A Different Kind of Ministry

About thirty-five years ago I thought I could possibly resolve my long-standing quandary about vocation if I prepared for work as a clergyman or in some other church ministry.  Theology and Biblical scholarship interested me, so I enrolled in seminary on a part-time basis.  It was intellectually stimulating, but something about the trajectory of most of the students and the professors seemed similar to competition I'd encountered everywhere else.  From my attempts to make it as a writer or a musician it was clear that success in competitive professions requires an edge that I don't have.

I've met people in church who seemed beyond this aggressive striving.  The church deploys these people into a world in need of support for the creative impulse that dies in most of us without encouragement or support.  Could I be one of the people who bring out the best in others?  A master's degree in theology, unfortunately, didn't lead where I had hoped it would.

Where I go to church now, there is an old scholar who has taught in prestigious universities and worked as a translator of the Hebrew scriptures.  With unflagging interest in Biblical texts, after retirement between his 70th and 90th year, he has written a series of books accessible to laymen.  He is an ordained priest and serves voluntarily to preach or administer the Eucharist, but his ancillary ministry is of the kind that I think is more to be cherished than that of many full-time salaried professionals.  

He listens with genuine interest to those he meets in the narthex or in the aisles before or after church services.  My wife and I are musicians with concert recordings.  He listened to a couple of hours of our music and asked for translations of the foreign language songs.  My wife has read, and reread, a difficult book on psychology and paranormal experience titled Irreducible Mind.  After her conversation with this saint about the issues it raises, he took it upon himself to read the book and discuss it. He doesn’t have time on his hands.  He still jets around the country to speak at various conferences, and he continues to write.

Among the professors I met in seminary two of them stand out in memory.  I'm still friends with one of them.  Now retired, he was for many years director of the Seattle extension of a high-profile institution.  While I was in seminary, I talked with him at various times for reasons dealing with my academic matriculation, but one day in passing I offered a bit of my writing, a contemporary paraphrase of one of the Gospels.  To my everlasting gratitude, he read it the same day.  He used it in one of his courses on the Gospels.  Another professor who worked for a publisher also read it and ran it through editorial review. That it didn't make the final cut is irrelevant to my theme.  He saw some talent in me and did what he could to give me a lift.

There are many encouraging people who work in church ministries.  What is the Kingdom of God if not restoring the image of God in Christians and bringing them to some kind of fulfillment?  The ministers I most admire understand that their job is bringing out the best in those to whom they minister. How do so many get distracted by careerism?  

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric who wrote a lot of books that managers read, supposedly, to increase the productivity of their workforce.  Jack Welch is known as the originator of a hypercompetitive review methodology called stack ranking.  I've worked in a large corporation for more than twenty years. For about half of that time, management applied stack ranking to thousands of employees like me. Every employee was compared to others in their division and ranked in a vertical order of value as appraised by their managers.  Those at the top of the ranking got big raises. A percentage at the bottom were washed out.  It's easy to imagine the kind of workplace paranoia that stack ranking engenders, certainly not teamwork or collegial mentoring.  If I help a coworker, he might get the jump on me in the annual review.

This is how the world works--get into the top 10% or accept mediocrity and become invisible.  The career track, if one chooses the Christian ministry, can reduce to stack ranking.  When I completed a master's degree in theology, there were a few graduates who already had church jobs or stipends from their denomination.  Many of those without connections were offered various parachurch opportunities that required fund raising, that is to say, asking friends to contribute regularly to support their ministries. Even to contemplate the time and humiliation involved was daunting.  I investigated a few of the organizations and talked with friends who worked in them. Some had reasonably secure jobs doing useful work.  Many of the organizations spent the majority of their efforts raising support. By that time, I had been making a living on my own for more than fifteen years.  I opted to continue working and volunteer in church.  At various churches, I worked part time as a musician. 

Another friend runs a business that employs 60-70 people.  He and his wife recently spent a week in Mexico where they with some of their employees worked maintaining and upgrading a church retreat center that serves Christians in the locale.  This guy volunteers in other ways, working with fatherless children or simply biking with friends.  He serves on the boards of directors in a couple of charitable organizations.  He also took time to watch video recordings of music that my wife and I created in our living room in lieu of concertizing during the COVID lockdown.  He's a good musician, so I told him to be ruthlessly critical.  Of course, he wasn't, quite the contrary.

If Christian ministry is the love of God revealed and made effective in Jesus Christ, then ministry is not indoctrination. It is not building the church. Instead, the church should build up the people.  Well, maybe… When my toughest editor, my wife, read a few paragraphs of this, she said, "You're sounding like Tony Robbins.  Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God, not the prosperity gospel."  

Yes, the teachings of Jesus and the apostles include severe sayings about self denial and an otherworldly perspective, warnings about the flesh and the devil.  Jesus says, "Take up the cross."  The symbol on top of most churches was, in the Roman Empire, a threat of merciless torture.  I heard a sermon less than a week ago by a preacher whose mother taught him that every question about the Bible should be answered, "Jesus died on the cross to redeem me from my sins."

Is the cross the gospel?  I've been going to church since I was five years old.  I was confirmed at age fourteen, before I carried a great burden of sin.  I was taught that the Law is a blessing, a light to my path, not a curse.  By the time I was conscious of my sins, I had found hope in the resurrection of Jesus against the deaths of people I loved and my own failures.  Yes, Jesus hung on the cross, but in his public ministry he preached the Kingdom of God.  What is the Kingdom of God?  The answer, of course, is found in the ministry of the King: healing the sick, raising the dead, liberating the oppressed, respecting common people, while he and they were rejected by the powerful.   

The modern church is engaged in ideological trench warfare.  Main-line Protestants rant about white male privilege, while conservatives attack the sexual revolution.  Moralistic hyperbole on either side of this argument is not the Kingdom of God.  Half the liberal clergy don't believe the resurrection is historical.  Too many conservative Christians expect to be raptured out of the world.  The resurrection is an event that changes everything, but what is the point of resurrection if we still don't find out how to live?  

Part of the problem is faulty soteriology, but that pales in comparison to careerism in full-time ministry.  Jesus worked as a carpenter for most of his life.  His greatest enemies were religious professionals.  St. Paul supported his own ministry by making tents.  Early in its history, the church became an institution in which opportunists can acquire influence or affluence or advance their own interests in other ways.

As is often noted, the church is a human institution. There are some counter-productive ideas in play about productivity in human institutions.  We've discussed business management by stack ranking. Amazon makes its core value to serve customers and supposedly evaluates every decision from users' perspectives. Former Amazon employees tell stories about the pressure and long hours of the grind inside the company.  Some managers must be motivated by something other than customer satisfaction.  

Here is a quote about leadership from a noted trainer who has worked in business and in the church:

Leadership is one of my passions. So is teaching it. I’ve dedicated more than thirty years of my life to helping others learn what I know about leading. In fact, I spend about eighty days every year teaching leadership. In the last several years, I’ve taught about it on six continents. The subject is inexhaustible. Why? Because everything rises and falls on leadership. If you want to make a positive impact on the world, learning to lead better will help you do it.  -- John C. Maxwell

I started reading one of this trainer's books some years ago. It was interesting enough until I hit a chapter in which he describes an organization where he had to clean house before he could get anything accomplished.   The group of people who were there when he took charge just wouldn't get with the program, so he maneuvered until he had gotten rid of all of them. Only then could he get on with his project of teaching leadership.  The irony of a "life dedicated to helping others learn what I know about leadership" and sacking the entire staff of an organization when he took charge was evidently lost on him.

In American Christianity competition is similar to that in business.  Regardless of the scandals of conflict, there can be some good in denominational and intradenominational competition.  If people don't get what they need from one church, they can choose another.  But what if most churches are running the same program under differing ideologies?   Whether you're selling social justice or family values, the church isn't much good if the program mainly establishes the privileges of the hierarchy.  Jesus did notice that the Pharisees and Sadducees enjoyed places of honor at dinner parties and their influence with the Romans.  Like Tony Robbins, John C. Maxwell has gotten rich selling his leadership success courses.  There must be a kernel of truth in what these guys preach, but it's a tough nut to crack.

We might agree that the church should empower ordinary people rather than perpetuate systemic injustice.  Jesus was not above explaining the usual paths to influence and power.  Matthew's gospel includes this story:

As he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, beseeching him and saying, 'Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, in terrible distress.'

And Jesus said to him, 'I will come and heal him.'

But the centurion answered, 'Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed.  For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, `Go,' and he goes, and to another, `Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, `Do this,' and he does it.'

When Jesus heard him, he marveled, and said to those who followed him, 'Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith’.

Tony Robbins and John C. Maxwell would probably not describe the mechanics of power in quite this way, but Jesus was not sentimental about it.  Success in the world is generally attained by submission to authority.  If you want to rise in the stack ranking in any corporate institution, ascertain who is in charge and make yourself useful to them.  A Roman centurion had authority over a hundred soldiers because he recognized the authority of the man to whom he reported.  I don't think Jesus endorsed this organizational dynamic.  He didn't submit to the authority of the Pharisees and the Sadducees or even to Pontius Pilate.  He was intent on the needs and interests of ordinary people.

There are different perspectives on success in the world. Jordan Peterson also speaks to thousands of people, but in a realistic manner.

In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident, who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash, he worked side by side with another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.

~Jordan B. Peterson

The miracles of Jesus, whatever else they are, were done in response to appeals from suffering people who still had the strength to believe they could be made well. The jury is out about whether we can heal the sick and raise the dead. Mountains tend not to be moved by Christians with a mustard seed of faith, but most of us can remove many obstacles through little more than sincere attention to the people who show up in our churches. Listening can be much more effective than preaching.

We have to decide how to use our resources in the church. Some high maintenance people can require too much time and energy. These kinds of decisions lead to discussions about priorities. Jack Welch apparently thought stack ranking was an effective way to decide in which employees General Electric should invest. From a business perspective the best indicator of future success seems to be past performance. Whether this principle is correct depends on the accuracy and equity of the assessments of performance. If reviews mainly reflect how well employees ingratiate themselves with important people in the hierarchy, their relative ranking isn't worth much. If we follow Jesus, many who have been deemed inadequate or even worthless should be cherished. A parable comes to mind of the shepherd who seeks one lost sheep, even while leaving the herd unattended.

For good or ill, we often understand what is needed by its absence. Children who grow up with an abusive father or mother know very well what is missing in their lives. A lot of people come to church in hope of finding the love of God and instead find a culture similar to the world that burned their souls dry. My wife and I had neighbors with a daughter who was dealing with schizophrenia, not through any failure of her family, but evidently caused by some physiological malady. She was 22 years old, a beautiful young woman of mixed race. Her father had played professional football and had a nice pension, but he suffered from brain injuries and hepatitis C, infected by a trainer who taped him up after treating another player who was bleeding. Her mother was a lovely woman, also the mother of four sons and two other daughters. The sons were doing well, one as a construction worker. Another tried to make it in pro baseball, but he resolved his ambition and was becoming a techie. The youngest daughter was twelve or thirteen.

