Easter, Actually

Every year on Good Friday at All Saints Church, we sing one or two versions of the spiritual "Were You There". It's gripping, and I often break into tears singing it, even though I'm usually standing in front of a few hundred people during the noon to 3pm service when singing it.

For the last several years, I've also sung it at around 7pm, as I have served as the cantor for the Via Crucis / Stations of the Cross march from our church, around the Courthouse, Police Station, Homeless center, Jackie Robinson memorial, and ending at City Hall. Quite symbolic locations for the stations in my opinion. While singing it this year, it occurred to me that it's in the wrong grammatical tense. It's sung in the past tense when we should be singing it in the present tense.

Are you there when we crucify our Lord
Are you there when we crucify our Lord
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
Are you there when we crucify our Lord

Are you there when we nail him to the tree
Are you there when we nail him to the tree
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
Are you there when we nail him to the tree

Are you there when we lay him in the tomb
Are you there when we lay him in the tomb
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
Are you there when we lay him in the tomb

And it needs to be in the present tense, because Easter isn't just about what happened 2000 years ago. The events leading to Easter, yes, occurred in the past, but Easter is more than that single day. Even the liturgical calendar has Easter spanning 50 days, almost one out of every seven days. Think of it as "and on the 7th day, He rose".

Easter is the apex of the liturgical year, and the 27 different services that occurred during Holy Week at All Saints sure feels like everything led up to it. The resurrection is God’s great revelation and is the center of worship for practicing Christians. But is Easter truly joyful? Does it speak of unimaginable love, for us, between us, about us? Is it a celebration that permeates our lives? If so, wouldn't we accept Easter every day, regardless of the liturgical season or which sport happens to be on television? We celebrate it weekly at the Eucharist, but do we carry that joy with us throughout our day?

I don't think most of us do. And I think that most of us forget about Easter because we forget about the intensity of Holy Week and the Passion most of the time. We think that Christ was crucified by the Romans at the request of the temple authorities 2000 years ago.

But don't we crucify Christ today? Don't we do crucify Christ every day when we ignore those he commanded us to love as He loved us? Don't we Christ to the tree when we turn a blind eye to injustice in our midst? Don't we lay Christ in a tomb every time we forget to give thanks for all that we have?

If we can remember these things when we hear about executions, about poverty, about homelessness, if we can remember these things when we walk past the hungry on the street, if we can remember that we crucify and nail throughout our day - yesterday, today, and tomorrow - perhaps we can remember that the story doesn't have to end on some Sunday in April or March.

Perhaps every day, we can feel the pain of the cross. And every day, we can live into the promise revealed by the Resurrection. And our lives can be intertwined with each other, as we balance the tears and pains of our day with the joys of our day. And that we can actually appreciate Easter throughout the year.

Perhaps every day can be Easter. Everywhere. Perhaps we can have Easter, Actually.

I Love to Forgive... But You Go First - Part 2

Continued from "I Love to Forgive... But You Go First - Part 1"


The key takeaway from the last blog seems to be the focal point. We cannot forgive until we stop focusing on the other person. When we think about the pain, we think of ourselves. When we think of the solution, we look to the other person to heal us. That's not possible. Even if they said "Sorry", you cannot internally be healed by such words. The healing is intrinsic to yourself.

Forgiveness is not so much about the other person as it is about what is happening within us. Do our hearts allow us to heal? Forgiveness is all about us through and through. If we truly want to heal, we have to exorcise the demon controlling us from within. Only with such an expulsion will we have enough room to heal. That monster stops us from letting the Holy Spirit in because we're too busy focusing on the other person.

The sad part about not forgiving is that you become your own prisoner. You poison the well not because you're trying to harm yourself, but because you're so focused on others, you don't realize that your well has gotten infested with disease. It's vital to let go of the anger and hurt. Leave it somewhere else. Do yoWe u practice meditative walks in a labyrinth? Leave the pain in the center. Do you walk in the countryside? Leave it in the woods. Some who attend church services on Ash Wednesday write down their pains and sins on a piece of paper and it's those papers that are burned into ashes. Mark your head with those ashes, reminding yourself that they came from you but have been sent to the fire.

This isn't easy and doesn't come overnight. You've got to wait, strengthen, and find nourishment to swell past the small space you left for your heart. But always remember, when patience is lacking, that God's grace forgives first and foremost. If Jesus asks that we be forgiven, then we ourselves must work towards that same forgiveness of others. Our rebirth comes from God forgiving us our sins. We can be set free, if only we allow and see that freedom.

Perhaps we need to consider forgiveness and pain in context with other contrasting reactions. The prayer normally attributed to St Francis is one of my favorite healing prayers, especially in times when forgiveness is challenging. It helps me because it contrasts pain and pardon with other difficult reconciliations. When I pray for the strength to forgive, I start here.

