Conversation and the Intelligence of Groups

Apparently Smart People don’t make smart groups.

“What mattered instead was the social sensitivity of individual members, the proportion of women (who tend to be more sensitive) in each group, and a balanced participation of conversation.”

The New Scientist writes “Social sensitivity – measured using a test in which participants had to identify another person’s feelings by looking at photographs of their eyes – was by far the most important factor….”  Anita Woolley, the senior scientist also said, “What it suggests is that if you don’t know the social sensitivity of a group, it is a better bet to include females than not.”

In the Episcopal Church, The Rev. Eric Law started the Kaleidoscope Institute to examine and enable diversity in congregations.  His methods tried to ensure that there was greater participation in communities with different styles of communication.

One of the primary tasks of the parish priest is simply this:  to gather and talk.  It need not lead to action (although it may).  There are rules to this:  one person need not dominate the conversation; all should be able to speak equally and freely; people will pay attention to the dynamics of the group.

But this is not that easy.  Congregants may need to be trained and taught.  There is a discipline to maintaining a learning culture that harnesses the intelligence of a group, a discipline which is worthy for clerics to maintain and teach.

I also wonder if this explains problems in churches that are run only by men.

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What is essential for Episcopalians to know?

In the comments below, Laura rightfully asks whether or not knowing the 39 articles are essential.  I’m sympathetic – I have a similar reaction when people parade Saint Hooker as the theological answer to our polity problems.

Perhaps there is another question:  is there a historical and theological narrative to being Episcopalian we assume people should share?  Is there a taxonomy or a lexicon of dates, facts, events and perspectives that we expect to be normative?  There may not be.    Although I understand the sentiment against idolizing the past, or claiming it uncritically, I wonder if our reticence toward naming our tradition inhibits us in other ways.

Are there some basic ideas we expect people to know about our tradition?  I think, for example, that new Episcopalian should be able to distinguish why we are organized differently than congregational churches, peace churches, and The Catholic church.

But should we be affirming denominationalism?   Most of the time I’m anti-denominational, but on the other hand, there are aspects of Episcopal culture (beyond gin and tonics), such as its intellectual and musical heritage, that would want to pass on.  The organizational potential of the Episcopacy has yet to be tapped.

I don’t think that such a list would be long.  But there may be a pedagogical issue here:  I’m inclined toward memorizing, drilling, and testing as legitimate (but not comprehensive or complete) aspects of learning.    How do we describe the shape of being Episcopalian, and what are the events or facts that articulate that shape?

Another way to look at it is we’re playing “connect the dots” with our denominational heritage or ethos.   What are the dots?  Do we need Hooker or the 39 articles?

This is separate from what may be essential for Christians to understand.  Some could be minimalist:  merely be able to be a friend of God and others.  Others might require adhering to dispensational theology.  I might leave it at believing that the church’s teaching about Jesus’ resurrection is the location for our holiness.  That is for another blog.

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Religious People Don’t Know Much

Pew recently came out with a report confirming what plenty of pastors already know.  Americans ill-informed about religion (Here’s the test). I recently purchased Stephen Prothero‘s book on Religious Literacy for the purpose of creating a basic minimum of what a confirmand should know about the faith and the church, adding the particulars of what makes Episcopalians distinctive.

I wonder if it would be helpful to have a basic universal test.  Prothero has a list of reasonable expectations for someone who participates in public life.  I don’t think every Episcopal student needs to know who all the Anglican divines were, but they should know about the impact of Elizabeth on the church, the framework of anti-puritan and anti-Catholic context in the thirty-nine articles; and some of the general tensions, such as evangelical, broad and Anglo-Catholic, within the tradition, without being triumphalist or parochial on our denominational identity.

Granted, a list can get unwieldy.   But knowing the ten commandments – and that there are different versions – the virtues and vices, having some of Jesus’ words known by heart; the order of the Pentateuch and the four Gospels; would seem important to any Christian participating in the public realm.