Maddy used to come to our house to sing. My wife played the piano for her and gave her some basic instruction in vocal technique. She had a natural and lyrical voice, not pushed in imitation of pop singers. The family had a church in the Pentecostal tradition, but Maddy started attending a nearby megachurch that had various praise bands. She inquired about singing in one of the groups. When they told her she would have to audition, she didn't have the confidence to even attempt it. "Should I have to audition to praise God?" she said. We invited her to join our church choir, and she came, but the liturgical format was alien to her. Vestments and processions astonished her. Of course, most members of our parish were senior citizens, but there were a few guitar pickers, a drummer, and a bass player who sang contemporary music for some services. The leader of the group tried to encourage her. People offered to come and get her for rehearsals. I think they were sincerely interested in getting acquainted and offering friendship, but most of them were, at least, twice her age.

Young Christians at the megachurch missed the opportunity to help her. Traditionalists couldn't reach her either. When she stopped coming to our house to sing, we worried about her, with good reason as it turned out. Last time we saw her, she was corresponding with a boyfriend online. He told her he needed her, or he might commit suicide. She talked about taking a bus to meet him in Reno. Not long after that her mother told us she was living on the street and taking methamphetamines.

Most people aren't contending with schizophrenia. But living with the perplexities of the world can be nearly as disorienting. When people come to church looking for something different, our hearts and minds have to be engaged. We hear a lot about contextualization of theology. Contemporary music may attract young people, but the churches that are growing have support groups that meet people in the midst of problems. Honest and caring Christians who have survived substance abuse, psychological distress, family breakdowns, indebtedness, or whatever, can provide friendship and perspective to people looking for help. If the church seems another place to compete for acceptance, it's not going to meet the needs.

We have to assume that many people who come to church have suffered. The apostle's letter to the Romans includes the bit about creation subjected to futility:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and shall obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. --Romans 8:18-21

There are evidently two problems in life. The first is not getting what you want, and the second is getting it. Whether you win or lose, expect trouble! But hope can be found in the revealing of the sons of God. Jesus set many people free from the bondage to decay. The church continues this core mission of the Kingdom of God.

I've tried to describe people I've met in church who discover and accentuate the image of God in others they meet. How do they do it? Where do they find the love that includes others in their vision of the Kingdom? Church services can be inspirational. I like a big procession with hymns that have been sung for hundreds of years, liturgy that includes readings that have been read for thousands of years, the creed and confession, the Eucharist. Some people take notes on the sermon. Some places they have a light show and high-decibel music. But ritual of any sort is just a prelude to the announcements and coffee hour where the real ministry begins. Church goers may connect briefly at the passing of the peace, but they find out where others are in their struggles at the coffee hour and mid-week events.

Hierarchy

Organizations generally function in spite of the people who manage them. I work as a technical writer by default, that is to say, because I couldn't find a vocation. A cynical assessment of how things work at Google, Amazon, or Microsoft is expressed by Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. And the corollary: Organizations over time tend to develop a competency inversion. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I spent more than thirty years in the Episcopal Church. Both have highly developed hierarchies, both claiming to be in the Apostolic Tradition. It's been decades now since the effort to merge the Lutheran and Episcopal churches against the centuries of scandalous division. The effort foundered, as I recall, as the hierarchies argued about which of them had priority, who was going to re-ordain whom. Most people in the pews hardly noticed when the much-vaunted merger climaxed with nothing more than open communion for members of either denomination. During my childhood in the Lutheran Church, I didn't know the hierarchy existed. For more than thirty years in the Episcopal Church I studiously ignored pronouncements coming from the hierarchy. I did notice when a deacon in the local church, who was interested in promotion, censored my contributions to the Prayers of the People. I would submit written text for a Sunday liturgy only to find it revised because it wasn't politically correct. In spite of distractions coming down the chain of command, foot soldiers in the churches fight the good fight with all their might. People converse during all kinds of activities generated by their churches. They make friends and share their struggles. The 23rd chapter of Matthew's Gospel includes a discourse by Jesus about how not to do ministry: ...you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ. He who is greatest among you shall be your servant; whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Any questions? Of course, many questions remain about how to be a useful servant. Is self-abnegation the path to spiritual regeneration? Penance? The Desert Fathers took renunciation of the world to heroic extremes. Humble service in an outreach ministry can be an option. But how does one follow Jesus's injunctions to self-denial? To what end? Should Christians be getting married and having children? Should we be striving for success in any serious ambition?

If you talk to people at the coffee hour or in a home group for study and prayer, you'll pretty soon encounter all kinds of openings in their lives. God is interested in these people. He became incarnate as a human being to participate in our struggles. My cynicism about leadership has been evident in this discussion. Friendship is better than leadership.

Jesus says, "The greatest shall be your servant". Is there some equivalence of service and friendship? Friends tend to help one another, but maybe being greatest isn't the objective. The severe teachings of Jesus about self-denial can be applied to interpersonal relations, often in opposition to striving for status or influence. But friendship supports the aspirations of others out of genuine interest in their lives, and we expect friends to support our own aspirations. If Christians are aiming at self denial, they will ignore striving for achievement at work, avocations, or in in the arts. Some fortunate souls know what they want and are working hard to attain it. Should people have to deny themselves to be my friend? The apostle of selfishness, Ayn Rand, said, "A woman isn't denying herself when, instead of buying a new car, she spends money on her son or daughter, unless she values the car more than her child." Even an atheist can understand motivation on this level. Nearly all the people I know have spent most of their lives earning a living. Many of them support family or extended family in jobs that do not engage their creativity or much initiative. Somewhere in the Christian discipline we must find opportunities to encourage others, especially young people, to find their talents and invest their best efforts in them. I've had friends, teachers, parents, managers who supported my efforts in school, at work, or in my avocations. Their support engendered my capacity to learn and develop skills that pay my bills or engage my creativity. There have also been Christian guilt-mongers, and fear-mongers, who diverted my attention from life in the world to apocalyptic scenarios. There is a transcendent perspective to be found in the Kingdom of God, but too many Christians are so other-worldly they're no worldly good. To return to the resurrection, eternal life isn't very inspirational unless we learn how to live.

The Sermon on the Mount

This extended discourse of Jesus is a transcendent perspective on living in a flawed world. The Christian religion is not difficult to understand. God became Incarnate as a man and lived in our midst. He suffered as we do. The church tends to emphasize indoctrination instead of spiritual formation. Many of those who have attempted to live by the teachings of Jesus, some of his most serious followers, have thought spiritual formation is self-abnegation and renunciation of the world.

He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.  --Matthew 10:39

Monasteries grew out of the adventures of spiritual athletes of the early Christian era. Interestingly enough, monks became important contributors to Western Civilization. Living celibate lives separated from the world, these renunciates found time to be productive in many worldly ways. They studied historic literary texts from various cultural traditions. They copied and preserved the scriptures as well as other important documents. They sang psalms and developed musical theory that became the core of Western tonal music. They did scientific research and created new technologies. Monasteries acquired capital resources. They loaned money to aristocrats and charged interest.

That isn’t the Sermon on the Mount, so let's get on with it.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.  Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

--Matthew 5: 3-10

There have been innumerable interpretations of these texts, which are far removed from the Christological controversies of the 3rd and 4th centuries: Ebionism, Docetism, Gnosticism, Dynamic and Modalistic Monarchianism, Arianism, Apollinarianism.  They are unlike the theology I studied in seminary and unlike most of the preaching in contemporary churches.

I've attempted to paraphrase some of these texts from the Revised Standard Version.  Start here:  Blessed are the alienated and depressed. God's revolution is for them."

Note that Jesus does not leave the alienated and depressed in their alienation and depression.  The Kingdom of Heaven is a revolution, peaceful, as specified in the later verse.  

It's also interesting that so far in this "sermon" there is no mention of religious ritual or religious vocations.  Jesus appears to be talking about a state of being that disposes one to God's grace.

We can extend the paraphrase, contextualize it for our time:

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, what good is it?  A self-conscious sense of virtue touches no one.  It's only friction.

You are the light of the world.  A city of good can be built without a lot of witless proselytizing and gives hope without a harangue.  Let the ideologues battle.  You work patiently for results, for your light is the good you do.  From it comes the inspiration to revolutionize culture.

Now, somebody is going to say I come to abolish the Bible and our dysfunctional church.  I have come, not to abolish but to revitalize them.  I tell you, 'til the sky is rolled up and we come out to take our bows, not a comma, not a dot will be nullified in the Bible or in the church's tradition.  Whoever then teaches bad faith and relaxes word or tradition resists God's new order.  Whoever honors word and tradition shall be a hero of the revolution.  We need all the help we can get!

I tell you the truth, unless your goodness exceeds that of our liberal and conservative moralists, you will never see God's universal laws.  You have heard it said by the pro-lifers and by the antiwar activists that you must not kill, and whoever kills is liable to judgment.  I say anyone who is angry with another is liable; whoever insults another should be brought into court; and whoever says, 'You idiot!' could be hanged.  So, if you are bowed at the altar, and remember you have offended somebody, forget about the sacrament, and go make amends to your neighbor.  Then approach God in your meditations, your prayers, and your sacraments.

Make friends with your accuser while on your way to court lest you incite him to greater severity and he prosecute you to the nth degree of the law.  You could end up in the 'slammer' with the insurrectionists.

You hear a lot of preaching against adultery and other sex sins.  I say, if you have a promiscuous imagination, you are already guilty.  Throw out your television set if it offends you.  It won't be as dark without it as it is in Hell.  If you produce marvels of electronics while you, the engineer, think with your gonads, you’re ridiculous.  I wouldn't make divorce easier, but harder.  Serial marriages are a travesty of the institution.

Again, you have heard, you shall be as good as your word.  A lie is a lie.  But I say, don't make hidebound promises and commitments.  Don't swear by heaven and earth or by the government.  Don't swear by your head; you might lose it.  Anything more than yes or no is an evil sham.

You have heard, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Sue the bastards!  But I say, do not resist one who is evil.  Turn the other cheek.  If anyone sues you, settle out of court as generously as you can.  If you are drafted into service by civil authorities, serve above and beyond the call of duty.  Give to the poor, and don't refuse borrowers who impose on you.  It's human nature to love your friends and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies, and pray for those who harass you.  In this way you become children of God, who is above all partisanship.  He makes the sun to rise on the good and on the evil alike and sends the rain on the just and the unjust.  If you love those who love you, what is your reward?  Even politicians do that.  And if you greet only your brethren, what more are you doing than is natural?  Any progressive pagan does as much. You must be perfect, as God is perfect.

