon) climactic decision at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum to reject what he had been up to that point (a person who had chosen to be trained as a cold-blooded killer “to save American lives”), heads were nodding when I discussed the movie’s denial of the Binding of Isaac as an acceptable myth. (The Binding of Isaac/Ishmael, which is a central story in the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions, is that archetypal myth that people in power, older people, supposedly wiser people, should make decisions for us, even decisions that we don’t understand or that require us to go against our best instincts; the Germans remember a time when they were asked to do this, and did, to their sorrow).

And more heads were nodding when I spoke about Bourne’s turn from his violent past to a future that didn’t depend on his use of violence. “In my tradition,” I told them, “we call this a spiritual transformation. The Greek word often used in connection with this movement is metanoia (metanoia). It’s sometimes translated in English Bibles as ‘repentance,’ but I think that’s an unfortunate translation. It’s not just about repenting something—‘I’m going to give up smoking because I feel bad about it.’ It’s about turning around, changing your core values, turning away from a life where you are at the center and turning toward a life of serving others.”

By taking these spiritual concepts out of the unfamiliar realm of “religion” and approaching them from the standpoint of a popular culture narrative, I was able to make the point I wanted—and to make it live: We are called to be different; we are called to something better. And this may be the lesson for people of faith, both here and in America, to which, God willing, I am returning soon. The Pew study found that, spiritually speaking, the fastest-growing group of people in America (currently at 16%) is what might be called the un-affiliated, people who have been a part of a formal religious tradition and left it, or people who have never been a part of a formal religious system. They may still believe in God, as they understand God. But for this large and primarily young section of the population, old religious ways of doing things are not going to work—or, in fact, have patently not worked, driving them from their traditions. They’re going to have to be approached in other ways if they’re going to be supported in the message of love and change at the core of the Christian faith.

So maybe this trip to largely agnostic Germany has been more than just exciting and nerve-wracking; maybe it’s also been a preview of how, in the future, people who are professionally religious are going to have to do business in America.

As I write this essay, a long line of German boys has just paraded by in the train station dressed in their soccer colors, singing at the top of their lungs and dancing a herky-jerky white boy dance just as badly as I do.

Maybe we’re not so different after all.

A few years ago, I published a short story about a girl who—with her family—is thrown out of a small-town church because of sexism and hypocrisy, and how it scars her and her family. “I guess the church has probably drove more people away from God than Satan,” she says, “and it almost drove me away too.”

I was thinking about this story last week as I lead a retreat at Ghost Ranch in the New Mexico desert. It’s a place I’ve written about before, a sacred place of color and light and silence, and my soul is always refreshed from being there, although last week my task was to walk alongside people who have been wounded, who are afraid, who are searching for their place in the world.

A surprising—I might even say an appalling—number of them, including priests, pastors, and laypeople alike, have been badly hurt by the church. 

Whenever I lead a retreat it is at the same time a privilege and an awesome responsibility to be entrusted with people’s stories. If you listen well, there is always brokenness, for we are all broken in some way at some time, and how we deal with that brokenness determines, in a sense, the shape of our lives. I know this, because I lived a life with too much sadness, was broken by my brokenness, and the pain I suffered in the church growing up has been an important part of my story.

I wish my story were unusual, but it isn’t. This week, my dear friend Betty, who at age 75 drove 1500 miles from Florida to be present, told me stories about the ministers (there have been several) who have hurt her badly over the years. At her son’s untimely death, for example, when the preacher at his funeral had the opportunity to be pastoral and loving, he instead went for hellfire and brimstone, telling Betty’s bereaved daughter-in-law from the pulpit that if she didn’t shape up and reform her life, she would never see her husband again.

Betty says that she and her family were so stunned that they didn’t do anything but sit there. Now I’m sure she wishes they had gotten up and left the church. And yet, the grace of God is still moving in the world. In our time to make art earlier this week, Betty drew the three ministers who have been a source of pain of brokenness in her life—and arrows flowing around them, showing how God’s love came and continues to come to her despite the mistakes and shortcomings of those in the church.

It was an inspiring—if, unfortunately, all too typical—story about how the church hurts people it ought to help heal, and how, thankfully, a faithful person can still know God’s love when human beings and human institutions fall short.

I’ve talked over the past few years to people who have left the Episcopal Church because they felt betrayed or hurt by the progressive stance taken by national or local churches on the inclusion of gay people in the life of the church—and I’ve know gay people who have left the Episcopal tradition because they have felt betrayed or excluded. I have known people—my mother among them—who have had Christian friends and ministers turn their backs on them because of divorce, who have been shunned or shamed out of fellowship. I have read about the children and adults abused by priests and pastors and church workers, the slow and fumbling and often entirely un-pastoral responses of church bureaucracies to the suffering.

And honestly, I think it’s a wonder sometimes that anyone stays in religious community, since people so often disappoint us.

Although I have been a person badly hurt by the church and those in it, I can’t now claim to be simply a victim. Professional religious people, such as I am now, are often both hurt by people in the church, and responsible themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, for hurting others. While I have not done so with intention, I can think of times in the past few years when things I taught, said, or preached, have stuck into people like hooks, and some people have gotten so angry at me that they couldn’t bear to listen. When I was serving as a seminarian in Calvary Episcopal Church in Bastrop, Texas, for example, there was a certain man who would rise up from his pew and leave the building whenever he saw me get up to preach.

I don’t know what it was that I did or said to offend this man. But whatever it was, it was bad enough that he was willing to suffer the gaze of the congregation as he got up to go rather than suffer through twelve minutes of me in the pulpit.

I didn’t mean to hurt him—and if I had remained in the parish, I would have had to talk to him to try to resolve our issue. And I think I could have caught him if he didn’t see me coming first.

But the point is, even without intending to, the church and people in the church have damaged many people. Sometimes those actions are heinous; sometimes they are simply a by-product of people in community banging into each other. But in any case, we expect more from communities of faith, and when we don’t receive it, it hurts us deeply, in our very spirits.

