Peoplewatching: A Sermon for Consecration Sunday

[NB: I preached this sermon on November 9, 2014 at Starmount Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. It had been so long since I had been invited to preach anywhere, I couldn't remember the last time. I am, therefore, the more grateful for the encouragement, kindness and generous attention I received from the people of Starmount. The sermon text was Mark 12:41-44.]  

Go to any large retail mall and you’ll see the guys I’m thinking of. Men of a certain age who say, “Okay, honey, you go on and shop. I think I’ll just sit right here.” And the “here” they’re talking about is the quadrangle of sofas placed every hundred yards or so for weary spouses, fussy, footsore children and peoplewatchers.

We all do it. Peoplewatch, that is. Where is your favorite place to peoplewatch? Airports, Waffle Houses, hospital lobbies and ER waiting rooms, the precinct lines on election day, Costco. What about church? Hmm.

If you really want to engage in some world class peoplewatching, I’ll tell you what. Wait till it’s a communion Sunday and show up for worship at a church where people walk forward to receive communion. There you’ll see a cross section of the people of God in all our wondrous variety:  a parade of ages and stages, healthy and infirm, happy and sad, rich and poor, able-bodied and handicapped, well-dressed and not so much.

If it is true that we encounter God in the faces of our brothers and sisters – and it is – then I would like to commend holy peoplewatching. For when I witness the deeply beautiful people God’s love is transforming you into, when I see you making an effort with God’s help to overcome your struggles – and realize that you have chosen to show up here when it would have been so easy not to – especially on Consecration Sunday, for heaven’s sake, then I am helped and encouraged. God speaks to me in you.

It was something like this Jesus was doing when he hiked up his robe that day and sat down just opposite the Temple treasury. The so-called treasury was the container where people on Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem placed their tithes and offerings. It was an Olympic-size offering plate. The act of putting an offering into the treasury was an important act of worship every pilgrim was expected to check off. So it made sense for Jesus to occupy this prime real estate. This way, his fifteen-minute break could offer a little holy peoplewatching, and no telling who and what he would see.

Nor was he disappointed in what he observed.

Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, Truly I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had.

Now the widow is clearly the heroine of this episode. But before we get to the widow, observe something about the other contributors. There are a lot of them, a multitude. They are rich. And they are making very generous contributions – large sums, Mark says – out of their abundance.

The rich are in the majority and they are worshipping God in an appropriate manner by making generous contributions. I pause here because this might come as a relief to prosperous folks who are conscientious Christians. Being blessed by God with prosperity and giving to God generously out of that abundance is in fact the norm for the majority of the people Jesus observes. And I believe it’s the norm for many of us here today.

You see, in making the widow a heroine, Jesus does not make the wealthy into bad guys, and he does not say that they should have contributed all they had. We can take a deep breath and relax.

Now consider the widow for a moment. And since we all get tired of calling her “the widow,” just for today let’s agree to name her … Lois. Why does Lois catch the peoplewatching eye of Jesus?

Well, the fact that she was contributing at all was pretty remarkable. The economic status of widow was down there right next to orphaned children. Being a widow was synonymous with abject poverty. Widows were supposed to be the beneficiaries of charity, but this widow is giving, not receiving. And not only that, she’s giving everything. In offering up her last two coins she gives relatively more percentage-wise than the rich who are giving out of their abundance.

Maybe she had thought about the trip all year, making one last offering to God in Jerusalem before she got so infirm she couldn’t travel anymore. Maybe she had come a long way to do just this one small thing. Two coins were all she had after paying for the journey. Two coins clinking in the plate. What love. What devotion.

God’s accounting system is different than what they use at Ernst & Young or Deloitte and Touche. The amount of my gift – be it $1 or $1 million – is not nearly as important to my spiritual well-being as the amount of my gift in relation to my ability to give.

Which, believe it or not, is good news. Because it means that anyone can stand beside the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in heaven’s hall of generous hearts.

You know, among the reasons people give to their church … okay, wait a minute. What are the reasons we give to the church?

·         to worship

·         because there’s a compelling need

·         because someone in our past has taught us to give

·         because Scripture tells us to give

·         and because we have a network of sustaining relationships in the church

For many of us, the last reason may be the strongest. Look around. When you boil it all down, what Consecration Sunday is really about is how actively our hearts are engaged with the work of God in and through these people.