I wonder if clergy are afraid of teaching too much.  For every Atheist knows that one way to make atheists is to expose someone to as much religion as possible.  Give a young child a bible without commentary, and it will seem like an incomprehensible, dangerous and violent document.  But I suggest it is our duty to handle scripture not merely reverently, but honestly, offering the alphabet of a common heritage that is available to all.

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Palladino and Cleveland

The recently elected Republican Nominee for Governor noted that the last major nominee from his hometown was President Cleveland.   There may be some parallels.  Cleveland was known as being honest, committed to classical liberalism, antagonistic to party politics.   Palladino may want to be a principled, small government Republican.  In the Nineteenth Century, they were called “Bourbon Democrats.”  He ignores issues of race, which has always complicated class issues in this country.

The problem?  Their policies didn’t work.

The scripture this lesson seems to map out a plan.  Cut the debts of the poor; condemn hoarding; may the rich spend their money on friends and family generously.

Jesus was a Keynesian.

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Breathing Space: a 9/11 sermon

Preached on 9/8/2002

Twenty years from now you may still be asked “where were you on September 11th?”  Like the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger Explosion, or the Fall of the Berlin Wall, moments of surprise, shock and terror that sear our collective experiences in our minds forever.

Consider where you were the day before?  The weekend before?   I was here, having driven back the long six hours from Rocester.  My father was dying.  The day before he had told me, for the last time, “Good-bye.”  An atheist, he nonetheless said to me, “and perhaps I’ll see you afterwards,” and with his typical, mischievous, broad smile.  He was offering me something, anything, a memory of him to hold while he was still lucid.

The next day I got the apartment ready for visitors.

I remember preparing for mass and trying to write my sermon, halfheartedly.

And it was a beautiful week-end.

What happened the day before?  Someone died after a long fight with cancer; Wasn’t there an earthquake that killed thousands?  Wasn’t someone’s son murdered that day?  Or you, maybe you found out you needed chemotherapy, or you knew someone who died in a car crash;  or did you yourself drive drunk the night before, daring God to keep you alive? Where were you the day before?  The week before?  What terrible things did we do?

How may women were raped in the Congo that week?  How many children got sick from unsanitary water supplies?   Who fled slavery?

Where were you the day before?

I can tell you I thought not of Chechnya being bombed by Russians; or Chinese Christians being killed by Muslim Indonesians; the starvation of thousands in the Sudan, or the sickness of children in Iraq.  I thought not of you, or my ill congregants at White Plains Hospital.  I was thinking of one thing.  I was thinking of my father.

I was thinking of my father and living life without him, what it would be like to live alone, an orphan, without him meeting a future wife or holding his grandchildren, to only hold him as a fading memory.

September 10th.

It’s hard for me to imagine thousands of people dying.  Three thousand?  It’s so many.   Do you know three thousand people?  One thousand?  The numbers magnify.  What of those killed by institutional negligence; or even deliberately.  The ones murdered by Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Amin.  Ten thousand?  Five million?  Twenty Million?  As the typhoons swept Bangladesh one year killing hundreds of thousands, the writer Annie Dillard wrote how she can’t conceive of it.   Her young daughter says, “it’s easy.  Just think of dots.  Lots and lots of dots.”

Dots, swept into the Bay of Bengal, swept away into the deep.

It’s easier to think of dots than human beings.  And when conducting a war, it becomes crucial to reduce human beings to dots.  Can you imagine 100,000 Iraquis killed?  Or a few thousand Americans?  Each American hurts more.  For each American has a body, war breathing body with the potential for love, a family that cares for them, joys and failures, plans and frustrations.  The Iraquis, the enemy, any enemy, remain dots.

Numbers cannot convey all that pain and sorrow, of 100,000 families.  Imagine losing one son, twenty years old, his life before him; an entire extended family.  Imagine it’s your son.  Your daughter.  Your father, your mother.  Now magnify it by 100,000 times.  Can you?  Can you imagine it?

Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered, God is there.”  Why?  Why does he say this?  “Breathing Space,” the Archbishop of Wales (now Archbishop of Canterbury) writes.  For when we affirm and love someone we allow for breathing space, a place to exhale, to fill our bodies with oxygen, to fill our bodies with a love that stands up in spite of our overwhelming sorrow. When we encounter someone there is the opportunity to be liberated from fear strangling us, for face to face we do not have just the enemy and outsider, another atomized and irrelevant dot, but a living person, a breathing person.

A retired solder once told me about urban combat he’d conducted  when we invaded Grenada.  He was a Ranger, and now battling street by street, house by house, with Cubans.  “I had only three weeks before I’d be discharged.  Then this.”  He turns a corner and meets a man.  Their eyes lock.  He sees a soldier, an opponent, an enemy, a living body;  they are both filled with fear, their faces fixed in terror, and they both know the next step.  The American is faster.  “He was a man,” the solider says, “and I’m going to live with this for the rest of my life.”   It’s easy to send a dot into oblivion, but much harder to send a man to hell.

It’s asked a million times, every day, “why this tragedy,” or “that tragedy.”  Where was God?  Perhaps the question got more intense on September 11th.  For normally we are shielded by a provincial media and fortunate to have avoided war on our continent for nearly 140 years.   But it’s the same questions when terror strikes:  “where was God?” or “What could we have done?” or “Who’s in charge, anyway?”

The archbishop responds, “all I have is words.”

Jesus affirms this:  when we face each other, see each other as bodies, as made in God’s image, as concrete and living beings, as individuals with particular habits, sorrows and joys, He enters our consciousness.  Not through statistics, the numbers that make us like grains of sand, bubbles upon the foamy sea, as collateral damage, but as one person to one person, through the steady of love of those we call by name.  For as the twin towers were about to fall, the dying would call to tell their love in those futile moments, expressing a pointless love in the face of a senseless crime.  They created “breathing space.”

Jesus makes sense only by this: pulling people together, taking one image of love and placing it before the dying, affirming faithfulness through a gratuitous,  powerless pointless love, triumphantly making room for someone else, even though the walls are falling all around and nothing will be salvaged.

And so we, also, are left here to create breathing space, to affirm love, pointless and faithful in the midst of tragedy, where nothing can be salvaged, the towers of our satisfactions and hope falling around us.  Here is where God enters.  It’s enough. It’s not enough.  It’s what we have.

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Rules for Understanding Religion

Talking about religion is hard, in part because most people are ill-equipped to discuss it with precision and accuracy.  Religion, after all, raises people’s emotional temperature to a point where it is difficult to understand what the real points of conflict or misunderstanding are.

Here are some of my presuppositions when thinking about religion.

1.   Religious traditions have as much diversity within them as they do between them: Quakers and Roman Catholics; fundamentalists and Episcopalians; Sufis and Sunnis; reconstructionists and Hasids; Zen and Vajrayana.
2.   Most religions are not single traditions, but multiple traditions.  For example: works vs. faith by justification; law vs. grace; institutional authority vs personal conscience.
3.   Traditions mingle and change according to context: Buddhapalians, for example; the protestant influence on all religions in the US.  New age thought on Christianity.
4.   Holy texts are unrelated to popular piety: Some Muslims drink; some hindus eat beef; Christians have premarital sex.
5.   Religious conflict is often ossified political conflict.  The conflict in Northern Ireland has much to do with the birth of the English empire; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began as a conflict about land.
6.   Religious practice is more like a language than a moral calculus.
7.   Religions are not the same; nor are they completely different. Traditions include rituals, myth-making, moral teaching, and organizational systems.
8.   Religious traditions steal from one another.
9.   Few people know all the rules.
10. Few follow all the rules.
11.  We misunderstand other people’s traditions.
12.  We often misunderstand our own.
13.   We like the positive parts of our faith traditions.
14.  We ignore the bad parts of our faith traditions.
15.   Hypocrisy is the universal faith tradition.
16.   It’s still about sex, money and death. (Or more poetically, survival in the desert).


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On the Twin Towers

Sent via my enewsletter the week of the anniversary of 9/11/01.