As we alked about the desert last week at Ghost Ranch, about the men and women who came to the deserts of the Sinai and Egypt for solitude and self-examination and to pursue their spiritual paths, we tried not to ignore the fact that they were also still in community with each other—and that even among these strange and holy people, there was betrayal, back-biting, hypocrisy, and every other fault human beings can display.

Saint Anthony, the great first responder to the spiritual call to the desert once reminded others that their salvation was with their brothers. If we gain our souls and lose our brothers, we have done ill, he says.

We cannot live in relationship with others, whether in a church or in a shared flat, unless we are willing to forgive each other. In the desert tradition, we find powerful examples of forgiveness and communion between people we would not expect to have people skills—these hermits living in isolation in the desert. I’m especially drawn to the figure of Moses of Scetis, a big burly African man who once made his living as a robber, but then repented and came to the desert to seek his salvation. Often insulted by bigoted brothers, Moses let their words slide off him, and his own response of forgiveness is a powerful one. Once, called to come and help judge a fallen brother, he filled a leaky jug with water and set out to the meeting. When he arrived, they asked him what he was doing.

“My own sins leak out all around and I cannot see them” he said, “yet now I am called to judge the sins of another.”

Forgiveness and non-judgment are skills we have to cultivate to live together, but even more, people who call themselves Christian have got to learn to stop hurting each other.  

Jon Dee, Willie, and Gretchen Graham 

Maybe things were hard at home for Austin singer/songwriter/guitarist Jon Dee Graham; or maybe, as my friend Joe Behen, visiting from Kansas City said, he was having a bad night. Maybe his meds were a little out of balance. Maybe he was hoping for a bigger crowd. Maybe he was experiencing a little existential crisis. Whatever was going on, when we went to see him last Wednesday night at the Continental Club in South Austin, he was favoring the black and purple and blue parts of his palette, hitting us with a string of dark and wrenching songs like “Laredo,” a rock song about going across the border to participate in dark deeds. “Laredo” is a song about chaos, and it degenerates into a swirling chaos of screaming lead guitar and feedback every time he plays it, but it seemed to go on even longer than usual on Wednesday night.

I suggest existential crisis, because even Jon Dee’s banter, which usually is playful, was tilted toward the serious and cosmic. It was a good night to have taken a group of Episcopal priests to the Continental Club (five, plus a layperson, from a class I was teaching at the seminary); after one of the songs, Jon Dee began talking about God’s revelation in the world and about the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. “You ever read the Old Testament?” Jon Dee asked. “God just starts disappearing. The last thing he says is, ‘I will hide my face from you.’ And then you get to the end of the Old Testament, and he’s just vanished. Gone.”

I don’t know what the crowd was thinking, but this was fuel for my little group, to be sure. You wouldn’t imagine an Austin rock musician would be standing on the stage making a theological point about God’s disengagement with the world—but then again, this is the same Jon Dee Graham who a few months earlier, had told a crowd including a seminary friend and I from the stage that our society was too full of fear, the same guy who begged us not to be so afraid. Why be surprised if now he lamented God’s seeming silence in creation? Jon Dee is some kind of crazy rock-and-roll prophet.

However we define the root causes, I think Joe was right: Jon Dee was having a rough night. In his life or in his show, he was having a hard time believing. But despite that, in the midst of whatever it was that was going on with him, Jon Dee played two songs that showed another side of the story—and another side of himself. One was “Big Sweet Life,” a bouncy riff-based song with a chorus that repeats, “It’s a big sweet life.” And then Jon Dee closed his set with another song about the goodness of creation, “World So Full.”

 “World So Full” is a slow ballad that acknowledges the challenges of life—but counters with the beauty. It’s a lovely and bittersweet song, with a guitar solo that sounds like a person weeping with joy, a song whose last verse goes:

I know it’s hard

But I know it’s sweet

Complicated

And incomplete

But I am in love

I’m still in love

With the world so full

Don’t turn away

Don’t turn away

From the world so full

This is the voice of a man acquainted with sorrows. Jon Dee’s young son, Willie, suffers from a congenital disease, Legg-Perthes, a painful and degenerative bone disease. Although his family had insurance coverage, his insurer declared bankruptcy, leaving the Grahams with a mountain of hospital bills—and no way to get Willie insured, since his disease is now a “pre-existing” condition.

Jon Dee Graham’s life has been edged with darkness–with heartbreak, with chronic depression, with self-medication. And yet, he also speaks out of this well of experience, out of all the possible horrors of the world—that life is still worth living.

Beautiful, even.

That to turn away from the world so full is to give up on life—and to give up on the possibility of finding meaning in it.

What happened to Willie—and is happening still—is horrible. What happened to his family is horrible. But out of that darkness has also come beauty: Two years ago, a crowd of people put on two nights of rip-roaring Austin benefit concerts for Willie, headlining almost everyone who is anyone in Austin music. As Jon Dee said in an interview in the Austin Chronicle, “You think no one cares about you. So much of the time it’s hard for me to believe that my music makes it any farther than the end of the bar. Then seeing this night, and seeing how much people cared about Willie, and cared about my family. The whole thing was an act of grace by everyone.”

 Sounds like theology to me.

I spent last week at the seminary teaching priests and other interested parties about the ways God continues to speak into creation through our own creations—through fiction, spiritual autobiography, films, music, poetry and other works of the imagination. During that time we listened to poetry, talked about novels, watched scenes from films. We discussed Gilead, by Marilyn Robinson, a book I am teaching a lot this year. We talked about the film Magnolia, a movie that has always moved me. We read Raymond Carver’s heartbreaking and beautiful short story “A Small Good Thing,” a story about all the ways that life can break your heart—and give you tiny gifts so beautiful you can hardly stand it.

 We spent the week, in other words, learning about ways that grace is still coming into the world, even if God has given up speaking out of pillars of fire and that sort of nonsense.