More than a decade ago I made a pastoral call on an elderly parishioner named Teresa. At 99 years, Teresa was easily the oldest member of my suburban Chicago congregation. I went to see her that day to ask on behalf of the church for money – a lot of money. We were hoping to undertake an expensive round of preservation work on a historic building, and I was going to ask Teresa to make the lead gift, the gift that was going to inspire others to give, a major commitment.

Teresa’s daughter Mary Ann had told her why the pastor was calling. When I arrived we had some tea, but quickly got past small talk. I explained what we needed to do, how much it was going to cost and how much I wanted to ask her to consider giving. It was a large number.

And then there was an excruciating fifteen seconds of silence.

When Teresa began to speak, she said, I was baptized in this church 99 years ago. I was confirmed in this church. I was married here. My children and grandchildren were baptized here and were all members of the youth group. We held my husband’s funeral here and his ashes are in the rose garden right outside the church door. This church is my family. I believe what this church stands for. I love this church. I want it to be a blessing to the people of this village for another century. And now you ask me will I consider giving this money? My head says be careful, you might need that money, but my heart says go ahead.

Yes, I’ll consider it. I’ll do better than that. You know, pastor, you’re in luck today. It may surprise you to know that I have that much money, but I do. And I’ll be delighted to give what you ask. Something lavish for the glory of God while I’m still here to give it.

Relationships. Roots. Heart.

Giving is one of the high callings and privileges of church membership. How much is the work of God in this place, how much is sharing the seasons of life with these good people worth to you?

Amen.

Anatomy of a Decision

Dale Arthur Johnson (1936-2014), emeritus professor of church history at Vanderbilt Divinity School, died August 10, 2014 in Nashville after a long struggle with lymphoma and colon cancer. I knew Dale first as a teacher, dissertation advisor and housemate in Oxford during a period of sabbatical research for him and of dissertation research for me. After I emerged from Vanderbilt’s graduate program in 1987, Dale remained an interested and welcoming colleague and friend. This, my first venturing on what I anticipate may be a number of reflections about this good man and his influence concerns my initial encounter with him in the pages of the 1975 edition of the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog.

The course of a life can turn on small incidents. Funny that I never told him about this. But seeing the photograph of Professor Dale A. Johnson in the Vanderbilt Divinity School catalog in the summer of 1975 triggered the internal motion that resulted in my enrollment at VDS later that same summer.

To be sure, other factors contributed to this choice. Encouraged by a Church of Christ mentor in whom I had developed an uncritical trust, I had cobbled together a complicated arrangement for funding my divinity school career abroad. It involved a group of Church of Christ congregations in Texas. I am pretty sure this “arrangement” had reality only in my own wishful dreamscape. Nothing was ever signed or even verbally agreed to. No memorandum of understanding between me and these congregations was ever drafted.

Amazingly, I had never even met the good people of the plains whom I nevertheless expected to make it possible for me and my young wife to travel to Scotland, where a bursary – the Scottish word for scholarship – was being held for me by New College, Edinburgh. There I would add to my stellar academic work labor as assistant to the previously mentioned mentor, a Church of Christ “missionary” from my home town in Texas who was being supported by churches in the States to persuade the working class Scots of Glasgow’s Castlemilk housing project to “obey the Gospel” and become members of the True Church. As Jack Paar would say, I kiddeth thou not.

That this ill-advised funding scheme fell through in mid-summer I regard now as great good fortune. But in the event I felt pressure to come up with plan B. At the eleventh hour – just two weeks before classes were to begin – Frank Gulley, then associate dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, called to say that VDS wanted me as a student and could provide me with a partial scholarship that I could supplement with a job in the school’s work/study program.

I had applied to Vanderbilt Divinity School just before I got married in July, thinking it might be a good idea to have a backup plan in case the funding scheme for Scotland evaporated. It was just about the only prudential thing I managed to do that summer. A college professor I respected and admired – after four years toeing the ideological line at Abilene Christian College I was willing to say that about very few of my teachers – a teacher I admired who was a widely respected scholar of the Hebrew Bible had graduated from Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion with a Ph.D. When I encountered him one morning in the college bookstore, I asked him whether he would advise me to go to Vanderbilt Divinity School. Professor John T. Willis said yes, but added that I would need to be strong lest Vanderbilt cause me to lose my faith.