Beware of public display of piety.  There's no significance in making a production of your charity.  Celebrities love to do this in public meetings and on television.  They have their reward.  Rather, give inconspicuously, and your charity will be noted by God.  When you pray, don't be like the fundamentalists who love to stand and pray in church and in restaurants to be observed by other people.  They have their reward.  But when you pray, go into your study and shut the door.  God will hear you.  And save your breath; long prayers are a pain in the neck. God knows what you need."

Pray, he said, In this way:

God and Father

Your Name is a Holy Fire

Reform the world

Make it conform to your desire.

Give us a living for our humble toil

Forgive us

As we forgive

Together we have failed

Push us

But not too far

Spare us the confrontation with evil

Greater than we can bear.

If you forgive others, God will forgive you.  Otherwise, why expect gracious treatment from God?

Whatever you do with great conviction, let it be between you and God, not a demonstration.  Okay, so you affirm that black lives matter and drive an electric car.  Can you lighten up with the moralistic pronouncements?  All kinds of things can be accomplished through self-control.  The higher power even comes to your aid, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.  But let's not be heroic about self denial.  Keep the reasons for your abstinence and the goal in mind, not the appearance of virtue.  Nobody else can help, so why put on a show for them?

Don't expend your best efforts making money and seeking recognition.  A certain kind of success is here today and gone tomorrow.  Enrich yourself spiritually.  What you prize will grow to strengthen or consume you.  Your spiritual eye is your guide.  If you discern correctly, you will move with the resolution that comes from knowing the truth.  Anxiety and pain await you at every turn, if your vision is clouded.

You can't work for two managers--conflict of interest again.  And you know the worst distraction: you are no good to God--or for anything else--if your real objective is money.  Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about earning your living, not even for the shirt on your back.  Isn't life more than the chore of sustaining it?  Look at the birds.  Do they have careers?  Yet they are fed.  Don't we belong in the world as much as they do?  And who can add years to his life by being driven?  As for clothing, think of the wild flowers on the plains.  They weren't manufactured in a sweat shop in the garment district.  Yet the Pope doesn't dress as well.  If God so clothes the prairie grasses which flourish for a single spring then burn, will you not fare as well, oh ye of little faith?  'What shall we eat?  What shall we drink?  What shall we wear?'  Grinding out your days to secure these things is known as the Protestant work ethic.  They didn't get it from me!  God knows what you need.  Seek His revolutionary goodness, and you will have security as well.  Do not be anxious about tomorrow.  Today's trouble is enough."

...the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.  --Matthew 7: 28-29

My slant on these precepts is debatable, but the ideas clearly are not the religious doctrines currently in in play or historically in the church.  Luther and Calvin wrote voluminously about theology.  Their ideas shaped culture.  Calvin’s doctrine of human depravity as held by New England Puritans influenced the framers of the American Constitution in the separation of governmental powers.  But, the Sermon on the Mount is accessible to the powerless.  Anybody who takes it to heart sees life and ethics in a new light.  Gandhi read it and immediately responded.  To find out more, he went to a church where he was repulsed because of his skin color.  Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King applied the precepts of these texts in their struggles despite rejection and opposition, and they credited the source.

The church doesn't always shut the door in your face.  King was a clergyman whose rhetoric was inspired by Jesus, and he worked with churches.  In nonviolent marches he led thousands of Christians and benevolent followers to greater dignity and freedom.  Gandhi took the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount with him after rejection by the church.  His actions transformed India against intransigent British Christians who then began to comprehend the ideals of their own religion.

Parables of the Kingdom

The church tends to focus on indoctrination in various theological and soteriological issues, but Jesus preached the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven.  What is this?  During the historical period in which Jesus preached and for centuries, Imperial Rome had dominated Europe and the Middle East.  In a country occupied by surrogates of Roman power many Jews were looking for a Messiah who would liberate them and reestablish a dynasty like the Davidic dynasty of their scriptures.  There have been various attempts to explain the eschatological dynamic in Jesus's ministry.  Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus concludes that Jesus preached an impending climactic intervention by God.  Schweitzer thought that Jesus’s confrontation with the religious authorities, which led to his crucifixion, was an attempt to impel God to act and bring in the Kingdom.  On this view it would be best to leave Jesus to his delusions.  Even resurrection from the dead is not the end of history.  We are left with an ongoing world.  What can we do with it?

“All we know is that we have a life on our hands.”  —George McDonough

George McDonough worked for decades as a librarian at a Christian college.  He claimed many scholars signed statements of faith mainly to keep their jobs.  He was a poet and skeptic, disillusioned by an unhappy marriage and ungrateful adult children.  I can recall disputing his existentialist creed.  We know a lot about ethics and human potential beyond persistence in meaningless existence.  Are the sayings of Jesus any help in an unjust and treacherous world?  There has been indisputable cultural progress since Jesus claimed the Kingdom would grow like a mustard seed or expand like leaven in a lump of dough.  We assume inalienable human rights, and we have higher regard for powerless people than anything in primitive civilizations or even that vested in Roman citizens.

Jesus’s Kingdom doesn’t resemble any other authoritarian state.  His teachings are antithetical to monarchy.  Allegiance to the King is entirely voluntary.  Among his followers there isn’t supposed to be any hierarchy, this clearly against historic church polity.  

The Parable of the Sower, as conveyed by the Gospels, describes an environment fraught with various snares and distractions that can inhibit growth among hearers of the Gospel.  Progress in this order is not inevitable.  Suffering and even success, especially wealth, can cloud the vision and arrest development.  Again, strait is the gate, difficult the way, and few find it.  The virtues of the new order, beyond conventional moral strictures, include repentance like that of the Prodigal Son and willingness to forgive, unlike the steward who is forgiven much but does not forgive his comparatively paltry debtor.  In these parables we find a perspective on life in an ongoing world, not a world on the verge of the apocalypse.  

In reply to those who criticized Jesus for the company he kept, Luke’s Gospel says he gave them a new parable: I have not come to call the righteous but sinners. No one sews a piece of new fabric on an old garment or puts new wine in old wine skins.  This is an invitation to begin again after moral failure, even persistent avarice or indulgence.  Change is feasible and worth the effort.  We have free will against what may appear to be irrevocable choices.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both include the parable of the master who gives his stewards money to manage in his absence.  Luke includes the preface to the story that it is told to dispel the notion among Jesus’s followers that the Kingdom of God was to immediately appear.  In both accounts the master expects the stewards to produce.  The good stewards invest the money and deliver profits at the master’s return.  They are commended and given authority over cities, presumably, in the new era of the Kingdom.  One irresponsible steward hides the money and returns it at the master’s return.  He says he was fearful about what might befall him if he risked losing the money in any venture.  The master rejects this line of thinking as lazy and wicked.  He he takes the money away from the unproductive steward and gives it to the others.  Use it or lose it is the implicit moral of the story.  

Any explanation of this analogy of money and profitable investments must include the obligation to use resources responsibly.  There are other parables that demonstrate Jesus’s awareness that life isn’t fair.  Workers who work only a couple of hours are paid as much as those who work all day.  It remains that, in the Kingdom of God, effort and productivity are not only commendable but necessary.  Spiritual aspirations are no excuse for evasion of worldly striving.  In this sense self denial may be better described as self discipline, not suppression of ability but rigorous application of ability toward worthy goals.  It can take considerable experience for Christians to realize that what we are is what we have to give to family, friends, or professional associates.  In simplest terms:  a man can’t contribute, even financially, when he’s broke.

We haven’t discussed the parable of the wheat and tares, that of seed growing secretly, the catch of good and useless fish, the pearl of great price, or the treasure found in a field.  But we have ample literary evidence to validate whole-hearted living in the world.  A transcendent perspective can support endurance in suffering and renewal after failure, but it should not engender guilt about creative striving and success. 

Self Denial

Self interest isn’t always selfish.  Being disciplined about managing time and resources enables some people to become doctors and professionals to serve human needs and support themselves and their families.  It might be considered self denial to refrain from partying through school in order to get into med school or law school, but self control of this sort is better described as rational self interest.  What is Jesus talking about when he says, If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.?

Christianity has often been a counter-culture.  The crowds that gathered around Jesus were there as much because he exposed the hypocrisy of their ruling class as for their hope of finding something better.  Telling the truth elicited the fury of Jesus’s adversaries who conspired with the Roman authorities to destroy him. Risking life or career for the truth isn’t an uncommon scenario.  Doctors and researchers who contradict the pronouncements of the FDA or the CDC have recently had their licenses suspended or their funding cut because they questioned a consensus that favors the pharmaceuticals industry.  Some of them, for the benefit of science, think it’s worth fighting this suppression of dissent.

Christians in regions where their faith is considered illegitimate or subversive can face persecution that costs them their living or their lives.  Martyrs have historically been willing to follow Jesus literally to the cross and lose their lives for the gospel.  The question for those of us in safer parts of the world is how much we’re willing to give or risk.  Contributions to relief organizations can require a manageable degree of self denial.  Many Christians who work in relief ministries live much more frugally than they would if they worked at family-wage jobs.  Those who have families and work in relief for meager pay have to consider the cost to their spouses and children.  I know a guy who was born in Burma to missionary parents.  He can recall, during long periods of his youth, his parents’ prayers for safety and sustenance.  He went to college and became an accountant, and he married another accountant.  Apparently he wasn’t willing to repeat the choices his parents made for him early in his life.  I can remember him saying, “If you want to make big sacrifices for your faith, don’t get married and have children.”  Celibacy in ministry or religious vocation is based on this logic.  Anything can be taken to extremes.  An early Christian theologian, Origen of Alexandria, is known to have made himself literally into a eunuch for the kingdom of God.

For most of us, the question is how to balance rational self interest and giving or acting on principle at work or in church.  Jesus’s antipathy to hierarchy and the privileges of authority opens the door to all kinds of challenges to common church polity.  Should we challenge traditional practices or the use of derivative pop music?  Should we continue to sustain the expense and bear the brunt of bishops, priests, and church managers of various kinds?  If the people making most of the decisions didn’t have power and privilege, there could be more diversity and participation by others.  Maybe most of the resources would be better invested supporting indigenous ministers in places where their work is more difficult or hazardous.

Jesus said, Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.

There appear to be compensations in the Divine economy for risk takers, even those who miss the mark or go overboard, in their efforts to serve God by serving people in need.  The Lord does provide… .  