We had worked hard all day doing this, so Wednesday night was supposed to be a play date—an evening of authentic Austin for people, some of whom were visiting town for the first time. But what we got was an continued lesson. Jon Dee’s set, taken as a whole, taught us about the way lots of people experience life—that it is hard, and painful, and sometimes so beautiful, so filled with grace, that it makes you weep.

We went to the Continental Club hoping to have a few beers and hear a great rock and roll show.

What we heard was God speaking to us, as God still does, through the honest voice of an artist:

I know it’s hard

But I know it’s sweet

Complicated

And incomplete

But I am in love

I’m still in love

With the world so full

Don’t turn away

Don’t turn away

From the world so full

The other night, I took my girlfriend Martha to see Shakespeare in the Park to celebrate her birthday (and that may be love in action, but it’s not really the subject of this post–or is it?). It was a beautiful evening, warm but not too warm, a breeze was blowing, and we had sangria and a picnic, and a good performance of a great play.

The play was Much Ado about Nothing, a comedy, according to Shakespeare, but a play that’s full of serious issues and serious moments as well. Because I’m a hopeless romantic, I’m always drawn to the love story. Or stories, rather. Shakespeare actually juxtaposes two couples, the young and passionate Count Claudio and his newly beloved lady Hero, with the wise and witty older pair Benedick and Beatrice, who spend most of the early play insulting each other—and insulting love.

The youngsters Claudio and Hero fall hard for each other. In fact, in Act One, Scene One Claudio professes (to Benedick and their liege Lord Don Pedro) his desire for Hero and his desire to be in love. But though he calls himself a lover, he proves himself to be unable to act upon that love—or at least, unable to act in love. In the play’s central action, Claudio is led to believe that Hero has been unfaithful to him and so, without even seeking the truth from the lips of the one he claims to cherish and honor above all, he denounces Hero to the community on their wedding day, causing her and her family great pain.

Claudio professes himself a lover and makes sport of Benedick for not being of his same mind where love is concerned, but Claudio proves himself something less than a believer through his actions. If, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, love is patient, trusting, and kind, then Claudio can call himself a lover until the cows come home—but his actions betray him as something else entirely.

Benedick, on the other hand, spends much of the play protesting that he’ll never fall in love—he’s one of those classic comic characters, who, as Shakespeare says, “protests too much.” Truly, he harbors a long and deep attachment to Beatrice that is prompted to the surface by those around them for their own sport. When they report for his hearing—falsely, although they’ve got the emotional truth of it—that Beatrice loves Benedick, but that she will never show it for fear he will reject her, he thinks it over and makes a profession of faith: “I will be horribly in love with her.”

But unlike Claudio, BEnedick is a character who both professes love—and acts upon it. When Claudio makes his false accusation of Hero, who is Beatrice’s cousin and dearest friend, Beatrice asks Benedick to betray his loyalty to his battle-tested comrades and challenge Claudio.

Boiled down to its simplest form, Beatrice’s argument is this: You say you love me. But will you demonstrate that love? Will that love change you?

At last, Benedick agrees, and he parts ways from those who have wronged his beloved to throw his allegiance to Beatrice and her family. He challenges Claudio to a duel—a duel that, thankfully, is never fought thanks to Shakespeare’s other plot devices. Later, when Beatrice confesses that, like her cousin, she is heartsick and broken from the events of the week, Benedick’s gentle and loving response shows how much his worldview has shifted from the one who mocked love and Beatrice both: “Serve God, love me, and mend.” Although he was slow to come to belief, Benedick is a lover who acts out that love—whose actions show that he is what he professes to believe.

I grew up in a Christian tradition in which belief was everything. Faith in God—or, more particularly, faith in Jesus as your savior and lord—was the ticket to Heaven. Admittedly there were some few pious and moral actions we took in support of those beliefs. We believed that your attendance at church and church functions was a measure of your faith. We believed that your willingness to bring others to belief was also a measure. But as for feeding the hungry, ministering to the sick, caring for the orphan and widow—well, I’m ashamed to say that I never heard those primary Judeo-Christian imperatives preached from the pulpit in my youth. Belief was primary, piety secondary—and action—well, we believed—probably because we took the apostle Paul too seriously—that our actions mattered much less than our belief and God’s grace.

Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. With apologies to Dickens, I want to suggest the post today could also be called A Tale of Two Bumperstickers. One is the slogan familiar to me from my growing-up years: God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It. And the other is a more symbolic slogan, although I think there are also times we should take it literally: Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is.

I don’t want to suggest—and I don’t think that Jesus intends to suggest—that belief is unimportant, or even that belief is somehow easy. Like the writer Anne Lamott, when it became clear to me that God was calling me into some kind of relationship that required my firm belief in Jesus, my first impulse was horror. I was, as Annie put it when confronted with her own leap of faith, appalled. I was a creative and intellectual person, I had a couple of college degrees, and every seriously Christian person that I knew in those days scared me a little. Or more than a little.

Chrysostom wrote that those who heard Jesus teaching on the mountainside were perhaps “stunned by the soaring level of the requirements he had made.” The Jesus we find in the Gospel of Matthew is pretty clear about what it is we are supposed to be doing to demonstrate our belief, to align our will to God’s so that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in God’s heavenly realm: Our love for Jesus is reflected in this world by our work for him.

Our care for each other—and for others—is a reflection of our love for him. Our concern for those who cannot take care of themselves, for those less powerful than ourselves, for those less affluent than ourselves—is a reflection of our love for him.

We can say we believe, or that we love—but do our actions prove it?

I’ll leave you to examine your consciences—and I will examine mine. And maybe, with God’s help, we can find some answers to take to a world in torment.