It’s the eighth anniversary of the attack on the twin towers. That morning, I called people who I knew worked in the area, and after doing what I could, began to drive up to Rochester to be with my father, who died the next day.

Several new people came to church that Sunday. One family is now an active member of the the church. I wasn’t there, but in my absence, the Rev. Allen Shin preached that Sunday. As the spirit would have it, he had been downtown at Trinity Church, shepherding young children with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was there to give a talk.

It was a rough time. Some were heartbroken, angry, defensive, righteous, eager for a fight, determined to administer justice. All these sensibilities are real and appropriate. One parishioner said, “we should bomb them,” although she was unclear about who “they” were. Others simply wrestled with trying to figure out, why would this happen to us?

What the archbishop argued for was “breathing space.” At the time it seemed ridiculous. The archbishop noted that as the mob was about to stone the adulteress, he just sat in the ground, writing. Perhaps all Jesus was doing, was giving the demons time to walk away. Saying “I love you” offers space. Sometimes all we need is some time, spacious time, to gather ourselves, and think clearly.

Peter Stienfels once wrote about the Archbishop’s reflections upon a conversation with a rabbi after the war in Lebanon: “The rabbi,” Archbishop Williams told his audience, “made no political points. But he said that when in the Bible God tells Moses to take off his shoes in the divine presence, the Jewish sages had interpreted this to mean that we couldn’t meet God if we were protected against the uneven and unyielding and perhaps stony or thorny ground.”

The rabbi considered this also true “when we meet the human beings who are made in God’s image,” Archbishop Williams said. “Those who are responsible for violence of any kind, even when they think it is in a just cause, need to take off their shoes and recognize what it is like when flesh and blood are hurt.”

“Terrorism, is the absolute negation of any such recognition,” What will defeat terrorism in the end “is ‘taking off our shoes,’ coming to terms with what we share as mortal beings who have immortal value.”

It is a tough message. In a politically polarized environment, our first task is to recognize in each other the image of God, that admits that we all have fears, frustrations and questions. Perhaps we have to stop participating in the madness that elevates the spectacle and drama of emotional conflict. Instead, we are called to stand on that stony and thorny ground.

We must not rely on the easy platitudes that reveal our defensiveness or demand war. It is to simply recognize the truth that we can each find ourselves pulled in the direction of violence.

Jesus merely says stop. And without looking at us, He waits, and draws in the sand. The demons then depart. And so we hope.

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The Bent Lady; or Having a Really Bad Day

(A general summary of the sermon given August 22nd, 2010, Proper 16)

Sometimes we have really bad days.

Start off with a lack of sleep and nightmares about the apocalypse, being
naked in public, or realizing you never should have graduated high school.
Wake up.  There’s no hot water.  You cut yourself shaving.  Then there’s a
leak from the floor into the ceiling of your living room onto your cherry
table.

There’s no more juice or milk in the refrigerator.  Someone in the house
finished the eggs and the cereal.  You get dressed, but you’re in a rush so
you rip your pants.  You try on another suit, and you notice a little grease
stain.  The next suit is too tight.  You take everything off and weigh
yourself, and you’ve gained ten pounds.

You can’t find your keys.

After you find them twenty minutes later, you speedily back out of your
driveway, hitting a parked car that isn’t usually there.

You’re late for a meeting with your biggest client.

As you drive, you smell a horrible odor.   You wore this shirt dancing a
couple days ago and forgot to place it in the hamper.

When you stop at a red light, a car pulls up next to you and a five year old
gives you the finger.

At work you’re handed divorce papers.  After your secretary quits, your
daughter calls and tells you she’s marrying her one true love, a musician
who has a long criminal record, who you caught smoking pot in your back
yard.

He hadn’t even offered to share.

When you come home, you discover there isn’t a single glass of booze in the
house.  The dog opened the refrigerator door and ate the steak you
were marinating.   You smell a strange odor of burning wood coming from
somewhere in your house before the alarm goes off.  In the distance you see
a volcano erupt.

That’s a bad day.

Now imagine having a bad day for eighteen years.