Hard upon Willis’s qualified endorsement, the scholarship offer from Dean Gulley was a major incentive. My parents had been clear that they would not provide financial support beyond my college graduation. At the time, this seemed reasonable enough. Besides, I was eager for the freedom and the challenges of being on my own in the world. Newly married at 22, I was – we were – now to sit on our own bottom financially. And we did. We both found jobs soon after unpacking our modest assemblage of belongings in a Nashville apartment.

Our friends Michael and Marceline had graduated, married and moved from Texas to Nashville earlier that same summer, both with intentions to go to Vanderbilt, he for divinity, she for law. It helped that college friends we knew and liked had already blazed a trail to the Athens of the South. We were callow, exuberant, curious and full of the sort of rebellious intellectual piss and vinegar that an upbringing in the Churches of Christ can create in some people. We drank a fair amount and tried exotic recipes on each other. Marceline smoked Gitanes, stopped shaving her armpits and discarded her bra. We went to foreign films at VU’s Sarratt Center and deconstructed them long into the night before turning our analytical prowess to post-Watergate politics. We went together – to a drive-in, of all unlikely venues – to witness the first porn movie any of us had ever seen, which, as far as I can remember, was Debbie Does Dallas.

But the photograph was before all that. Before John Willis’s endorsement, before the scholarship offer and before Michael and Marceline had moved to Nashville ahead of us, a 22-year-old with dreams of academic adventure (and maybe even glory) sat in the Abilene Christian College library thumbing through the faculty section of Vanderbilt’s divinity school catalog. And there was the fateful image, an unremarkable sidewise profile of Dale A. Johnson, B.A., M.A., Oxon. in the classroom.

My response to that photo and the copy paired with it was not irrational, but it was, I think, nonrational, intuitive and emotional. I did not make lists of pros and cons, using deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion about the best American seminary or divinity school for me. Prior to my enrollment, I had never visited Vanderbilt, nor, except for John Willis, had I ever known anyone who had graduated from the place. No, simply put, I saw the photo and the Latin abbreviation Oxon. – Oxoniensis, “of Oxford” – and knew that Vanderbilt was the place I wanted. Since I couldn’t have an Edinburgh University education, I later rationalized, I would go one better. I’d place myself under the tutelage of this young, earnest Vanderbilt professor who taught the religious history of modern Europe, America and nineteenth-century England and was Oxoniensis.

I resolved that Dale Johnson was going to become my ideal academic, my new hero.

A Very Small Thing

[The Great G Minor Symphony, No. 40, by Mozart] was written in the final years of Mozart's life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

                            The Writer’s Almanac for July 25, 2014

I sat with my sponsor for ordination, T. Hartley Hall IV, at a table in the church hall of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville and listened to the Rev. Fred P. Zitzmann tell me that he didn’t think I was called to ministry. I have asked myself from time to time in the more than 35 years since whether he was right.

In my tradition of faith, people never tire of explaining the nature of a call to ministry. A call, the boilerplate explanation goes, is composed of three parts:  personal conviction, the possession of the requisite gifts and aptitudes and, finally, the confirmation of the community of faith as represented by members of a presbytery committee. On that day many years ago, Fred was saying to me and Hartley that, as a member of the presbytery committee with the power to say yea or nay, he was reluctant to concede the third part.

Like most terms and phrases the church uses when it presumes to describe the ways of God with human beings, call, calling or vocation is a notoriously ambiguous and politically malleable idea. Eventually, the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee formally confirmed that I had a call. When I think of it now in retrospect, this seems like no big whoop, but then it seemed to represent the validation of my whole life. The bureaucratic way was finally clear for the Presbytery of Western Kentucky to ordain me to the ministry of word and sacrament, and so it did on Friday evening, July 25, 1980 at First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Kentucky. For those who mark such things, July 25 is the feast of St. James on the church calendar. Hartley preached the sermon that evening from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter four.

With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.

Just so.

Saying what a calling or vocation is not is easier than saying what it is.  It is not a successful career in the church or anywhere else.  It is not being paid well or, more often, poorly for performing certain services. It is not identifiable by clothing or uniform or social status or public opinion or whether one summers in Maine, Montreat or Kanuga.  It is not measurable according to any list of goals and objectives that can, at the end of a funding term, be ticked off as completed in the final report to an imagined cosmic grant maker.