But suppose you are married to a substance abuser who makes problems that are becoming burdensome for you and other family members.  After months or years, things continue to get worse.  You’re covering for the abuser in many ways.  Maybe the bills aren’t getting paid if you don’t earn extra income to pay them.  Maybe you have gotten your spouse into treatment for addiction, or maybe he/she is in denial and resists treatment.  For how long do you forgive?  70 times 7?  How long should you, or how long can you, compensate?  The organizations that deal with addictions will tell you about the dysfunctional enabler relationship that often makes it possible for substance abusers to continue in decline while making people in their support network miserable.  Often enough, the syndrome is resolved by taking the enabler out of the symbiotic relationship.  An abuser who cannot evade the results of his/her behavior has to get back in control of life or hit bottom.  The consequences of dysfunctional behavior may be the best treatment, as many recovered abusers will relate.  Christian self denial in these situations can be an evasion.  Rational analysis of the options, including divorce, makes more sense than dying for a loved one who is addicted.  Calling addiction an illness only confuses the issues.  People do desist and dry out.  

Yesterday my wife and I went to a prayer meeting for the persecuted church.  We heard terrifying accounts of endurance in suffering.  Most Christians now read or hear about them on a regular basis.  Another option came up regarding refugees from the war in Ukraine.  A local organization is supporting Ukrainians who have escaped to the United States and are in need of housing and support.  Jesus’s long-standing invitation is there for those open to consider it.

Church as Theater

The Sermon on the Mount and the Parables of the Kingdom as found in the Gospels show little resemblance to church ritual and polity as it has developed over millennia.  The psychological dispositions blessed by the Sermon and the virtues dramatized by the Parables clang with such dissonance against an ensuing history of power mongering by clerics, that one cannot evade the similarity of religious authorities against whom Jesus contended and the rulers of the church.  When Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, it mainstreamed a faith that had been counter-cultural.  This led to syncretism with Roman religions, sun worship, fertility rites, and their holidays.  It also made priestly roles opportunities to gain influence.  A Christian majority in the population became politically and economically important.  Constantine diverted massive state funding, on which pagan temples had depended, to the church.

When C.S. Lewis converted to Christianity, he admitted that he did so largely because Christianity answered the pagan longings he had experienced in his love of mythology.  A seminal work of modern anthropology, The Golden Bough, by James Frazer and Robert Fraser, influenced many twentieth-century writers, including D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, Thomas and Wyndham Lewis. This discussion of magical types, the sacrificial killing of kings, the dying god, and the scapegoat, delineate many parallels between ancient religions and Christianity.  Christianity imbued festivals and rituals that had existed for centuries with new meaning.  The church grew rapidly for three hundred years without church buildings, but after the Imperial edict, pagan basilicas became churches.  Priests of the old order became priests and bishops in the church.  The old religions imposed cultic hierarchies on Christians that have not been neutral or benign.  Jesus lived in controversy with the rulers of the synagogue and temple.  He’d likely be just as opposed to the church hierarchy that developed and has persisted through history.  

Liturgical worship in the Roman Church involved priests and other clergy in dramatizations of scenes from the Gospels.  Set to music these events became functionally operatic.  Church as cyclical lectionary drama in combination with a ruling hierarchy who set the protocol for nearly everything, transformed Christians into passive auditors at theatrical events.  Meetings in the synagogues and house churches had maintained a teaching-and-discussions format.  Where they still existed, these churches fell out of the mainstream.

Tradition in the historic church supported development in the arts and sciences.  One stone upon another, cathedrals, universities, monasteries were built and sustained cultural advances that are core of Western civilization.  The church has been an actor, a power broker, in government.  Now when critical theorists are deconstructing the Western literary canon, it is more evident than ever what we stand to lose.  And there is something to be said for hierarchical management.  An open forum can lead to chaos.  Capitalism is based on economic freedom and competition, but without a legal framework that enforces contracts and punishes abuse, not to mention governmental armed forces that prevent aggression, capitalism wouldn't be productive.  It couldn't function.  Corporate management is at the core of the human dilemma, whether we're talking about business, government, education and research, or the church.  What in God's name is Jesus talking about in his discourses about the Kingdom of God?  

There is great drama in the Gospels, but none of it is on the stage.  Jesus says, only indirectly, that he is the king, but anybody in his vicinity can challenge him, ask questions, or ask him for healing.  Most of his hearers attended synagogue and temple services as their forebears had for centuries.  When Jesus went to the temple, he announced the fulfillment of scriptures, or he turned over tables.  Nobody could passively watch his ministry, which everybody noticed was not like that of the scribes and Pharisees.  If we are to understand Jesus, we’re going to have to get out of the posture of church goers everywhere who listen week after week to sermons and prayers inflicted on them by religious professionals.  Strait is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few find it. 

The Widow's Penny

The 12th chapter of Mark's Gospel includes another account of Jesus's attacks on the scribes and Pharisees and the ensuing controversies.  Here Jesus compares the venerable authorities to vicious tenants who mismanage a vineyard entrusted to them and kill the owners' son.  Next, in a controversy about church and state that still rages, Jesus silences those who would entrap him: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.  The challenge about the resurrection follows, and Jesus again stuns his antagonists: As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said to him, `I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are quite wrong.  Then we have the question about the greatest commandment and a couplet that has resonated ever since: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.  After this litany of earth-shaking rejoinders, Jesus sits down opposite the treasury of the temple and watches as people contribute their tithes and offerings.  Many rich people put in large sums.  A poor widow put in two copper coins, which make a penny.  Jesus called his disciples to him and said to them, 'Truly, I say, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living'.

The contrast of aggressive rhetoric by religious leaders, juxtaposed with the humility of a widow who contributes two copper coins, accentuates the love of Jesus for ordinary people who sustain a desire to be included in the Kingdom of God.  The story of the Pharisee and the Publican, again, illustrates God's acceptance of intellectual honesty even by a disreputable tax collector.  Jesus commends ordinary people who struggle and pray.  By all accounts, he is interested in their prayers and their offerings. In this perspective, people who put flowers on the altar or sing in the choir have citizenship in the Kingdom of God, and the conversations that go on in the kitchen are as important as the report from the vestry, conversations at the coffee hour as significant as the Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Ordinary people are as important, or more important, in Jesus's vision of the Kingdom of God than the clerics and theologians who purport to speak for God.  Jesus didn't have a pulpit or a title.  He lived a life of dialogue with the common people.  He rejected being called good.  His dialogues with clerics were recurring controversy.  The psychological dispositions he commends and the people with whom he interacts compassionately tend to be those the world overlooks or tramples.  Ministry in the church as we know it, and historically, has been primarily clergy on the platform talking down to auditors in the laity.  It isn't a stretch to conclude that life in the Kingdom should involve interaction beyond conventional preaching and teaching.  People should ask questions and talk back to speakers during the various meetings of the church.  We should encourage frequent and vigorous dialogue.

We’re told that the publican went home justified, unlike the pretentious Pharisee.  We can imagine the change in the widow’s soul after her encounter with Jesus.  Everybody was talking about him, whether he was a prophet or rabble rouser, but he talked about her.  She left the temple more impoverished than she came, but surely with a new sense of her ultimate worth.  A few people must have noticed her and offered friendship or alms.  We’re still talking about her after two millennia.  

Art and Authenticity

Luther and Calvin affirmed preaching as authoritative and a mandate for the church.  The doctrine of priesthood of all believers theoretically removed the Roman Catholic priestly prerogative to forgive sins, but it didn’t diminish Reformed preachers’ control of church polity and liturgical form.  They kept the distinction between clergy and laity.  Interestingly, artists and musicians patronized by the church created masterpieces that have outlived Luther’s and Calvin’s sermons.  Theologians still read the works of the reformers, but the arts sustained by the church continue to draw crowds.  Musical masterpieces by Palestrina, Bach, Handel, and Mozart are sung all over the world.  Artists, not only preachers, found their voices and continue to communicate eloquently.  Dialogue in the church can be composed and rehearsed yet maintain authenticity.  This evening I went to a moving Good Friday service that consisted only of readings from the Passion narrative and music.

Unstructured house churches encourage dialogue and sharing of Christians’ most intimate struggles and spiritual progress. Authenticity is discovered in prayer, study, and discussion.  But, even home meetings generally include hymn singing or choruses supported by musicians who have spent many years in study.  Writers, who generally talk to themselves, occasionally read composed works that communicate more careful analysis than that of spontaneous prayers or discussion. I’ve heard some eloquent, authentic preachers.  They are artists in their way, but they tend to monopolize the conversation.

What is authenticity?  Existentialists claimed it is the only honest way to live in the world as we find it.  The phrase existence precedes essence is actually a reversal of historic philosophy since Plato and Aristotle, which posited metaphysical formal order either originating in God or used by God in creation. The Trinitarian controversies of the 4th century took Plato's forms and Aristotle's ontology as foundational.  Theologians attempted to explain how God can be one divine nature, or substance, in three divine persons.  The fit with Greek philosophy was imperfect.  Platonists and NeoPlatonists conceived the formal realm as more real than the material world, which led to some of the Gnostic heresies.  Since they consider the flesh unreal, Gnostics might be ascetic or libertine.  The Council of Constantinople in 381 CE resolved the theology and politics of the Trinity.   Medieval Scholastics maintained the creedal formulations and sustained traditions based on Greek metaphysics.

Pagan ontology and logic are basic to Western philosophy because they are coherent and useful in explaining why existing things are distinct in their forms.  A tree is either a Cedar or it is not a Cedar.  The binary logic of computers is Aristotelian (a thing is either A or not A).  It's reasonable to think that behind the existing Cedar there is an essential form that defines the universal category.  This metaphysics persisted in philosophy and theology until the early 14th century when William of Ockham promulgated the idea that universals have no metaphysical reality, but instead are purely concepts in the human mind.  In this sense they are only names, thus the term nominalism.  Empiricism, the claim that all knowledge is based on sensory experience, followed and proved useful in experimental science.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher famous for his criticism of traditional European morality and religion as well as social and political pieties associated with modernity.  If metaphysics is a construct of the human mind, traditional morality, as well as the theological basis of reality, are null.  Nietzsche's rhetorical statement, God is dead, simply describes a pervasive state of culture in modernity.  Authenticity in this view is assertion of the will to power.  In Nietzsche’s view, the Jewish slave mentality, continued in Christianity, caused a perversion of morals, a sickly triumph of the weak.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) persisted in faith in God, but he did so on the basis of an anti-rational leap of faith.  He accepted the terms of existential thought.  Even if metaphysics is real, not nominal, the formal order is inaccessible to us as existing beings.  The Incarnation, the proposition that God could become a time-bound human being is, on this view, scandalous to reason.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a celebrity public intellectual credited with the existentialists' creed: existence precedes essence.  His works merge philosophical concerns with existential themes such as freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish.  We find ourselves in the world with a life on our hands, existing, and we must continually define ourselves, rather than coming into being with an already given nature from God or metaphysical order.  For Sartre, authenticity requires taking responsibility for our life, choices and actions, in full awareness that we will die.