To explore the hard questions through the stories of people like Mrs. Gonzales and her family—to retell them, to think about them in such a way that others might benefit from them, and to consider how we might apply the collected wisdom on grief and suffering—is the purpose of this book. While I will hardly be able to absent myself from these pages—my observations and conclusions are essential parts of this process, and as Henry David Thoreau said, I would hardly talk so much about myself if I knew anyone else as well—the stories of the suffering I encountered in the hospital will be our entry into exploration. A hospital is a sort of laboratory for the study of suffering—hyper-realistic, dramatic, life with all the boring bits edited out. Whether loss of life, loss of loved ones, loss of health, the stories that occur daily in a hospital setting crystallize what it might take decades for us to learn in the course of a happy life.

This is a work of narrative theology. What I mean by that is that we will be telling and retelling stories, examining them for theological meaning (What can these stories tell us about God and our experience of God?), and sifting them for philosophical understanding (What wisdom can these stories give me about how I should live my life?). I have discovered that being able to put the pieces of our experiences together in some satisfactory way—telling a story that makes sense, if you will—is an essential part of that process. The thing is, even some of the stories we tell that make some sort of sense to us may be dangerous theologically, emotionally, spiritually. Believing that God is punishing you for your past sins by killing your son may allow you to make a sort of sense out of the trauma your family is experiencing, but it seems to me that it is an unhealthy kind of sense—and probably an unhealthy story about who God is and how God participates in our lives.

In the respect that we’ll be questioning some of the most common and widely held life narratives, this book has Postmodern tendencies: many of the so-called “master narratives” begin to leak when you fill them with grief, and pointing out their inadequacies in favor of individually-constructed narratives fits in with many of the developments in Postmodern thought. But I’m also still Modern enough to think there could be some overarching stories that work: you can’t be a person of faith if you don’t work to reconcile the conflicts between one-size-fits-all belief and personal practice and understanding. Some stories must (and do) mean something to many people—and still hold up under pressure.

One afternoon in our group time, Cyd, my CPE supervisor, told my colleagues and me that “Why?” is the question of all patients and those who love them (and perhaps of those who care for them as well). I believe that she was right, although that why often led people to a whole lot of other questions: Why has this happened to me? Why did God cause this (or permit it)? Haven’t I lived a good life? Aren’t I a good person? Didn’t I do everything that God required? Am I being punished? How am I going to get through this? Where is God when I need Him? Who or what is God, anyway?

I want to suggest that first we step back from all of these questions—even from what seems to be an initial why. Before we can ask why suffering has entered our lives, we first have to uncover our core beliefs about God, about ourselves, and about life itself—to tell, hear, and understand our foundational narratives.

“But this too is true—stories can save you.”

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

“There was a man—or woman—and . . . “ This is story, or at least, the bare beginnings of one. Narrative at its simplest level works in this way: you have a character or characters to whom something happens. That action or event may be the beginnings of a plot, but it is important to realize that what forms plot is our ability to make sequential actions fit together in some logical fashion. English novelist E. M. Forster described it in this way: The king died and the queen died is a sequence of events, but it most assuredly is not plot; however, the king died and the queen died of grief is. [1] Forster’s example reminds us that we cannot form stories without being able to connect the dots; action and character do not equal a satisfactory narrative without some sense of meaning.

Plot typically moves from an initiating action through complications toward some sort of climax and ultimate resolution. The climax may be a physical action: a woman wins an election, a man escapes from prison. But in many of the stories we’ll be telling (or retelling) here, the climax is emotional or spiritual, rather than physical, although it may arise from drama-laden physical actions. The events of these stories should lead us toward some sort of understanding, some sort of reflection that may bring us closer to enlightenment.

The literary term we employ in this regard is epiphany. You may know that this is not only a Greek word, but also a word with religious associations. It means, literally, “showing forth” or revelation; the religious relation is to the Feast of the Epiphany, the date on the feast calendar when we commemorate the “showing forth” of the God-incarnate child Jesus to the Wise Men of the East. Epiphany is what we hope for from a story: insight, inspiration, some understanding that we did not possess before.

So: character, plot (perhaps leading to an epiphany), and then we seek what literature teachers have always most loved, theme. What is this plot about characters truly about? What does it tell us about life? In words sometimes used by teachers, “What is the author [or Author] trying to tell us in this story?”

It is in theme that we find ultimate meaning: When we read, hear, or live a story, we ultimately seek to know what the point of the story is. What does it mean? As Forster noted in distinguishing between a simple story and a sequential plot, “If it is in a story we say: ‘And then?’ If it is in a plot we say ‘Why?’” [2] It is here that we come back to Cyd’s understanding of the patient’s fundamental question: I am in this story where these things are happening, and I really want to know why. Why?

Throughout the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well as in apocryphal documents like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus told stories: “There was a man—or a woman—who . . .” We know that people, sometimes great crowds of them, listened to his stories. Sometimes the stories were clear enough that Jesus’ rivals understood he was attacking them through the medium of narrative, but we can also feel certain that sometimes people simply scratched their heads even after they had listened carefully, because often someone (more often than not those rock-headed disciples) asked Jesus to delineate the meaning—to explain the themes of the story, if you will—for them, as in this instance from the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew:

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet. “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.”

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” [3]

Lessons are typically rooted deep in stories, not floating for easy harvest on the surface: we experience the events of stories, but they are not systematic in the way they present the world. We have to create our own systems, our own meaning. As the Apostle Paul might tell you, Jesus told stories, but you can’t found a faith tradition simply on stories; they have to be sifted for meaning.

Why did these events happen?

In the stories and discussions of grief we will consider here, meanings may be, at best, provisional; many of the people whose stories I stepped into in the hospitals during the summer were a long way away from coming to a complete understanding of their experiences, and even writing some time after the end of these events, I can’t be confident that I fully understand their import. We grow in wisdom and understanding as we reflect, gain critical distance, tell our stories again and again.