What is it, then? Having a call implies a certain awareness of a caller, an inchoate sense of that caller’s summons and a feeling of being haunted by some mysterious sense of accountability when one does not respond to that summons.

A calling is not, I say, an experience for any institution to define or own or evaluate. It is more commonplace than religious people would have you believe. It is simply finding – giving in and allowing oneself to be guided to – and doing the thing or combination of things that a person enjoys, is suited for or can’t not do. Just as Mozart found and did musical composition, Hemingway found and did the writing of stories or my friend Sandy Lynch found and does the building, repair and maintenance of anything heavy, wet or broken.

So Fred, wherever you are, my memory of your pious pronouncement on me still stings a bit, and reminds me that it is not for you or anyone else to pass judgment. On this anniversary, it's only for me to ask whether I'm still listening. Just in case I get a call.

We Make Our Buildings and Our Buildings Make Us

Driving to work one day recently I was listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge under the direction of Sir David Willcocks singing the sixteenth-century English composer William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus.  I have sung this piece, and from personal experience can testify how difficult Byrd’s polyphony can be to perform well a capella.  At cuius latus, I was struck by how gentle and caressing Byrd’s phrases are.  The music conjured late medieval images of the grieving women observing the taking down of the body of Jesus from the cross. 

From my earliest memories, art, and particularly music, has been the gateway to the deepest religious feeling, the door to what Friedrich Schleiermacher famously identified as a sense of utter dependence on the source of all.

In his Dawn and Decadence, Columbia historian Jacques Barzun confirms that my experience has been shared by many through the ages.  Most medieval people didn’t think about theology or philosophy.  But the socially-constructed world of medieval Christendom, with its theological grid, simply was reality, and the reality was reinforced by art and story. What medieval Cathedrals, for example, communicated to average people about God, the soul and the nature and destiny of human beings was portrayed vividly in a space that virtually everyone shared. Depth of meaning within this shared world was accessible through art – plastic, musical and literary – and architecture.

Something like this deepening was vouchsafed to me as a child through pictures, books that were read to me and that I read, poetry my grandfather recited from memory, music, movies, buildings and the language of great public orators like FDR, Churchill, JFK, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Senator Everett Dirksen.

Not long ago I attended a dedication service in one of Charlotte’s spotless new Protestant church sanctuaries.  As I settled into my pew, I wondered how much soul-deepening is being conveyed to parishioners by this building and its contents.  The design of the structure is an apt expression of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ of culture paradigm.  It is a shiny, high-tech, pre-fab, industrially manufactured facility.  It was planned for American suburbanites and their idea of what a place to worship should be.  Although the pastor spoke about the holy that day, and referred to the interior space as set apart for an experience of the numinous, I did not sense anything of the sort. God seemed not to be home. As I tried to identify what exactly was awry, two things came to mind:  the omnipresence of factory-manufactured metallic fixtures and electronic conveniences of every kind, and the relative absence of natural woods and fibers. 

The processional cross, for example, was a factory-made, metallic Christus Rex.  Synthetic carpet throughout the room – it covered both the aisles and the floor under the pews and chairs – said these good people believe in practicality and economy – but, and this is important, not simplicity – above all. Both the pastor and the head usher cautioned worshippers against bringing substances into the space that might mar or stain. Praise bands featured well-amplified electronic instrumentation.  What was absent were natural materials, acoustic instrumentation, simplicity of appointment, silence experienced communally as preparation for being addressed by the transcendent through scripture and sacrament and the spirit of human kindness. These things might have invited a sense of the numinous, might have provided context for the possibility of such an experience. But they were absent. And I missed them.

Interior of Third Haven Friends Meeting House in Easton, Maryland, circa 1684.

Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

My father died suddenly 26 years ago today at the age of 61.

My age now is 61. My father was born in 1926.  He was 26 in 1952, the year I was born.  My daughter, who was born just two months before my father died, turned 26 in February of this year. A curious generational chord sounds here. It resonates faintly, but distinctly, in a minor key. I suspect a significance in this that I have so far not been able to plumb. 