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I Love to Forgive... But You Go First - Part 1

The great political news of today and of my entire life seems to revolve around retaliation and mistrust. We have to account for past grievances and don't believe you're going to follow through. Every gets mad at countries for pursuing such tactics. We're always climbing into war, wasting resources, sacrificing our young men and women on the battlefield.

Yet this isn't something unique to countries or politics. It's within us. It's a human trait. And if we retaliate and mistrust, we're not going to be able to forgive.

We talk about forgiveness often in church. I mean, really, very often. But it's almost as though we can't help ourselves in blocking efforts to forgive. We automatically abandon or make impossible forgiveness when we place demands on the other person. We ask that they accept responsibility for their actions. I don't want to forgive but feel like I'm required to do so. Only the weak forgive.

People tend to put words in other people's mouths. We assume that they don't really want to move forward. We give them unpleasant personalities characteristics, thinking that they're careless at best, but like just unappreciative or mean. Our own personal accountability is negated because it's entirely the other person's fault. We say, "I'm willing to forgive, but you have to take the first step."

We can't move forward with such thinking. And during Lent, I think and pray hard on how to dispel these innate actions every human being seems to do. To forgive, we have to be stronger than this. This action, this default, genetic way of doing things, is actually the weaker position. It takes enormous strength to overcome our predispositions. For many it seems impossible. It may be, but I think as Christians we're urged and compelled to try.

Now, I'm not saying that forgiveness means the other person has no responsibility. That person may be 99% responsible for every action leading to the transgression. Actions lead to consequences and that cannot be circumvented. But the key to forgiveness is not to let the other person off the hook. It's to let YOU off the hook.

It's all about you after all!

Maybe time to change the words to Carly Simon's song. "You're in pain, you really should think this wrong is about you."

When we fail to forgive, we're hostage to the other person. They have control over us that we cannot escape. They're not even trying and they have you in their hands.

So how do we move forward?

I'll think about this some more... Stay tuned

Shaken, and Stirred - Christianity and Torture

I'm finally able to put down some words regarding the release of The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate by the Pew Forum. It's a study with a somewhat small sample of under 800 people that seems to indicate that a large majority of evangelical Christians strongly agree with the belief that torture can usually or sometimes be defended. Mainline Christians form only a slight majority, but a majority nonetheless. Secular folks form a large majority -- against torture. Moreover, the study seems to show that the more often you attend weekly Christian church services, the more likely you will defend torture.

I simply don't understand how Christian beliefs can defend torture. After all, we're not talking about realpolitik policies, about secular governments, about the presumed guilt of those being tortured. We aren't discussing the efficacy of torture or the differences in political parties. The study supposedly showed a simple correlation between Christian identity and support for the use of torture.

The press releases from Pew started coming out last year. I guess they really wanted to make a splash with their findings, so they waited for a nice slow news week to really knock it out of the park. The results certainly caught everyone's attention. It's all over the blogs. And this weekend, Rector Ed Bacon at my church in Pasadena (All Saints Episcopal Church) chose to bring it up in his sermon. And now, even I am moved to write about it.

Since everyone from the Huffington Post and Fox News has an opinion, I figure I'm not alone.

But my thoughts were slow in finding form and substance. It wasn't until I saw Hugo Schwyzer's post that I was able to put my thoughts down. In an outraged, passionate way, he described what he saw as irreconcilable differences between Christianity as he practices it and the "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the US practiced it.

Both Father Ed and Hugo were ashamed and scandalized by the findings. I'm not so much ashamed as baffled and enormously saddened.

But, as I've reviewed the blogs and literature in the past week since hearing about the Pew study, contradictions seem to abound. I usually understand the consequentialist argument to be mostly inconsistent with most Christian doctrine. Whether it's from my Roman Catholic upbringing or my fascination with fundamentalism in high school or my collegiate libertianism, I've understood typical Christianity to disavow calculated ends-justify-the-means utilitarianism.

I recall a Pat Robertson sermon where he debunked Marxist thinking because of such amoral philosophy. I use amoral as he would have, but consequentialism does anticipate a greater good as a consequence of the possibly immoral behavior that caused it, so there is to me a real and definite moral structure there. After all, isn't Christ's death the ultimate "ends justify the means" sort of thinking that would please a John Stuart Mills?

But most of torture's Christian apologists don't talk from a right is right and wrong is wrong perspective. Rather than the expected deontological assertions, I was surprised that most seem to bring up political, non-Christian utilitarian arguments. Saving lives matters more than the torture of a single person, whether that person has guilt, guilt by association, presumed guilt, or innocence. This moral weighting of good and bad actions seems more consistent with the secular world than the Christianity world.

These arguments even come from folks who also argue that abortion under all circumstances is immoral. I'm terribly confused by this. This is a reversal of typical positions, to me, and it confounds me.

To be blunt, if one can save the life of one person by torturing another, then it seems easier to justify that the life of a mother can be saved by killing a fetus (killing at best, torturing and killing at worst).