Anne Lamott notes at the conclusion of one of her essays that sometimes provisional meanings might have to be enough: “This is plenty of miracle for me to rest in now.”[4] Stories may also have mean different things to different people: the words of wisdom spoken by the Desert Fathers were often intended to “diagnose” a specific case, and my friend Rodger Kamenetz says that the great rabbis chose stories to tell individuals based on what they specifically needed to hear to be healed. In any case, no single story will lead us to a single simple understanding of the experience of suffering. Jesus didn’t tell a single story about the Kingdom and stop there: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this.” He told a number of them: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this. And this. And this.”

So we too will consider a number of stories to attempt to say something like, “Suffering is like this. And this. And this.”

And perhaps: “Suffering means this. And this. And this. Perhaps one of these is the story you need to hear to be healed.”

Not a cure. But, perhaps, a prescription.

Within these pages—and with these pages—I hope that you will sift through stories of grief to uncover at least one story that acknowledges the experience of suffering and that feels like a truth you can accept and make your own.

My very first day of CPE, I had to go to the sprawling Seton Medical Center to get my ID badge for the Seton system, and as I wandered the maze of hallways looking for the ID office, I got seriously lost, which I did nearly every time I entered that hospital. All summer I had nightmares about being lost in Seton Medical Center that were disturbingly similar to that first actual experience: Dead ends. Long hallways. Unmarked doors.

But at last I found the personnel photo office, had my picture taken, and emerged with the badge that would admit me to parking garages and emergency rooms throughout the Seton system and threaded my way back to the entrance of the hospital, and there at the front door, I observed a paramedic who was wheeling an elderly woman into the hospital from an ambulance. The woman lay atop the gurney, gray and drawn and clearly in distress as they began to process her for admission; he had stepped over to the volunteer station to ask a question, while

The paramedic also apparently was suffering.

“Uhm,” he said, fidgeting, as he leaned over to ask the red-vested volunteer at the desk in a low voice, “Can you tell me how to get to the closest bathroom?”

The Book of Common Prayer tells us that in the midst of life we are in death. But I believe it is also true that in the midst of death, life continues. What that means, is that even when they are confronted by suffering and pain, people still seek directions—and not just directions to the bathroom. What we will hope to do in this book is to discover some directions—perhaps not a one size fits all set leading everyone inexorably to the same destination, but at the very least a compass heading for the perplexed. In the exploration, we will hope to help people make meaning out of pain, develop their own working theology of suffering, and help those who experience suffering, whether directly or as caregivers and comforters. In the exploration, we will hope to find ourselves—and perhaps even something outside ourselves—in ways we never have before.

[1] E. M. Forster.  Aspects of the Novel. 1927. New York: Harvest, 1955. 86.

[2] E. M. Forster.  Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harvest, 1956. Page #.

[3] Matt. 13:34: 36 (NRSV). 

[4] Anne Lamott. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. New York: Anchor, 2000. 67.

This week I’m reading the final type-set pages for my book on grief, Stories from the Edge, which will be out in August. I want to share some of the first pages with you here in hopes you’ll find them interesting. It’s about my experiences as a hospital chaplain–and my reflections on my own difficult life and understanding of story in it. 

“When we find a difficulty, we may always expect that a discovery awaits us.”

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

Although Mrs. Gonzales was sitting with her family outside in the sixth floor waiting room, you could hear her wailing whenever the outer doors to the Intensive Care Units (ICU) opened. [1] Maybe that’s the practical reason explaining why the sixth-floor caseworker asked me to speak with her: her keening, her calls for her son Hector, her constant moans of “Why? Why?” might have been audible and even disturbing to some of the other patients fighting for life.

But it’s also possible that the caseworker asked me to talk with Mrs. Gonzales simply because she was so clearly a person in pain. The source of her anguish was readily apparent: her Hector lay in a bed in the Medical ICU (MICU), where his body, ravaged by alcohol and drug use, was failing him, one system after another. He was still a relatively young man, 46, and his rapid decline must have been traumatic to all those who loved him.

It was certainly traumatic to her.

As floor chaplain, it was my job to be present with people as they were in the midst of suffering, the midst of loss, and so it would have been my job to visit with Mrs. Gonzales, no matter what reason might have originally prompted the caseworker to direct me to her. So after getting some details on Hector’s case, I passed through the MICU toward the waiting area, glass-walled rooms containing seriously ill patients to my right as I walked. I pushed open the door to the waiting room, and as Mrs. Gonzales’ anguished call, “Hector! My son!” filled the hall, I breathed a prayer from Psalm 23 I used often that summer before I entered a room or confronted a situation: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.”

I found Mrs. Gonzales easily. She was a short, weeping woman in her 60s, seated against one of the walls, surrounded by her family, Hector’s children, and his ex-wife. I walked over to her, put my hand on her shoulder, and introduced myself: “Mrs. Gonzales, my name is Greg. I’m the chaplain for this floor. I heard that you had gotten some very hard news, and I’ve come to be with you.”

She looked up at me—registered my presence and my identity—and let out another cry: “Why, God? Why?”

I nodded my head in sympathy, but there was no good response to her question. All I could tell her was, “I’m sorry.”

There was no easy answer I could give, no panacea I could offer, and I had learned better than to try. She would have to earn her own answer. Only then could her story be complete.

I met Mrs. Gonzales during the summer of 2006, when I was a seminarian working as a chaplain intern at Brackenridge Hospital, the regional trauma center located in my hometown of Austin, Texas. During those twelve weeks I was enrolled in a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), I worked in house at Brackenridge every day, visiting patients and working with staff in the emergency room, in Intensive Care, and on a “regular” floor where cases were acute but not critical. I also rotated through regular nights and weekend shifts on-call when I served Brackenridge and four other Austin hospitals operated by Seton Hospitals as chaplain, responding to any spiritual emergency in the Seton system, whether heart attack, car crash, or frightening diagnosis. As part of the CPE process, I also met for three hours three times a week with a group of six peers and our CPE supervisor, Cyd, to discuss with them what I was seeing, feeling, thinking about, what we all were wrestling with during this experience of chaplaincy.