Existentialist thought reduces to autonomy of the individual and the will to create one's own code.  If there is metaphysical order, it is inaccessible.  We're on our own.  In a sense, this is the reciprocal of self denial.

Jesus clearly had a different vision of life, existence, in the world.  He sees the moral order as more stringent and obligatory than the Law and the Prophets.  He has little regard for a will to power, quite the contrary: blessed are the meek.  He raises the status of women in ways that have persisted in Western culture.  He talks to children.  He talks about self denial, but many of those who applied his statements most stringently got it wrong.  Celibacy hasn't proved very effective in control of some priests who maybe should be made into eunuchs for the Kingdom of God.

In our era, critical theory is based on rejection of formal order in the world. There is no truth, only power.  Systemic injustice is presumed to be the basis of any inequality of results regardless of merit. Deconstruction of the Western literary canon assumes that virtues dramatized in literature and even the structure of language are racist, sexist, or classist propaganda that maintains the privileges of a white, male hegemony.  Assuming there isn’t any formal order in nature leads to various attempts to mainstream pathology.  People suffering gender dysphoria are encouraged to sexually identify against biology.  And, of course, Darwin's theory of evolution is everywhere presumed to explain distinct species in nature against a fossil record that does not evidence intermediate species.  

Art can communicate authentic virtues, or it can be an instrument of propaganda.  If we only read the current best-sellers or listen to popular music, it is difficult to know when we’re being manipulated.  Works of art that have endured over centuries, or millennia, have proved their authenticity.  After World War I, disillusionment afflicted the art world.  Visual artists and musicians, schooled in historic traditions, submitted to an ideology that elevated invention over principles that had been discovered in nature, not created by fiat.  The results are the bizarre, often shocking, paintings and sculpture in galleries.  Transgressive art is considered the cutting edge.  Dissonant 20th century music wanders without any tonal center in works that seldom survive beyond their premiers anyplace except in academic settings.

Assertiveness is not authenticity.  There's a line in Eliot's Waste Land that describes a type, in this case a seducer: 

One of the low on whom assurance sits... 

His vanity requires no response

And makes a welcome of indifference.  

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is respected for his insights in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. In Heidegger's fundamental text, Being and Time, he explains a mode of being he calls being-in-the-world.  Among the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, he was also a member and supporter of the Nazi party. Being in the world can evidently mean joining ascendant power mongers.

I remember a conversation with a friend who went to a psychologist for counsel after struggling with what might be called mental illness.  He was bemused by the counselor's suggestion that he think of his problems as living in a different reality.  

It isn't uncommon to hear somebody say that we need to create our own reality. But isn’t reality what is there regardless of what we imagine or perceive?  Is there any right way to be in the world?  Is there any right way to do anything, or is it up to each of us to create our own reality?

Art might be an area for creation ex nihilo, but 20th century art diminishes the credibility of this prospect.  Serious art (Lately, this is art so absurd that only an intellectual can take it seriously) has the authenticity of being in the world without any points of reference.  Serious music is painful, and pop music is in various stages of regression to barbarism.

I've been seriously involved in music for about fifty years.  I've sung in operatic productions of historic masterpieces and in one travesty of the art form by a modern composer.  I've seen and heard the decline in church music for more than sixty years.  Is there a right way to sing?  Is vocal technique learned through discovery of what the human body was designed to do even before human beings learned how to do it?  Singers skilled in Italian bel canto can project a musical phrase over a full orchestra with hundreds or thousands in the audience.  Many of them sing for decades without damaging their voices.  There is a right way to sing and sing with authenticity.

The decline in church music has gotten ridiculous. Today, Easter Sunday, my wife and I walked out of our church service in a barrage of high-decibel instrumental and vocal malpractice.  Maybe it would pass in a karaoke bar, but in church putting microphones in front of singers who haven't learned basic technique should be punishable by imprisonment. Sixty years ago, in the small town where I grew up, every church had a choir that sang music in the classical or, at least, traditional style.  Congregational hymn singing was full and harmonious, because many people could sing the bass, tenor, or alto notes from their hymnals.  Amplified guitars were in the taverns, not in church.

Confident, loud singing does not compensate for ignorance of the right way to sing.  Self-assertive, invent-your-own-rules living is not authenticity.  While Jesus is not moralistic or Pharisaical about the human struggle to understand what God requires of us, neither does he commend existential being in the world or Gnostic antinomianism.  The Lord is risen.  But we still have to learn a few things to make life worth prolonging.  

Dialogue and Community

At the deafening church service from which we exited this morning, there were people with whom I would have liked to have conversed.  The production on the platform obliterated any attempt.  Even before the music started everybody was oriented by protocol to listen to the speakers up front.  Is this muted, passive crowd the body of Christ, every member of which St. Paul’s epistle says is essential?  I’ve been to church picnics with more evidence of community.  Everybody is busy, and many of us drive for miles to attend church meetings.  It doesn’t seem  unreasonable to expect more opportunities to talk with one another.  If there is to be authenticity of any description, we need to change the Sunday service protocol.

After centuries of church as theater, some of it glorious and some just overblown, it’s not likely that a voice in the wilderness will be heard.  In spite of the contradiction of long standing malpractice with the model of the New-Testament church, we do meet wonderful people who share our faith through the activities of the church.  Today, even in the narthex, conversation was so difficult that we left, but we have a small group that has been meeting on Friday night.  In parts of the world where the church is growing rapidly, even against persecution, house churches are the norm.

At my age with my dietary restrictions, church potlucks are not going to cut it as opportunities for dialogue.  I make a living as a writer, so I could start a group for people who write.  Writing seminars in my college courses were based mainly on reading one another’s work.  On this model I might find more readers than I’ve found for most of the manuscripts in my desk drawer or in boxes in the attic.

The lockdowns over the past two years have curtailed the concertizing my wife and I previously enjoyed.  Most of our friends have stopped wearing masks, and summer is coming, so we could consider reviving musical soirées in our home, with the windows open, of course.

On this model there are many affinity groups that church people can enjoy: hiking, biking, gardening, flower arranging, golf, tennis, cooking, auto mechanics, fishing, or whatever.  Not everything about church groups has to be group therapy.  Peoples’ avocations engage creativity that is enhanced in participation with other enthusiasts.  These kinds of groups can include others whom it would be awkward to invite to church, an outreach of sorts.  Work parties and service groups among Christians provide opportunities to make friends and support them in their various efforts. Children can often be included.  People expend time on these kinds of activities, voluntarily, out of intrinsic interest.  Here we find out something about living with vigor and passion.  We might find out that auto mechanics are as important as preachers in the Kingdom of God.

Work and Vocation

The American Constitution codifies a system of checks and balances based on the principle that unconstrained power tends to be abused. Puritan theological doctrines about human corruptibility and the framers' knowledge of history went into the separation of powers that is now considered to be integral to sound governance. Neglect of both the premises and the principle of constraint in corporate management has made business entities into hierarchies of self-serving ambition and networked incompetence. Business has become the domain of an aristocracy.  Nearly every working person contends with the resulting dysfunction.  That it resembles the situation in churches shouldn't surprise anybody.

Most people work for their living.  A lucky few have strong motivation to succeed in a particular kind of work.  We tend to think of vocation as what people do professionally.  It is said that money is the sincerest appreciation.  People don't part with their money unless they really want something. But it's interesting that the word vocation originated in religious orders.  The word is derived from Latin, vocare, the verb to call.  Some churches still call their ministers, and some think the call is a divine mandate.  It does seem like a bolt out of the blue to find strong motivation in combination with exceptional talent and opportunity.  The careers of successful people are often way out of proportion to those of others.  Maybe God decides that some will have a vocation and others just work for a living. 

An interesting question: how does one make working for living into a vocation?  The short answer: in the same way we make church into a collegial experience that is uplifting for all, or anyway most, people in attendance.  We've been discussing how to do that in church, by listening to people and including art that is more than self-expression.  Karaoke singing in a bar is self expression, but it doesn't belong in church.  At work, self expression and self promotion are not the most effective ways to make productive contributions to a project or have a sense of accomplishment for your efforts.

A situation that arises often enough on the job is conflict between getting a project done on time against getting it done with highest quality.  Sometimes this reduces to getting it done against making sure the product actually works as advertised.  Technical and administrative skills are diverse in the current economy, which leads to specialization and assignment of various aspects of projects to teams that work separately, if not independently.  Often enough only quality control and documentation specialists see the product as end users.  Managers have compelling deadlines to meet.  Everybody wants some kind of work-life balance.  Sixty-hour weeks to meet deadlines are not healthy or morale building.  Add performance reviews to an already stressful environment, and any reflection about vocation starts to to seem meaningless.

Does the Kingdom of God resolve any of this stress?   Having a perspective that is not confined to that imposed by management or the expectations of coworkers can help.  If you work without feeling somebody’s evaluation is going to make or break you, it’s easier to work intelligently day by day.  Think about the problem this technology is supposed to solve.  What are the customer scenarios?  If you can’t imagine them, management isn’t doing their job.  Ask questions.  Grind away at implementation details.  Somebody has to think beyond the timelines for delivery.  Sometimes others will appreciate what you find out.  Often enough others will wish you would just go along without exposing flaws in the designs, but the process is not the objective.  If you are to find any satisfaction in work, it’s going to take rational analysis, not slavish conformity.  This is starting to resemble Jesus’s perspective from the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t it?  Don’t worry, the Kingdom of God impinges on the present world with unexpected power, and it’s already in our midst.

Technical and administrative issues are as much about people as technology.  It’s politics as usual, but on the job, you’re going to continue to interact with the same people over time.  Managers and coworkers are not a parade that passes.  They’re a community where you get to know one another very well.  Going to work is also interesting now because you meet people from all over the world.  The global economy has a human face.  A strong work ethic that includes honesty and generosity makes friendships that count for more than productivity.  Again we’re verging on a spiritual dimension.  It is often surprising what you learn by applying imagination and taking creative risks.

There is often intimidation at work by managers and coworkers.  Scapegoating is common enough to be troublesome.  The world is treacherous but not impossible where transcendence intersects the flawed existence by which we are constrained.  Faith is independence.  Freedom to work creatively and collegially is realized according to faith.  Faith moves mountains of bureaucratic nonsense, or anyway makes it possible to work around many obstacles.

The works of René Girard span the disciplines of literary criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, and Biblical Hermeneutics. His work is becoming increasingly recognized in the humanities, and his commitment as a Christian thinker has given him prominence among theologians.  At work, as everywhere else, people are social creatures.  Their behavior is based on imitation to a much greater degree than generally supposed. Gerard's hypothesis is that predatory competition is motivated by mimetic envy. In this view, people are so unenlightened about their self-interest, clueless about what they, in fact, want and need, that they copy the desires of others. The desires are essentially covetous. The result of mimetic envy is relentless competition. People want the same things that, usually, it is impossible for all to attain. This is certainly the case when they all want to come out of the annual review as top performers. Scapegoating provides a release of the psychological compression. The pathos of the scapegoat is an analog of the fate that is feared by those in the network who drive him into the wilderness. For a while it calms them, and they can go about their business without fear.