As I ponder these interconnections, another generational resonance occurs to me.  In the suddenness of his passing – he worked a full day that Friday in Dallas before dying of a heart attack late that night – my father joined his father and his father’s father in making an abrupt, unexpected exit.  Three consecutive generations in a patriarchal line slipped quickly and without preparation or farewell through a narrow slit in the thin diaphragmatic tissue that separates this world from the other side.  William James in January 1919, William Franklin in April 1988, and, out of generational order, my grandfather, John Lawrence, in February 1989. I would seem to be next in following this family tradition of leaving the party by way of a side door. This prompts a certain amount of sober reflection.

My father loved font design.  This sounds strange as I write it, but he was a typographer. He knew and appreciated the history and design of fonts as they are in themselves and as they are combined on a printed page to produce a desired effect. Recently watching a film documentary on the font Helvetica made me homesick for my father and the shop he and his partners founded, Tradetype of Dallas, Inc. When I try, I can still smell type cases, lead, ink and cleaning fluid, and hear the tinkling of individual brass fonts as a cigar-chewing typesetter released them from the magazine of a Linotype machine to create a molded lead line of type. Working for my father in that shop in the 1960s, I witnessed the last years of hot-metal typesetting for ink presses and the dawn of a new age of electronic, computerized printing. To this day, I am nostalgic for the feel and smell of a page of copy printed from a galley of inked metal type.

I could, and probably should, write much more about ways my father was a blessing to me. The long, bonding silences we shared when we worked together on a yard or a building project. His love of mountain landscapes, seascapes and sailboats. His grace and elegance on the dance floor. The way he loved a good joke. An enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of everything about New Orleans, including, most especially, its cuisine and music. And, not least, his rejection of religion.

The religion my father passionately rejected was the fundamentalism of his upbringing in south-central Oklahoma Churches of Christ. Fundamentalism's unique combination of provincialism, anti-intellectualism, exclusivity, flinty mean-spiritedness and denial of most forms of fun and pleasure became the great hatred of his life. From the day he boarded a train for Navy boot camp, he never willingly attended worship, prayed at meals or contributed money to religious organizations. This caused no little tension between him and my devout, fundamentalist mother.

Understanding my father’s animus toward religion was a formative, compelling, ongoing project – perhaps the formative, ongoing intellectual and emotional project – of my adolescence and young adulthood. In this sense, my father contributed more than he ever knew to his son’s academic work and pastoral ministry.

Irony abounds here. One of the more blatant ironies made its appearance at my father’s funeral. The service in a funeral home was conducted by my mother’s minister, who used his privileged position behind the podium to spend  half an hour preaching my father into hell. Let William Boone be an object lesson to us all, he said. He never accepted Christ and “obeyed the gospel” – a noxious and oxymoronic phrase, as if the apostles intended the Christian euangelion to be a taskmaster instead of a liberation. No, Bill was never baptized. He never joined his parents, sister, wife and children in becoming a member of the Lord's church. And therefore, ask not where his soul is today.  It is in torment, writhing in a lake of fire that will never be extinguished.

I had written this minister an honorarium check for $150 before the funeral service began and after the funeral I didn’t stop payment on it. I wish I had, for I deplored and still deplore what he did. In fact, the service he conducted has for me become emblematic of what the Hebrew Bible means by “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” The Ten Commandments prohibit taking or using the Lord’s name in vain, meaning the use of religion to abuse or harm others.  My family and my father's friends were subjected to a minister intentionally and systematically taking the Lord's name in vain. Which only validated what my father had been saying about religion all along.

Immortal, Invisible, TICM Only Wise

My last post affirmed that religion is a human creation, the result of millennia of human myth-and symbol-making and ritual-crafting.  That unqualified claim left me open to the misunderstanding that I regard religion as merely a human creation.

According to medieval scholastic theology, God is not a being, but the source of all being. What we call God is prior to distinct beings. God is uncreated being itself, from which all separate and distinct beings derive. The limitations of language force those who would speak of God into strange, strained forms as, for example, Transcendent-Immanent Cosmic Mover, the origin of all space, time and matter.  In other words, a reality for which human thought and language have no adequate categories.

Rather than using the word God, with its heavy accumulation of emotional and intellectual baggage, it might be more useful to use another symbol like TICM.

Scientists like Robert Sapolsky and Richard Dawkins will not entertain the hypothesis that TICM could have impelled human evolution toward the development of a religious sensibility.  They won’t entertain it because it is not subject to scientific – that is to say, experimental – proof.  And they are right.  It isn’t.