This last made my chaplaincy more than just a blur of images, voices, and pain: it also began to make some sense of what I was experiencing in patient’s rooms and with family and friends in halls and waiting areas. This was perhaps the first time in my life that I had been invited—nay, required—to try to process what I was experiencing as I experienced it, and it was vital, because what I was experiencing was far outside the middle-class world I normally inhabited.

Although I had lived a life that taught me plenty about pain and suffering, I had not experienced the kind of unexpected pain—and the results of it—that I observed and hoped to soothe all summer long. Since Brackenridge was a trauma center, we were a magnet for accidents, shootings, drownings—all sorts of immediate and unforeseen suffering. My patients, their friends and family, and our staff, were confronted by problems that sometimes seemed to have come out of thin air. Mrs. Gonzales, for example—in the moment after she met me and asked why God was doing this, told me, “He was getting better. He went to Mass with me on Sunday.” For her, as for many of those I met that summer, this sudden illness and impending death made no sense.

During the summer, I heard the stories of many people like Mrs. Gonzales who suddenly found themselves in places of suffering, loss, or mourning: Michael, a 15 year old boy shot in the back because he said he had tried to bum cigarettes off the wrong guy; the mother and brother of Lewis, a 35 year old ex-con, who told me that they had not even known Lewis was out of prison and back in town until the hospital social worker located them and notified them that he was dying in the ICU of liver and kidney failure; the family and fiancé of Amanda, a beautiful 21 year old girl badly injured in a motor vehicle accident (MVA), who came up to the hospital faithfully and remained hopeful although Amanda never regained consciousness during my weeks as the chaplain on her floor; Carina, the mother of a 17 year old boy with Down’s Syndrome, who had turned her back on him for only a moment, but during that moment he had fallen into the lake, drowned, and subsequently been revived and brought to Brackenridge; Howard, an 87 year old man with a couple of months left on a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, who wanted to know what God was really like, and who asked me flat out if God would mind if we prayed for a miracle.

We should be clear about one thing from the outset of this book: while I was a good chaplain when the chips were down, I do not think of myself as a hero, and my intent here is not to write a story about the life of a hospital chaplain (although such a book might be of some interest and even of value, particularly if it were focused on people like the staff chaplains alongside whom it was my honor to work and learn). No; the focus of this book is not on what I did on my summer vacation, but on what a person like myself—a teacher, storyteller, and theologian—learned about some of our most important faith questions as a result of inhabiting the roles of observer, comforter, and representative of the universal Church in those moments of grief and loss. Where is God in the midst of suffering? How do people find strength, comfort, courage, and faith in the midst of terrible adversity like Mrs. Gonzales’ pain? How can caregivers, family, and friends stand alongside such terrible suffering?

To explore those questions through the stories of people like Mrs. Gonzales and her family—to retell them, to think about them in such a way that others might benefit from them, and to consider how we might apply the collected wisdom on grief and suffering—is the purpose of this book. While I will hardly be able to absent myself from these pages—my observations and conclusions are essential parts of this process, and as Henry David Thoreau said, I would hardly talk so much about myself if I knew anyone else as well—the stories of the suffering I encountered in the hospital will be our entry into exploration. A hospital is a sort of laboratory for the study of suffering—hyper-realistic, dramatic, life with all the boring bits edited out. Whether loss of life, loss of loved ones, loss of health, the stories that occur daily in a hospital setting crystallize what it might take decades for us to learn in the course of a happy life.

[1] I have changed the names of all patients, family, and medical staff throughout the book to protect their privacy. I have, however, preserved essential details about their lives—ethnicity, family history, family dynamics, medical details, and so on—in the interest of presenting their stories authentically. I have preserved the names of my fellow chaplains unless otherwise noted.

I’ve been talking a lot about Iron Man lately, the first of the summer blockbusters, and not only a great comic book film, but a movie with a lot to say about spiritual and cultural matters. It’s a shame that these days we tend to get more involved commentary from our cineplexes then from our elected officials, but thank God that someone somewhere has the courage to ask hard questions and suggest hard truths–even if they come in the guise of a blockbuster about an armored superhero.

First, a word about the change of heart that is at the heart of this movie: Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a billionaire inventor and arms merchant, a dissolute playboy, a man who should be happy, as our world understands happiness. But that happiness is brittle, built on nothing that matters, nothing that lasts, and Yinsen (Shaun Toub), who serves as Tony’s assistant and mentor, brings this out in questions he asks after he has saved his life: “What is your legacy? . . . You’re a man who has everything–and nothing.”

This is familiar spiritual territory; I seem to remember Jesus imagining someone a lot like Tony Stark, who has everything our world says can give you happiness–and yet who has no happiness. In the magisterial words of the King James version, Mark 8: 36 reads:

 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

 Or as I recently rendered it in The Voice of Mark, “Really, what profit is there for you to gain the whole world and lose yourself in the process?”

The point is this: we’re looking in Iron Man at the scramble for meaning that every human faces, and although our culture tells us we’ll find it in seeking pleasure (Tony Stark sleeps with every supermodel he can find, drinks expensive scotch that I probably couldn’t even properly appreciate, and lives in a mansion in Malibu that looks like a super-villain hangout from a Bond film), in the pursuit of capital (Stark has a stable of expensive cars, a customized private jet, and a multi-national conglomerate that has money pouring in from selling his imaginative weapons designs across the globe), in the acquisition of status or celebrity (Tony graces the cover of every magazine, and in the opening scene, when a soldier in Afghanistan asks if he can take his picture with him, we get the sense that Stark is like Michael Jordan-big, except that his fame comes not from slam dunks but from dealing death), Tony doesn’t find it anywhere.

What is his legacy? A world full of armaments, of maimed civilians and combatants, of impressive explosions. One of the terrorists who captures Tony in fact congratulates him on being “the most famous mass-murderer in the history of America.” And then, the change of heart: Tony is taken captive in Afghanistan, sees his weapons being used to kill American soldiers and non-combatants, and has to absorb what until then he has been able to put out of his mind: that his wealth is built on a pyramid of death and suffering. He looks death in the eye, realizes that his life has counted for nothing, and resolves to be a different sort of person. 