More than twenty years in corporate business culture have given me time to contemplate the workings of envy and scapegoating, not in literature, but among people with computer science degrees, MBAs, and the various skills of a throng of affluent techies. I was in my forties when I started working in technology and had not invested as many years in school or at the computer as most of my multi-national coworkers. I was not disposed to endure everything I encountered without questioning the rationale or the authority behind it. In the first few days of my employment, I was struck by the fear and intimidation evident among people who were driving new cars and enjoying the satisfactions of success, which was everywhere apparent on the corporate campus. This was 1997 and company stock was soaring. These people were doing very well, but an expression that I heard too often was, "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link".

When my employment was terminated after nine days, I was stunned. The boss, a cordial Brazilian, said I was a smart guy--he and several others had interviewed me, tested my coding skills, and hired me. He said he'd finesse the record so this would not prevent me from getting another job, which I did, but it was not without feeling betrayed by several people who had judged me as inadequate in private conversations and made it clear to management that I was a weak link. 

This was the first time that I encountered or witnessed this variety of predatory paranoia that still gives me pause. I had not read René Girard, but I remember a conversation with a manager whose authority over more than a hundred people didn't insulate him. A lawyer, a former district attorney, for some reason he had changed careers and written a couple of books on technology. He had been successful, but he volunteered his bewilderment at the degree of treachery in the company. "I don't understand it!" He said, "What makes them go looking for somebody to hang?" After a time, he found that even he was not safe. A woman a level above him in the hierarchy found reason to work the system against him. He landed on his feet and ended up working at a high level in HR. Now, after a look at the address book, I see that even he is gone.

My next job in the same company started during the era of networked incompetence in the hierarchy.  People were retiring, with millions of dollars' worth of stock, at such a rate that it created a vacuum in managerial jobs.   The people promoted to management were often out of their depth.  To cope with their own fear, they intimidated other workers.  Regardless of the intrigues everywhere, I was able to work productively.  Asking questions by email enabled me to complete a project that involved difficult coding and testing.  I got answers from a Russian developer whom I never met in person.  The results won an award for excellence in technical communication.

I never did very well in the stack ranking, but I worked on many interesting projects for ten years before intrigues entangled me again.  The Internet had transformed every area of data science.  I was writing documentation for then new technology, a protocol that supports interoperable database programming online.  Things were in flux, but I had working code and documentation based on current status of the project.  A Comdex conference in Las Vegas was looming, and there was panic on the development team due numerous open issues.  There had been so many changes that few people knew whether what we advertised was still the plan of record.  A week before the conference, my manager showed up at my office with a dour look on his face.  One of the development team managers had told him that my documentation was so bad they couldn’t take it to Comdex.

The product didn’t go to Comdex.  Changes were so extensive that anything released would have been so unstable that developer’s couldn’t build on it.  It was, in fact, different from what I had been writing about for nearly a year, because changes at the latest stage broke things in the existing design.  Blaming my work was a convenient cover for several people, some of whom quickly jumped to other projects.  Nonetheless my review that year put me in the low end of the stack.  A recession led to substantial layoffs, and I got an ominous email about a matter of importance from the department director.

I was in my fifties, with house payments, about to lose health benefits for my wife and me.  Things had been tenuous, at times, partly because I occasionally questioned features I was testing in order to document them.  Some managers appreciate feedback, but there are others who don’t.  I never would have resigned from a job in the department that dismissed me.  It was a situation known as golden handcuffs.  

Recovery was surprisingly beneficial.  I came back as a contract worker on another interesting project without a lot of process designed to track and measure employees.  I worked for a year, after which a couple of managers were so impressed they wanted to hire me back as a full time employee.  The company gate keepers balked, so I had to find another contract job.  It turned into another engaging and cutting-edge project.  After a few years of contracting, I realized everything was better without reviews and micromanagement.  The pay and benefits were eventually as good as the company provides for high-performing full-time workers.  Now if things go badly, I can find another job in a couple of weeks.  The contract agents are good friends who respect me.  I might consider what I’ve been doing for the past ten years a vocation.  It certainly has answered the calling to pay my bills.  More than that, it has been productive, stimulating work.

Working in the Lord’s vineyard seems far superior to working in the domain of the aristocracy.  I’m old enough and financially advantaged enough to retire, but I enjoy my current contract and my coworkers.  My wife can order what she wants from her gardening catalogues and enjoy the spring sunshine.  I’ve seen enough recoveries, after being knocked around by people who think they run the world, that I believe God does have a realm of humanity and freedom that is more real than that of the power players, the Kingdom of God.  

Health and Healing

It’s easy to be confident when feeling strong and healthy.  Does faith enable anybody to get up and walk after illness or disability?  Is the medical industrial complex the last, best hope.  Put another way: can we avoid getting into a condition where standard of care, that is to say, drugs and surgery are the only options. My parents both suffered with heart disease.  At age 73, my heredity has proved inescapable.  My father had bypass surgery on four arteries at my age.  For more than ten years I’ve seen my coronary calcium scores increase by about 100 points per year.  The cardiologists have advised statins and other drugs to treat atrial fibrillation.

I’m among thousands of guys who have exercised religiously for most of our lives and are yet contending with arterial sclerosis.  I joke about being so gullible at 14 years of age that I believed the claims of Joe Weider and Bob Hoffman in their body-builder magazines.  I believed that I could look like one of the steroid-infused hulks on their magazine covers.  I had an anticlimactic athletic career, but I never stopped weight training and running.  Even now I’ve met many of our neighbors because I run the hill on our street six days per week, rain or shine.

So it was a shock when my calcium score started rising.  Then I started waking up at night with an irregular heart beat.  One day after my run, my heart rate stuck at a pulse of 140 per minute.  All night it continued, and the next day a doctor put me in the ER for monitoring or shock treatment.  Interestingly enough, after a phone conversation with my wife, the tachycardia stopped and I could go home.  My wife was pleased that she could have such a effect.  Love is a wonderful thing.

I’m gullible enough to read alternative medicine.  I’ve been anemic and borderline hypothyroid most of my life.  I read that iodine supplementation can improve thyroid numbers, so I was taking it and showing some benefit.  Two doctors told me I was crazy to take iodine, so I stopped.  The atrial fibrillation quickly got much worse.  I had also read Doctor Esselstyn who has shown remarkable results using a vegetarian diet for treating heart disease.  After nine months of a strict vegan diet my coronary calcium score dropped nearly a hundred points.  

But the atrial fibrillation got so bad that I couldn’t run without setting it off.  For a while I had it 3-5 times per week, 5-15 hours at per episode.  I was searching for anything other than Diltiazem and Warfarin that the doctors urged me to take.  My mother had taken Warfarin for ten years before anybody knew the side effects included arterial calcification.  I refused the drugs.  Again, my wife found a reference to iodine deficiency among vegetarians.  I found the website of a doctor online who says that iodine can be helpful against atrial fibrillation.  I restarted iodine supplementation at about 35 mg per day.  In two weeks the a-fib and tachycardia stopped completely.  It has been more than four years, and I have had very few recurrences.  I’ve been running six days per week and weight training as well on three of those days.

I was diagnosed with heart disease ten years ago, but since getting control of atrial fibrillation, I have no symptoms.  The coronary calcium score is still a concern.  Of course, because I’m gullible, I continue to read rather than take the statins.  Thirty years ago, I read Linus Pauling about vitamin C.  High doses prevented the colds and flu viruses that had previously bothered me several times per year.  Pauling also wrote about vitamin C and heart disease.  If things were as simple as he claimed I shouldn’t have heart disease.  The benefit may be that I haven’t needed surgery like my father.

I have had other problems.  I was a dialysis tech for ten years, and I can recall, at least once, puncturing myself after removing needles from a patient.  A few years ago my bloodwork came back showing that my liver enzymes were off by a factor of 100.  The doctor who ordered the tests had never seen anything like it.  I felt ok, and at the time my mother was having trouble caring for my father who was in late stages of Alzheimer’s dementia.  My employer generously allowed me to work remotely from my parents’ home 175 miles away.  While I was there I consulted a hematologist about the liver enzymes.  She retested, and the results came back unimproved at disturbingly high levels.  She sent me to the ER, the day before Thanksgiving 2014, where I was diagnosed with hepatitis C.

The more I read about it, the worse the prognosis seemed.  The treatment using interferon was extended with many patients feeling like they have the flu for a year or more.  There are some new drugs, but companies will not pay for treatment until a patient is stage 3, which is the verge liver transplant.  Fortunately I was diagnosed early.  An ultrasound test didn’t show liver damage yet, but with ferritin over 4000, there soon would be.  

I was taking my parents to a naturopath with whom I discussed my diagnosis.  By sheer luck, or Providence, he had recently been to a conference with Burt Berkson, a medical doctor and biology Phd who has been treating liver disorders for 25 years with a protocol that conventional medicine doesn’t recognize.  It involves intravenous administration of alpha lipoid acid, milk thistle, and vitamin C.  I started treatment by the naturopath, who also prescribed low-dose Naltrexone, which at higher doses is used to get addicts off drugs or alcohol.  It suppresses endorphin response, and the body reacts to what appears to be immune deficiency by increasing immune response. The naturopath also did phlebotomy to get rid of the iron overload I was carrying.

In two months of treatment, my liver enzymes and ferritin numbers came down closer to normal.  My hepatitis C viral load also came down.  I was in remission in a fraction of the time that would have been expected on conventional treatments.  Insurance paid for the comparatively inexpensive protocol.  Dr. Berkson tells appalling stories about how conventional doctors and hospitals have rejected his successful protocol.  My conventional doctor back home was astonished by my case.  She called me a medical miracle and started sending hepatitis C patients to the naturopath 175 miles away.  Few doctors know anything about Berkson or his protocol because it isn’t standard of care.  Standards of care are the drugs recommended in conferences sponsored by the pharmaceuticals industry.  After seven years, I have no recurrence of high hepatitis C viral load.  My liver enzymes have been normal for seven years.

A doctor whom I see has recent experience dealing with the medical industrial complex during the Covid-19 epidemic.  He was doing early treatment for Covid-19 with the drugs rejected by FDA and CDC dictates.  After successfully treating maybe a hundred patients, one of them required hospitalization.  Doctors in the hospital asked if the patient had been getting any other treatment.  The patient told them about the unconventional treatment, and the hospital reported Dr. X.  He ended up successfully defending his practice, but it cost him thousands of dollars.  He has stopped treating Covid-19 patients because the power brokers have made it financially untenable.