And yet, as twentieth-century French Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin and others have claimed, TICM could have acted – could be acting – through countless agencies, including the neurobiological capacities of the human brain, to impel us over hundreds of thousands of years to evolve a collective urge, an itch, an ever more refined erotic aspiration toward something that would come to be called divinity, gods, God.  Understood in this way, religion is a mirror TICM prompted and is prompting humans to create to reflect divinity.  Religion is the response in a divine-human antiphonal conversation TICM initiated and continues to initiate.

Whether evolution is purposeful in that sense would seem to be the only real issue in the argument between contemporary scientific atheism and religion.  It is a question that will never be settled.  Belief, on the one hand, and scientific atheism, on the other, are, in the end, personal commitments made without compelling rational proof or demonstrability.  Just as I cannot prove the reality of TICM, a scientific atheist cannot disprove the reality of TICM.

A life based on religious faith is therefore a series of choices, taken over a lifetime, to believe in the reality of a transcendent-immanent purpose mysteriously at work at both macro (beyond) and micro (within) levels. Faith is a decision to affirm a “something more” or a “something behind” the kaleidoscope of what we can apprehend with our senses in time, and to tailor our actions in the world to reflect that belief.  

I choose to believe in that sense, even as I sympathize with those whose commitments are otherwise.

Robert Sapolsky Is A Pussycat

When I set out to read Robert Sapolsky, I was prepared not to like him.  Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford, publishes widely, and belongs to a coterie of neoatheists that includes Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and cable TV host and filmmaker Bill Maher. Noteworthy is that Sapolsky is a recipient of The Emperor Has No Clothes Award given by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

But Sapolsky’s book title alone softened me up.  The essay I was looking for, called “Circling the Blanket for God,” is included in a collection of essays bearing the title The Trouble With Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (Simon and Schuster, 1997). By the end of my read, damn if I hadn't taken a shine to this iconoclast.

Relying heavily on the work of anthropologists and psychiatrists like Paul Radin, Jules Silverman, George Devereux and Alfred Kroeber, Sapolsky’s essay probes the neurobiological roots of religion -- in other words, he argues that our genes made us religious.  

Sapolsky traces the origins of religion in preindustrial societies to two forms of genetically determined psychiatric disorder and suggests why those two forms of disorder survived evolution. The two forms are schizotypal personality disorder, which is genetically related to schizophrenia and might be thought of as “schizophrenia lite,” and obsessive compulsive disorder.  

In our early history, persons with schizotypal personality disorder became the shamans, witches and witch doctors, visionaries and medicine men and women. These were the odd ducks of the tribe.  They were recognized to be half crazy, spirit-filled, possessed.  They heard voices, lived as hermits, became possessed by the spirits of bears, wolves, hyenas and other animals, spoke in tongues, and delivered messages from the gods.  Healed madmen and mad healers, they told fortunes, predicted the future and provided counsel in tribal affairs.

The metamagical thinking, wild behavior and prophetic speech of shamans was supplemented by a second and very different religious caste that enacted obsessive compulsive religious rituals on behalf of the tribe. These early religionists channeled their own obsessive compulsive disorder into the performance of precisely executed religious acts. Think the ritual consecration of bread and wine in the mass or the ritual washing of food preparation vessels by the Orthodox Jew. In doing so, they vicariously siphoned off some of the endemic obsessive compulsiveness of tribal members.  You didn’t need to worry so much about placating, appeasing or wooing the gods by means of the exactly correct performance of ritual if a uniformed someone anointed by the tribe was doing it on your behalf.

These two genetic types – call them shamans and priests – survived and flourished in the long evolutionary history of humanity because they provided an important service to human societies.  With them lies the evolutionary origins of all religious ideas, symbol systems, texts and rituals. And of course they are still everywhere among us.

Sapolsky thinks we have created gods and religion over the course of many millennia. We did it because we had existential problems to deal with.  As Voltaire said, if God did not exist, we would have had to invent him, and this wily maxim – for the eighteenth-century philosophe almost surely believed that we did create God – sums up Sapolsky’s main point.  Religion is a kind of very salutary opium.  It’s Linus’s comforting blanket.  It’s whistling in the dark.  It encourages good behavior and discourages bad behavior.  In making sacred the routine duties of life, it gives the quotidian a sense of meaning.  It got primitives through illness, death, tragedy, famine, war and the high-stakes chances of the hunt and the growing season.  Religion is the oil that enables the social engine to run smoothly and not overheat.