It’s a deeply Christian (and, of course, more broadly spiritual) impulse we find in most films about heroes: Tony Stark resolves to use his gifts for good instead of for evil, for the common welfare instead of for personal gain. When Yinsen sacrifices himself so that Tony can escape, Tony is still discovering what it all means, but he begins to see the shape of it.”Thank you for saving me,” he tells Yinsen, who replies (in shades of Saving Private Ryan), “Don’t waste your life.”

The spiritual impulse not to waste our lives often leads to the renunciation of a past life with its mistakes and failures, a true repentance for misdeeds, and a resolve to change, a change of heart, in its deepest meaning. (I think it’s not accidental that one of the central images in the film is the glowing circle over Tony’s heart). In the Christian tradition, that process is usually connected to the Greek word Metanoia, which in Bible translations is often translated (unfortunately, I think) simply as “repentance.” Because it’s not enough simply for someone to repent of past sins; he or she must also show evidence of what we professional Christians call “an amended life.” 

And that’s what the rest of the movie is about; Tony’s determination to be a new creation, to turn from his (and his corporation’s) former sins, to help others. It’s a beautifully concrete application of that spiritual lesson, made even more poignant because it’s represented by the changed life of the actor who plays Tony Stark, Robert Downey, Jr. What makes this casting work is not just Downey’s expressive face and eyes, not just his intelligence. I think the producers of this film also believed that Downey knew about the desire to turn from one life and lead another, more worthy one. It’s a personal and professional redemption we see in the story, and it’s doubly powerful. When Tony says to his assistant Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) that he hopes to have a girlfriend who is “proud of the man I’ve become,” we feel that pride ourselves. We feel it for Tony Stark.

And for Robert Downey, Jr., as well.

Finally, a word about the cultural critique implicit in this film. For all we say about our desire for America to be a force for peace, and our image of ourselves as international philanthropists, I think it’s important to face the fact that America is the world’s largest arms merchant. It was a matter of no small concern that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program in Iraq that could kill a lot of people, but we knew it for certain because Western corporations and governments had put those weapons into his hands so that he could kill Iranians in their long and bloody war. America has actually lived out the words Tony uses about his conversion experience: “I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I had created to defend them.”

The war/peace debate is a long and involved one, but it might be simplified by this question: What is our legacy?

Will people remember the liberators of Europe?

Or the American landmines littering the world?

Maybe it’s time for a change of heart. 

Summer is approaching, which means lots of things: in Texas, where I live, it has generally meant a lot of hot and muggy weather such as we are enjoying now (although last year, climate changes gave us a cool wet summer instead—welcome but weird). It means no university teaching for me, if a whole lot of other teaching around the world. And it means a new crop of movies based on comic books and graphic novels, and this summer’s group of superhero films offers some provocative things to think about as we watch things blow up and people in outlandish costumes fight for truth, justice, etc.

Over the past five years, superhero films have been not only among the most popular, but in some cases, also some of the most theologically and spiritually-profound movies in American cinemas. I know this is quite a claim, but at their heart, superhero films are able to deal directly with some of our most important spiritual themes—those of justice, good and evil, violence, redemption, and heroism. 

A movie like Batman Begins (2005) offers a profound investigation of the various meanings of justice; not only does it explore retributive justice (and, refreshingly, condemn it), it also suggests more ancient understandings of justice as a positive practice instead of a punishment in reaction to some committed crime. Spider-Man III (2007), while it had its narrative flaws,  foregrounded issues of ego, power, and the desire for revenge. Other superhero films deal with the possibilities of human good and evil and the true definition of heroism as self-sacrifice. If you pay attention at the multiplex, these films suggest, you might even learn something.

This summer, Will Smith, past King of Memorial Day Blockbusters, is starring as a flawed superhero in Hancock, and while this movie isn’t directly based on a character from the comics, it offers some typical superhero themes. Smith’s character is deeply-flawed, and the movie looks as though it will examine the nature of heroism in a culture of celebrity. Heroes are more interesting when they’re flawed, as the successful Spider-Man and Batman films suggest (and the ongoing difficulty in making Superman dramatically interesting affirms). Director Peter Berg notes that Hancock “does as much damage as good”—perhaps an analogue for the current American superheroic mania to try and resolve every issue with force. But one doesn’t have to get too deeply into cultural readings to enjoy the idea of a flawed character trying to do the right thing, since for people of faith (and all people of good will), that is a deeply-familiar story, one that looks back at them from the mirror every morning.

Iron Man, due out in early May, is another film with a deeply-flawed hero that could open a dialogue with current events, since its hero, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an arms magnate/industrialist who finds himself using his technology to fight evildoers. Stark has long been one of comics’ most troubled heroes (his battles with alcoholism brought a real-life issue to life for many young readers), and this film too will resonate with viewers for its exploration of good and evil within the person of its hero. Iron Man also suggests our ongoing ambivalence toward technology and science: Will they solve all our problems, or make them worse?  The Modern myth of progress has always told us that we could invent our way toward perfection, but some of the uses of science and technology in the last century—at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to name just two—showed that we might simply have found a better way to destroy ourselves. Iron Man compels our attention since its main character uses science to become a human weapon; a less-heroic figure using similar technology would—and does—become a force for evil rather than good.

This summer’s installment of the Batman story, The Dark Knight, follows perhaps the most-acclaimed of superhero films, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. The figure of the Joker (Heath Ledger) is one of the most interesting elements of this film. Where does this kind of primeval evil come from? Has Batman in some way brought him into being? And are Batman and the Joker alike in anything more than adopting costumes and over-the-top methods? Batman stories also always revolve around the question of justice; ever since Bruce Wayne’s (Christian Bale) parents were killed by a gunman when he was young, he has devoted his entire life to battling evil. How much of that is impartial justice—a desire not to see others suffer as he has suffered? And how much of that grows out of resentment and the desire for revenge? The first is clearly healthier and more laudable, yet in American narratives and history, the second often takes precedence. The archetypal narrative of violence in American history is that of Pearl Harbor—if you throw the first punch, we’ll come after you with overwhelming force.—but it’s also present in our stories of vigilante justice.