Suppression of research and treatment that doesn’t favor the pharmaceuticals industry isn’t science.  Dr. Fauci controls millions of dollars of research funding.  Thousands of doctors have nonetheless objected to micromanagement of health care by the government.  Their courageous testimony has been suppressed along with the alternative treatments they recommend.

My experience with health care outside the medical industrial complex is similar to my experience working around the power brokers in my industry.  It’s also similar to working around the hierarchy that rules the Christian Church.  It begins to appear that Jesus’s controversies with the authorities in his culture are not incidental to his announcements about the Kingdom of God.  One could conclude that debunking the people who think they know is the core of his message.  There is a liberation to be found simply by questioning authority and exploring alternatives to conventional options.

Satan or the Wilderness

Jesus seems to have had a different perspective on how power and authority are allocated in the world than St. Paul who said all authority is given by God and therefore by resisting authority one might be resisting God.  This gets into matters of perspective that could account for St. Paul's relatively long life as contrasted with the death of Jesus after intrigue and conspiracy of clerics to silence him. Probably in accord with his reply to Satan in the wilderness about the ruler of this world, Jesus offended nearly everybody he met who had power or influence.  He continued his fast in the desert rather than bow down to Satan and obtain power by the devil's dispensation.  When Jesus was a twelve-year-old boy, Temple scholars marveled at his knowledge, but they didn't propose a route to ordination or the equivalent.  After working as a carpenter for thirty years, he was basically a street preacher. 

Most people have to decide whether to defer to the accepted arbiters of legitimacy.  The history of scientific and medical progress includes many cases where established authorities turned out to be, not only wrong, but intransigent about dissent.  Practitioners invested in the status quo can be obtuse to new evidence, and they can destroy the careers of challengers.  Is it better to conform or hold out in obscurity, as it were, in the desert? 

Business but not as Usual

Peter Thiel is a billionaire, German American, venture capitalist who reads René Gerard’s literary criticism.  The result of mimetic envy, according to Gerard, is herd mentality.  People copy the desires of others to the degree that everybody wants the same things.  Business investments tend to follow the crowd in attempts to cash in on the spending stampede.  Thiel is a contrarian who reasons that success in business is more likely if it is based on original thinking that avoids competition among trend followers.

An originator of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, Thiel was also the first outside investor in Facebook. He has an estimated net worth of $9.13 billion and was ranked 279th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.  Evidently, it is possible to work around conventional practice and succeed in business.

Also a maverick conservative, Thiel is a Republican among Silicon Valley progressives and technology barons.  Like Girard, Thiel is a Christian.  Unlike just about anybody else, Thiel publicly announced at a GOP convention in 2016, where he also endorsed Donald Trump, that he is gay.  If there is any truth in my thesis that the Kingdom of God is people living outside the boundaries of what is politically correct, Thiel gets it.  

There is also an analogue of antiauthoritarianism in capitalism, also known among conservatives as economic freedom.  The argument is that millions of people voluntarily buying, selling, and entering into contracts is more productive than government management and control of the economy.  The history of 20th century socialist experiments in government control, otherwise known as enforced "social justice", has proved mainly the ineptitude of bureaucratic management.  

Again, the American Constitution is, by design, an instrument that limits and separates power among entities that are necessary in corporate polity.

Theodore Adorno was a left-winger. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Marxist analysis of the evolution of Enlightenment thought and Western rationalism, first appearing in 1944.  Adorno's authoritarian personality motif is often hurled at conservatives, but he argued that it applied to all advocates who took their cause to extremes of conformity.  Respecting tradition when progressives dominate institutional power in academe, business, the media, is quite different than contesting tradition in Jesus's puritanical culture ruled by priests and Talmud scholars.

According to Adorno's theory, the elements of the Authoritarian personality type are: Intolerance for ambiguity; Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs; Submission to acknowledged authority; Aggression toward people who do not subscribe to conventional thinking; A desire for strong leadership that displays uncompromising power.  

There have been various attempts to explain racism and the atmosphere that leads to purges and ethnic hatred.  Now the reigning elites have marshalled these ideas against anybody who espouses market capitalism or persists in believing in American exceptionalism.  In academe Peter Thiel or George Gilder would be shouted down and not permitted to speak based on a doctrine that purports to be no platform for fascists.

More appalling is the conversion of corporate business to ideologically based hiring-and-promotion policies.  Big business has swung left to a degree that is not only counterproductive, but undermines merit advancement for "equity" of results regardless of qualifications.  

Working in this environment can take some effort to maintain independence and calm.  One careless remark could cost you your job.  Even a reasonable comment on sensitive issues could get you cancelled.  Don’t talk about politics or religion.  Up to a point this helps.  But somebody has to occasionally inject reality into the discussion when somebody repeats hysterical claims about climate change that have for decades been wrong (It’s already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day 1970).  Citizenship calls for reasoned debate about issues like government spending and inflation.  Biological males competing in woman’s sports is nuts.  Ad hominem argumentation is a logical fallacy to be avoided, but lots of people do attack the person or source of an argument instead of the issue in debate.  

I have worked in big tech for more than twenty years and not muted my politics.  I don’t talk about religion, but, interestingly enough, it has come up, once while having coffee with a Muslim friend.  We agreed that we had more in common with each other than we had with most of our progressive coworkers.  Another Muslim, a woman with whom I worked for several years, one day out of the blue said to me, “You are religious, aren’t you”.  There is perspective to be gained from these kinds of encounters. The current materialist consensus isn’t endorsed by most of the population of the world.

How do we find freedom in the Kingdom of God while employed in a business empire controlled by networks of influence, stack ranking, and political conformity codes?  It may be simplest to ignore the networks and politics.  A lot of work gets done by people who just do their jobs.  Focus on the work instead of the distractions.  Coworkers will appreciate substantial productivity, even innovations that somebody discovers in time available while not thinking about the next review.

Dominance or Submission

In nearly every area of life, competition defines some people as dominant and others who are expected to submit. Wealth created by the American economy is enough that most people don't go hungry.  Even the poor have mobile phones.  But aggressive achievers get control of resources and influence.  

Carl Sandburg's poetry was written during a less prosperous era of American history. I have always admired the earthly humanity of the characters in Sandburg's poems.  In one of them, he says "I've chosen to live among those who have too little rather than those who have too much".  I haven't found explicitly religious sentiments in Sandburg's work, but his choice to live among those who have too little is similar to Jesus working for a living and spending his days with ordinary people. 

I know these people.  My grandparents left South Dakota in September 1916 to homestead in Eastern Montana. They drove a Model-T Ford up the Yellowstone Trail, Grandpa with determined hands on a bucking steering wheel, his wife with a baby in the other seat. In the few weeks before the Montana winter hit, they built a house North of Wolf Point, Montana.  By first snow fall they had a roof and four walls--sixteen by twenty-four, with an attic--between the family and wolfish weather outside starting to howl.

In the spring, when the ground had thawed enough to be broken with a plow and a team of horses, they planted ten acres in oats and potatoes. In a few months the temperature climbed to 117 degrees. They brought seven more children into the world.  The kids helped pick the rocks out of the fields.  I met them as adults with children of their own, my 35-40 cousins.  My mother admitted later in life that she didn't marry a farmer because she saw her mother carrying water for pigs.  She stuck to her guns and married my father, a railroader.  I didn't know my grandfather on his side, an Italian immigrant who became a section foreman on a crew of track laborers.  He died in his fifties of a heart attack.  My father went to work at 14 while he, his sister, and my grandparents lived in an outfit car, basically a railroad boxcar modified to house workers on a rail siding out in the boondocks. 

Years after he died, people told me my grandfather got to be foreman because he could beat up anybody on his crew, a bunch of guys who swung nine-pound hammers to drive rail spikes. He found a way to achieve dominance even in his humble profession.  My father said that without any math or engineering tools his father could lay steel around a curve, and when it was time to cut the rail, he'd call my father with the acetylene torch, and tell him to, "Cut here". The next rail dropped in by crane, seemed always to fit.

Both my grandfathers were tough, and within the confines of their world they did have a kind of dominance. It didn't solve all their problems. Both occasionally drank to excess. Dad told me he sometimes had to find his father sleeping off a hangover in somebody's garage. He liked to drink with the railroad officials. Mom remembers holidays when her father went to town and got drunk instead of taking a day off with the family.  Apparently, my father learned something about humility from its absence.  He was uninterested in gaining influence by fraternizing with railroad officials or any other elite.  In the small town where I grew up, he knew everybody.  It could take half an hour to walk three blocks along 1st Street, because he talked to everybody we met.

I spent more than twenty years passionately involved in opera singing, an art form from which we get the terminology prima donna.  Not only the top soprano in this business gains dominance on and offstage.  Conductors and stage directors have absolute power over singers and orchestra musicians.  Agency representatives control hiring of professionals from their rosters.  In opera organizations of major cities the general manager controls everything, because he or she knows how and where to get funding for production costs that run in the millions.

My first audition, singing for the staff and general director at Seattle Opera went very well.  Afterward the director shook my hand and welcomed me into the company.  He couldn’t give any substantial roles because even he was constrained by agency agreements that prescribed casting of even minor roles.  In order to get the superstars represented by the agencies, he had to hire their up-and-comers for the bit parts.  He put me in the union chorus, which paid for more coaching, and he was always cordial.  Often enough he would walk across the room to say hello or chat.  Not bad for a local singer nobody had heard outside of church.

It’s nice sometimes to be on speaking terms with influential people.  But, I was still in the chorus after then many years’ study.  The way to make a career in opera involves jetting around the country to audition for apprentice programs until you land something that puts a few substantial credits on your resume.  Then the agencies will talk to you.  I was 35.  One prestigious coach told me I had about two years to get the roles I needed or forget about it.  Another option was to go to Germany where the government subsidizes opera houses even in small communities.  Singers can find work, basically, in civil-service jobs. I never felt ready to risk my marriage and leave house and home in the attempt.  A few people I had sung with did go to Germany, with mixed results.  Money might have helped, but even young singers from wealthy families often came home defeated.

There are regional opera productions that struggle for existence.  I sang major roles with some of them.  My wife and I have sung concerts for many years, enjoyably, without spending months living in hotels separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.  We are financially much better off than friends who gambled on music careers.  Musical soirées in our living room aren’t glorious, but art songs by Brahms, Strauss, Quilter, Vaughan Williams, Albéniz. Granados, Rodrigo, Mompou, are more musical than much of the arts entertainment on TV.  While we're not among the glitterati, we are on first-name basis with our audience of friends and neighbors.  