I regard all this as fair and plausible enough. Perhaps it, or something like it, is true. While I expected to find Sapolsky’s account of the origins of religion upsetting or disagreeable, I discovered that in the end it’s really old news. How Sapolsky anticipates a reaction of shock and horror from the people of faith who read what he has to say is curious. Divinity students and seminarians have been taught for generations that religion is a human construct. A deeper question is whether the human construct  we know as religion, in its myriad forms and manifestations, points to any reality beyond itself.

I Will Overlook Your Sophistry

The decade of the eighties had begun. I was 30, single, only a couple of years out of the ordination chute, a graduate student in religion and the new pastor of a historic church on the outskirts of Nashville.  All Saints Sunday was my third Sunday on the job and I chose to include in the morning service a litany of the saints that I had found in a packet of materials from the liturgical resources office of my denomination. The litany began with references to some of the more familiar saints in the Christian calendar – St. Mary the Virgin, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Paul, Justin Martyr, Perpetua and Felicitas, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  We remembered and gave thanks for their inspiring, exemplary lives. They had lighted the path of love, devotion and courageous discipleship for people of faith through the ages. No problem, no argument. So far, so good. But then the litany seemed to veer left. Suddenly congregants who allowed themselves to be guided by the printed order of service – many of whom, I fear, had not reviewed the program before the service began – found themselves giving thanks for the blessed memory and example of saints from our own century, witnesses and trailblazers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King.

As I was walking up the aisle toward the front door to greet the people who would be emerging from the church following the benediction, I felt pleased and proud. Here in the South, in a sanctuary built with bricks that were handmade by slaves, I had maneuvered an exclusively white religious community into raising its collective voice to affirm that Dr. Martin Luther King was a saint of God and an inspiring example for us all.

My mood of self-congratulation was soon arrested by a middle-aged man who approached me bristling. He grasped my hand, told me his name, and then said, “I deeply resent the reference to Martin Luther King as a saint in today’s service. He is a known Communist. I have been a member of this church with my family for many years, but this reference is extremely offensive to me and I will not be back.”

I had been warned about The Judge – for a circuit court judge he was – but in that moment the only details I could remember were that he was a retired United States Marine Corps officer and a judge of some kind with a decidedly conservative political bent, a temper that warmed easily, a deceased wife, a dashingly handsome son and a beautiful daughter.

The Judge walked away and my adrenaline rush dissipated. I then decided I was duty-bound to write him a letter. I would explain everything: where the material came from, the theological rationale for including King in the litany as a pioneer of social justice, the meaning of the term saint in Scripture and how the usage of hagios and its cognates had evolved in the history of Christendom and was then reformed and reclaimed to apply to all believers. Unfortunately, I not only composed the letter; I mailed it. Because I was right. And – the hardest thing to admit these years later – I needed The Judge to understand why he was wrong and I was right so he could bless me by conceding the point.

He never did any of that, and I was left to grow up as best I could. Before the end of the week, I had received his written reply. Perhaps someday I will find it, discolored by mold, in some obscure basement box of papers. On picking up the mail, I read the letter slowly and carefully. He retracted nothing, although his handwriting was composed and graceful, his tone courteous. “I will overlook your sophistry,” he wrote. That’s the only phrase from his letter that I distinctly remember.

Not long ago, I came across The Judge’s obituary. He lived into his mid-eighties. He had retired from the bench, taken diplomas in the culinary arts and bartending, become a hotelier in Florida and finally bought a hotel somewhere in the South Pacific. But they didn’t bury The Judge in the South Pacific.  They brought him back home to Middle Tennessee. His funeral was held in the church he said he’d not come back to.

If I could write The Judge another letter, I’d request clemency for youthful arrogance. I’d say it often takes time for some of us to get over the need to be right. I’d come clean about not knowing what I don’t know, then or now, my easy assumptions about the bigotry of others and the regrettable sense that I have little to learn from people who are not like me. If I wrote the letter well enough, using adverbs sparingly and eliminating all the sophistry I could wring from it, maybe The Judge would give a delayed ruling in favor. Or at least I like to think he might.