Maybe I'm missing the point. Is it because the typical torture victim is a non-US citizen? If so, then I'm more worried if racism or xenophobia plays a part. Are we saying it's ok to torture people if they're not Americans? Not Christians?

Again with the comparison to abortion, what if the mother of the fetus were a non-US citizen and non-Christian, and the about-to-be-an-American fetus (with its mother) were currently in America? And why or how could Christian behavior be based on one's legal nationality anyway? Are the souls that our missionaries seek to save of a second class nature in God's realm? All this seems even more odd when Paul was so adamant that Gentiles and Jews are both saved by Christ.

So if abortion can or cannot be discussed in absolute terms, why or why not torture? The "under certain circumstances" phrase used in the torture justifications has typically been seen as one given by so-called wet liberal Christianity and secularism. (I've understood Liberal Christians as being folks like Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists. Oh wait, George W Bush and Dick Cheney were both Methodists. Interesting.) But in this topic, the phrase is found all over the blogs that defend torture, on ethical grounds or not.

What of the presumed innocence of the tortured person? The discussion on this aspect seems to treat is as an under-whelming inconvenience. It seems far easier for defenders of torture to assume that the person being tortured is somehow deserving of this treatment because they have already been found guilty of withholding information. Moreover, since "time is of the essence" arguments are put forth, innocence is largely irrelevant anyway.

Would any of these arguments been used by the British during the American revolution? Perhaps. We were fighting in a largely guerrilla fashion after all. Had the term existed then, I'm sure some of the British would have called us terrorists.

Would we apply this thinking to American citizens today? If a US citizen could stop a criminal act by divulging information, wouldn't waterboarding be justifiable? Would 183 acts of waterboarding be justifiable (the number is supposedly how often one person was waterboarded during the preceding federal administration)?

Is the number of torturous acts permissible directly related to the number of lives in question? Can you torture one person to save one person? If the number of lives threatened aren't known, is that unknown number to be treated as millions of people. Do we torture a person if we think Hiroshima and Nagasaki will land on our shores?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki of course are the ultimate in irony in the torture debate. Imagine the background story: Millions of innocent, unsuspecting lives are at stake. Every soldier you come across may have information on how this dastardly deed will be performed and where and when. Clearly, following the teological arguments most Christians seem endorse, it's justifiable and right to torture every one of those soldiers to prevent the nightmare that happened.

Since those soldiers were not tortured, two cities got nuked. Those who did not die immediately suffered miserably for the next two decades as radiation poisoning punished them for being in the wrong place. Casualties of war is one thing, but these innocent civilians, children and adults, bore the burden of cancer and other maladies for years after. All of this could have been avoided through torture.

If I am to read this correctly, 1940s Japan had every right to torture every American, Filipino and Australian soldier within any notable distance from its shores. WWII Japan had a moral entitlement and duty to torture scientists who could somehow prevent the situation.

Moving away from history, since utilitarian positions are acceptable when it comes to torture, do they apply to children? I recall many a times when a team of kids would encourage a slower, less skilled child on. That's nice. That helps everyone. And then they go too far. They do it in anger and fear. They bully the child to do better. They yell, punch, taunt, push. They want the team to win, and this one child's not going to keep them from winning. The greater good is that the team wins, isn't it?

And, if a child knows who will be causing a terrorist act (as many children in other parts of the world are in fact deployed as mules and messengers in war), is it acceptable to torture a child? Why the adult and not the child? Both might carry the same amount of useful information. There is an equal amount of benefit. The person to be tortured is just far smaller and far younger.

I think my final confusions over the study swirl around the responses of the non-Christian respondents. The folks who attended church least frequently or who were self-identifying as non-Christian were the least likely to endorse torture.

Are their positions as such because they are totally manipulated by the liberal media? If so, then are the Christian respondents just as manipulated by Fox News?

Are secular folks generally pacifist? That could explain their aversion to torture, as it would be consistent with their moral structures. But it certainly seems a gross oversimplification. Besides, the horrific genocides of the past century were done by secularists whose ends justified the means.

Irrespective of how the less- and non-Christian world finds torture unjustifiable, I'm shaken that self-identifying Christians sound less like my beloved Matthew 22:36-40 than the secular folks. And what exactly then do Matthew 7:12 (Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets), Luke 6:31 (And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise), and Luke 10:25-28 mean to Christians? Even a non-literalist like myself has to ask "Don't these verses mean anything any more?"

No, I cannot condone the torture of an individual, guilty or innocent, for the presumed greater benefit. In my love of Christ, I cannot imagine how the Lord would ever say that it's plumb ok to waterboard. I do not want to be the Roman crucifier. I do not want someone to do it in my name. I will not be the first to throw a stone.

And, to simplify, torture does not pass the simplest and oldests tests in morality.

Torture doesn't pass the standard set by Confucious: Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself
Torture doesn't pass you out of this Karmic cycle of rebirth
Torture doesn't pass the test of the Golden Rule
Torture doesn't pass the test: What would Jesus do?

Share on Facebook