Grand opera is, yes, grand, but I've been involved in church music for more than fifty years.  I learned to sing in church before a barrage of banality obliterated congregational singing in amplified musical malpractice.  To make things worse Screwtape and his minions have created a polarity of ideological warfare among Christians.  Churches that maintain some sanctity in their music, oldline Protestants, tend to be left-wing propaganda operations.  Conservative churches--where people still think the resurrection is history, not myth--have succumbed to derivative pop music, often at decibel levels that sends people who've heard Handel and Mozart running for the parking lot.

It is understandable that kids who grew up with an overdose of revival-era music want some relief from sentimental 19th century parlor music. Evangelical culture took an extended dive into sectarian thinking in an attempt to work around the old liberalism.  There are various discussions of the results, for example, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll.  There is also a rejoinder, by me, titled TheScandal of Evangelical Music, which began in a blog discussion nearly twenty years ago.  Here's another good book: All Shook Up, Music, Passion, and Politics, by Carson Holloway.

I can deal with the whiskey baritone who hit the road to escape Sunday School art, and I understand why a lot of people now in their thirties and forties enjoy a harder edge to their music.  But my wife and I refuse to go deaf attending church a couple of times per week.  We have sung in great choirs and mediocre choirs in mainline Protestant churches and in Catholic Churches.  Here's some of the memorable music: 

Bach, Wachet auf (Sleepers Awake)

Palestrina, Sicut Cervus

Brahms, Requiem

Dvořák: Biblical Songs

Vivaldi, Magnificat

Mozart, Coronation Mass

Benjamin Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb

Faure, Requiem 

Haydn, Mass in Time of War

Haydn, Lord Nelson Mass

Gounod Messe Solennelle (St. Cecelia)

Where we went to church, people who were not in the choir sang. Hymnals had four parts and even a twelve-rank organ didn't drown the congregational singing.  When you've seen the celestial city, why settle for art from an urban ghetto?  Don't start on contextualization.  I've been there: Form and Meaning inLiturgical Art .

Art is not in essence self-expression. Art is an embodiment of culture that teaches on a very profound level as it inspires, or ravishes, the whole person. When schmoozy praise choruses, and now even hard rock, drive historic music from the sanctuary, it surely says something about the substitution of subjective values for the rootedness of faith in history and in fact. These cautions are often diverted by the argument that disputes about musical style are trivial. Usually this is a ploy to keep decision-making about music in private discussions. Your questions are old stuff, now just let us decide. In court, at least, the defense has an opportunity to cross-examine. But those inclined to sell the birthright for a mess of pottage know their ideas won’t stand up to open investigation of the issues.

The dominant secular elite has its equivalent in church where decision makers set the course for people who can't even discuss their perspectives at the coffee hour.  There is a time to submit, and there's a time to resist.  Jesus turned over tables when money became a greater influence in the temple than worship.  Consider that while we decide what to do with commercialized pop music in church.

Another area of controversy where people are refusing to submit is in the education of their children.  The dominant elite are in shock, to a degree that they recently pressured the US Attorney General to investigate parents who attend school-board meetings and challenge the teaching of critical theory about race and gender.  For asking questions, people have been dragged out of meetings by the police.  

Colleges have been distilleries of critical literary theory, which boils to ethical nihilism and, consequently, deconstruction of literature for implicit structural racism and sexism. Conformity has progressed from group-think to suppression of free speech.  If there is no truth, everything reduces to power.  Teacher education and certification have become an indoctrination in racial politics and post-colonial propaganda about Western Civilization.  Hiring in academe enforces the party line.

Young men and women have to decide whether they will go in debt to pay for college degrees that may be useless in the job market.  Parents have to decide how much racial and sexual ideology they will permit schools to inflict on their children.  We know two couples, the first with kids in high school and the second whose kids are in college.  The first couple is investigating buying a house in rural Montana, the second advising their daughter to keep her mouth shut and get a degree in the sciences or technology.  The humanities are impossible for anybody with remaining rational sagacity or conscience.

Monasteries kept civilization alive as the Roman Empire disintegrated.  An iteresting book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, is a variation on the Evangelical withdrawal from confrontation with liberalism, a retreat into communities of like minded people. In the 1970s, the Religious Right came out of the backwaters to wield political power.  Still at the core of the Republican Party, Evangelicals are unrelenting, and under democratic government, they are an example of Christians who maintain organized resistance and increase voter registration.  Sectarian separation from the world is irresponsible, if the core of Jesus's ministry is opposition to power, now entrenched on the left not the right.  It's gotten pretty crazy.  George Gilder frequently speaks to gatherings of scholars in Communist China, but he is barred from American colleges.

Children of the Kingdom

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

  

Children are able to live without taking thought for the power struggles of the adult world.  They feel pain and disappointment, but they tend to forget pretty soon and go on with their high-energy activities.  They seem to deal even with death and suffering better than adults, who recognize their own vulnerability in the trauma of others.  I was five years old when my grandmother died.  We were traveling to Rochester, Minnesota where she was in the hospital in late stages of kidney failure as a result of diabetes.  My father came from the train station with a telegram informing us that she had died, and there was no reason to continue our journey.  

My mother cried.  She said her mother was a good woman.  My younger sister and I tried to comprehend the death.  We waited for a cue from our parents about how to respond.  Our father did his best to console our mother.  His father had passed about six years ago, and to my mother he said, “I know how you feel”.

Instead of continuing our trip to Rochester, we traveled back to Wolf Point, Montana, where the rest of Mom’s family waited together to attempt to manage their grief, grandma’s five daughters and three sons.  The funeral was a week later at the Lutheran Church where the family had held weddings, confirmations, and funerals for several generations.  I don’t remember the scriptures that the minister read or his eulogy, but aunts and uncles assured us as stunned children that Grandma was with the God in heaven.  

We still had our father and mother on Earth, and somehow their consolations about Grandma’s passing were enough.  The adults explained the pain they were feeling: “We grieve for our loss.  Grandma is with the Heavenly Father.”  

It was some time, maybe weeks, before I contemplated what it meant to be in heaven with God.  Back home, I can remember looking at the sky and feeling a vastness that I imagined transported me to heaven.  I thought at the time that I could go there again without much effort.  The sky is still inspirational, but heaven isn’t so easy to imagine as it was when I was five years old.

Children have easier access to another world that from time to time converges with the world of toil and grief that we know.  They seem able to live day by day with enjoyment of the known world, even while it keeps adults in a quandary.  So many of the sayings of Jesus are childlike in faith and simplicity.  Take no thought for tomorrow.  Consider the lilies, how they grow.  Your Father feeds the birds; will he not care for you, oh men of little faith? Ask and you shall receive.  

My parents lived through the Depression and World War II.  They went to church in the 1950s and 60s during the post-war years, thankful for peace and prosperity, like most of their neighbors.  Then they had to suffer the indignities of their children’s descent into revolt and depravity.  There must be compensation for endurance at some stage in the cosmic economy.  Fear not, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Case Studies

I've been writing about living in the Kingdom of God while working around the various Kingdoms of Men.  Ten days ago, I got the Covid19 virus, this about the same time as I hit a particularly tedious stage of my current employment.  Because I work at home, I've been able to get through some rather pointless tasks on the job while waiting for my health to improve.  In previous segments of this long essay, I've described years of interesting, productive work, mostly ignoring office politics and processes designed by managers to make them look good.  My current contract is proving difficult to navigate in this regard.

I didn't get the Covid19 vaccination.  The suppression of evidence about early treatments and risks associated with the vaccine were enough to discredit pronouncements coming from government agencies.  When billions of dollars in pharmaceutical industry profits are on the line, the FDA and CDC are expectedly complicit.  I work at home, so evading exposure to the virus was easy enough for me.  My wife goes out for groceries and occasional appointments.  After two years we were a bit complacent and started attending more social events.  A get-together two weeks ago that seven people attended resulted in six of them contracting Covid19.  None of us were vaccinated.  Some treated the virus with Ivermectin.  My wife and I used vitamin C and chlorine dioxide solution. 

All of us are in our 70s, some upper 70s, but nobody has been very sick, nothing worse than the flu.  In less than two weeks we're all healthy again.  I'm back on my exercise routine.  It was possible to ignore the pharmaceutical industry.  The only encounter I had with it was a discussion with a doctor at urgent care where I was tested for the infection.  He wanted to know why I had not been vaccinated.  Though I was already infected, he urged me to talk with my cardiologist about the risks I mentioned, to dispel my concerns and get vaccinated. This would possibly avoid infection with another strain, as if four boosters were preventing others from getting sick.  He listened to my breathing and commented that my lungs sounded very good.  He asked about my pharmacy preference, but he had no options for treatment of the virus.

So, I'm back contending with a job that isn't very interesting.  I guess that's a problem, because it pays very well. I don't think it's my attitude.  I was feeling the same way about a job some time ago, and a week after I quit, the company folded.  That's not likely to happen in this company of 165,000 employees.  I have usually been able to find something about my job that makes it interesting.  There's a meeting in forty minutes that may open some possibilities.

Hmmmm... Forty minutes later, and the meeting is cancelled.  It's Friday and everybody wants to call it a day.  Is this writer's block or a life block?  Time for some weight lifting and a run.  My mind will work better if my body is working.

It made a difference. The sun is shining, and the Rhododendrons and Dogwoods are in bloom.  I pray best when my pulse is above 100 per minute.  

I've had a three-day weekend to contemplate working at a dull job versus retiring to write.  My blogs are read by a couple of hundred people per week.  I could retire and write something ambitious, something to change culture on a suicidal trajectory through erosion of the metaphysics that made Western civilization more productive and more just than any other culture in human history.  Civilized observers can see that Jesus and his teachings are at the core of human rights and that civilized institutions have been sustained by the church even under clerical mismanagement. 

But, I don't think professional clergy, generally, are embodying the teachings of Jesus.  The church would be better if Christians were not reduced to spectators for people they pay to think for them week after week.  So why would I choose to become a writer who doesn't participate in the world he's trying to understand or change?  Like the pope making pronouncements about contraception!  My Aunt Irma, who was excommunicated in the 1950s after divorce, said about the pope and his ex cathedra statements, "He no play the game, he no make the rules."  I'm going to have to keep at it, living in the world, one way or another.  Jesus was a carpenter, St. Paul a tent maker. 

A couple of weeks have passed.  The last time I was stuck like this, I couldn't’ find enough working technology to document, so I quit.  Then the company folded.  Today I was notified that funding for my current job has been cut.  Three writers will be looking elsewhere for work.

Half a dozen resumes sent to various employers and contract agencies resulted in an interview for a job similar to others I've had in the past twenty years.  The interviewer was cordial, and I think I could be productive in the role he's staffing.  Inflation is bad and getting worse.  I don't want to find out in old age that I don't have enough net worth to live without financial stress.  It will take a week or two for the interviewer to confirm funding for the job.  He says he'll be in touch.