Finally, following up the cult success of Hellboy (2004), director Guillermo del Toro and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola give us Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, another apocalyptic epic centering on the red-skinned character (played by Ron Perlman) who is the son of a demon prince and a human witch, an unlikely servant of Good against the cosmic forces of Evil. Hellboy raises questions about choice and free will, about our ability to choose good over evil, and, as in the first film, revels in apocalyptic discourse. How and why will the world end? Should we struggle against that end or accept it? While popular culture typically gives us different answers than Jewish and Christian faith, they both suggest that on the other side of the cataclysm is a better world, which should give us hope in the face of looming destruction. 

Superhero films distill many of our central spiritual questions into dramatic morality plays. They explore the conflict between good and evil, and the difficulty sometimes of knowing which is which. They play out our continuing quest for justice, desire for a better tomorrow, and hope that something larger than we are might step in and save us. And when they do these things with skill—or even, in some cases, with beauty—they move from being simply pop entertainment and actually begin to do the things that art does—move us, shake us, and inspire us. 

I was listening to some punsters–excuse, me, pundits–on MSNBC last night talking about how change has become the buzzword of this election (and how could it not, with more than eighty per cent of Americans convinced the nation is going to hell in a handbasket, as evidenced by this most recent poll in TIME magazine), and I was thinking about how change is both necessary and frightening, how those who call for change can be both lionized and villainized, and how change fits into our understandings as Christians, Americans, human beings. 

So, just an enormous topic. But I think at last I found something to write about this week. 

The Senate just held hearings on the war in Iraq, and on the Bush administration’s decision to continue as they’ve been doing (”stay the course,” if you will), leaving any substantive decisions about Iraq to the next president. As I read the signs from Iraq, we have achieved some tactical military victories, which, God help us, we should, as the mightiest military power in the world.

But the internal political turmoil doesn’t seem to have changed–not only do we see the continuing lack of ability to govern, not only do we see continuing strife between Sunni and Shiite, now, in fact, we seem to have a Shiite-Shiite confrontation for power, in the ongoing contest between the Iraqi “prime minister” Nouri al-Maliki and “radical cleric” Muqtada al-Sadr (yes, I’m using air quotes). To suggest that we change what we’re doing, again, seems obvious, but what to change?

Democrats (and some Republicans) call for us to withdraw our troops from Iraq. John McCain suggests we change our tactics, but supports an ongoing peace-keeping mission as in North Korea, for a hundred years, or a thousand years, as he said in New Hampshire. Peaceniks do not want to hear that Iraq will be a mess if we leave; hard-core militarists say that to withdraw from a battle we should never have fought is “losing.” In either case, to change our course in Iraq will be difficult and painful.

From a Christian ethical viewpoint, I feel torn between responsibility to keep the peace and responsibility not to make war to do it. Colin Powell’s “you break it, you own it” comment, made to the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq, presaged our moral responsibility not to leave the situation worse off then we found it (and yes, you can be glad Saddam Hussein is gone and still see that in many ways, we have made things worse for the Iraqis who have stayed behind and not been displaced or murdered), yet I’m not sure that there is a simple solution such as “stay the course” or “let them handle it” that will ever bring these people to the table.

In the Senate hearings, Barack Obama asked if a “messy, sloppy status quo” would be acceptable, if that would allow us to bring many or most of our troops home out of harm’s way. I think a sloppy status quo may be the best we can hope for in a multi-ethnic preserve like Iraq created by the Colonial powers without regard to self-determination. People were suffering there before we arrived; people have suffered while we were there; people will suffer after we have gone.

From a Christian ethical standpoint is our primary responsibility not to cause suffering, or is it to alleviate suffering, even if it requires military might to do so?

That’s where I get caught up. My Christian pacifism begins to get a little fuzzy when you bring real-live human beings into it. And yet, my faith tells me that militarism is un-Christian, that military solutions are un-Christian, and that if my nation is not in danger of destruction (and frankly, I can’t construct a scenario where even the best-armed and most determined terrorist group represents the kind of extinction-level threat to the US that Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany did), there is no rationale for a just war, even using the most expansive definition of violence a Christian might support.

This kind of conundrum is often present when we think about change, both in international affairs and in the very personal affairs of our lives. If we saw a simple choice, we would take it; if we saw an easy route, we would follow it. The fact that often every possibility requires something of us makes change difficult, and explains why we so rarely undertake it except in times of crisis.

I can’t speak for you and your own personal situation, but I think nationally we are in a time of crisis, and the possibility of change is at last real, however threatening it might seem. The Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is etymologically revealing: the sign is made up of two other signs, “danger” and “opportunity.” We stand in a moment of danger–but that moment of danger may provide us with the impetus to discover great opportunities. Perhaps this crisis will give us the opportunity we need to make certain that our elderly can have the medications they need, that almost fifty million of us who are uninsured can somehow have access to preventative as well as emergency health care, that people who work for a living don’t have to take two jobs while the CEO of their corporation rakes in a salary out of proportion to his risk–and his work–while he enjoys tax cuts and exports jobs overseas. 

And so on. And so on. It’s clear from my concerns here that national security, border security, and other issues are less important to me than so-called justice issues. But the truth is, if America falls, I don’t believe it will be at the hands of a foreign enemy. I don’t think there will be barbarians in the street.

Unless we ourselves are the barbarians.

Eighty per cent of us say we are headed in the wrong direction. Let’s talk, honestly and respectfully, about what might be the right direction.

And then, let’s do more than talk about our direction. Let’s change it.