Some take the optimistic view.   _There’s always someone with a worse day.
_ “I have cancer, but it could be stage four melanoma.  That would really
suck.”  Or “I have a terminal disease, but I’ve always wanted to die before
my husband and kids.”

Others become like zombies, their sensitivity to pain so reduced they can’t
feel anything.  Some of those are so calloused themselves, they can’t feel
the pain of others.  Some become bitter, outraged at the injustice around
them, the needless victimization, they shake their fists at the absurdity of
a God or a world that would make suffering so ubiquitous and ordinary.
They become pillars of resentment, with such a chip on their shoulder they
can’t make friends, alienate their family and routinely insult police
officers and babies.

In one parable, a woman who’d been sick for 18 years, bent with a serious
form of arthritis, asks Jesus for healing.   The scene has the indignant
priest, upset that Jesus is ignoring the holiest of God’s laws – don’t work
on the Sabbath.  He represents the enforcer against Jesus’ libertine
sensibilities.  But they are also indignant because they complain because
she’s a woman, an old woman, one who is not seen or allowed much power or
voice in a patriarchal society.

Jesus sees her; she stands.  He chastizes the rule-makers.  Even they would
free their animals on the Sabbath to get them a drink of water.   This
woman, isn’t she also a child of God?  Shouldn’t she also be liberated?

After 18 years, she could have been defined by her bad days.  This was the
sick woman; who others thought she may have deserved her plight; her identity was confined and bound by the fears around her.  Jesus sees her differently, instead as a child of Abraham, a person who could be free.

It wasn’t sympathy he offered; nor did he erase the past.  Rather, he saw her as a human being worthy of love, interrupting the cruelty of the habitual pieties that
rendered invisible the ones who always have a bad day.

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On Beck

I’m not all that sure about what the kerfuffle is all about, but I’ve gained a few insights about the man.

Initially, I didn’t get indignant or outraged that Beck was having a revival on the same day as MLK’s historic I have a Dream speech.  Although a speech that is now iconic in American history, it has been played out to the point of parody (“I had a really weird dream last night“), and I don’t think it was even his best one.

The rally, however, did reveal some aspects of Beck’s personality.  I’ve always found him insufferably (deceitfully?) ingratiating, obsequious at times, and insulting on others.  His whingy sentimentality merely makes me even appreciate Bill O’Reilly’s strong arm.

The rally made me consider that he truly does want to make a difference.  In itself that is admirable.  But it seems to me that he’s really got a secret Obama envy.

Instead of working to challenge the powers, to gather the people, the hard way, as Obama had done, Beck consistently takes the easy way out.   Obama’s mettle has been tested:  he worked hard to get through school, was disciplined in his personal life, and has sacrificed a potentially lucrative career of that of public service.  Instead, Beck has been rewarded for his immaturity, his identification with the resentful, anxious and fearful element of the American Public.   He seems to be one of those people who thinks that Obama has gotten more than he has deserved, and that he is not fit to run the country.

What outrages me is the audacity that Beck would hold a revival when the man has no flesh-and-blood congregation.  His interest in the lives of the public seems opportunistic at best, and non-existent at worst.   From where does was he given the authority?  At the very least, pastors are given the authority from congregations who’s everyday difficulties aren’t ideological, but concrete.  He pontificates and orders people about, without the real relationship building that most pastors consider part of their work.  How dare he preach to anyone about spiritual improvement from the vantage point of arrogance about his own supposed gifts?

Was it a success?  We’ll see.  Building a movement isn’t for the charismatic:  it is for the organized.    My suspicion: he is even a two-bit propagandist, a man who should be challenged as a fraud at every step.  He wants desperately to be taken seriously; but since he cannot, he offers his followers what they want.  The adult wing of corporate party has the responsibility to ask him directly:  does he really believe the things he says, and will he sacrifice his career on them?  Or will he be revealed to be an opportunist?

Until I see that time, I will continue to be baffled by why he has the attention he gets.  Although, like any bright child, it is exactly what he is good at.

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