Monthly Archives: April 2016
When I heard Ted Cruz was evoking the image of solitary five year old in a public restroom I was flabbergasted. Does he really let a five year daughter old go into a public rest room alone? Fathers, both single fathers and fathers on father-daughter excursions, have to take their young children with them to the rest room just like moms do, don’t they?
The image was concocted to counter objections to a law in North Carolinaspecifying how to choose your bathroom.
Maybe it’s just my “New York Values” causing alarm. Before I first moved east I was warned as a college age woman NEVER to use a public rest room in New York City. I believed my expatriate NYC friends. Even New York administrators reflect those ex-New-Yorkers-moved-west values becausemany public restrooms are closed. If they are replaced it will be with individual units that don’t have to be labeled by sex.
Sadly, the most dangerous rooms east or west turn out to be the ones in your home, your friends’ homes and places you gather with what you believe are your friends. That is because most sexual abuse occurs from men that the victims — and often the victim’s families — know. These are mostly men that misuse their authority and/or strength with the children, women, or lower status males in their lives.
If we are at all honest the idea of breaking down public restrooms and showers by gender was never safe. In public, there was always the potential for same sex attack and adult attack of minors, even as far back in the time as the Roman Empire. C. S Lewis discusses it frankly when describing the boys’ schools he was sent to. In Surprised by Joy, he claimed sexual attack was common and unavoidable. That was in the early 1900’s, before you could legitimately blame secularism or individualism.
Science studies indicate our brains just don’t think rationally sometimes inassessing risk. Christians describe the cause of this as the noetic effects of the fall.
Perhaps there is a useful way to think about the issue of bathroom access, using Roger Williams’s thought process. If we use the Roger Williams’s analogy we are all on a ship. We have a right to our different consciences, values, morals, religions but there are certain activities — like not molesting each other — prohibited or required in order to keep the civil peace. When considering legislation we should ask, where has civil peace been at risk? We should gather some facts, about when and how has it most been at risk. Then we can work to reduce the risk.
If we accept the real issue is fear of molestation, and look at the actual crime statistics on that molestation, I contend we will end up closer to whereFrank Bruni and Donald Trump come out on the issue as compared to Ted Cruz and the current North Carolina position. Possibly we want to create new spaces with better privacy and protection. For sure we want to accompany our children in higher risk settings.
Another approach for Christians to look at is what Jesus did when a woman was accused of sexual sin. He pointed out we’re all guilty given his high standards, and asked if anyone cared to throw the first stone. None dared. Transgender people are our neighbors. Some have mocked them, however unfortunately, as if they were somehow someone’s enemy. Jesus said our job is to love our neighbors, even if they are our enemies, to love them as we love ourselves. I don’t know about you, but when I have to go, I don’t want to be hassled to show my birth certificate, I don’t want to discuss which door to choose. If people are choosing to go about their business peacefully, let them be.
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“…our children will go forth and pluck the lovely red blossoms of courage, and generosity, the beautiful blue flowers of truthfulness and kindness, and the white purity of the divine “Lily of the Valley” — thus they find the heritage of the Narragansett fathers and mothers, and loyalty to our country in their own back yard.”
Princess Red Wing in the Narragansett Dawn, as recorded in Dawnland Voices
The impact of the First Nation People is everywhere just beneath the surface if you scratch just a little, even though the descendents with majority First Nation Blood are rare among us now. Many things incited that change…disease, purposeful mixing of cultures from both sides before the descent into war and conquest, war and conquest, forced migration, and more melting pot integration. Even the term “First Nation” is misleading, as there were many waves of people and multiple civilizations layered one atop another before the earthworms arrived in America with the Europeans.
Purple Quahog for the Heaviness of Loss
There is a sense of lost opportunity, of something that could have been different, or at least was hoped to be different than it has turned out. This sense of promise permeates Roger Williams’s early observations. The ancestors of Miantonomoh that came from the south and west, from across the blue hills at most hundreds of years before had a long history of migration and relationships with prior inhabitants. Groups of nomadic elites established trade routes across the continent. They, more than the Europeans and more than the indigenous tribes that been in what is now New England for thousands of years, had a track record of encountering new people, and using massive civil projects and plant technology (e.g. the milpa) to satisfy people groups, intermarry with the rulers, and then send a portion of a next generation onward.
It is not then such a surprise that of all the tribes Roger Williams encountered, it was Sachem Miantonomoh, as emissary of Grand Sachem Canonicus, that he allied with most closely in establishing Providence. It was their land he had arranged use of, so he likely owed them tribute, a basis of trade. The image of a large hill full of indigenous and Miantonomoh holding court as sachem alongside Roger Williams is unmistakable. The currency of trade was indigenous wampum.
While Roger Williams was away in England to secure a charter that all passed away. Boston had a part, as they at a minimum magnified conflict to optimize their positions against the upstarts in Providence. When Roger Williams returned, there was too much treachery and the relationships of trust that had been built were broken by death. They did not fully renew in the next generation. The amazing thing perhaps is that we are not Syria. The First Nation People rise above the vendetta mentality of many peoples. That is not just an accomplishment of democracy because democracy is like a dance. Every people group chooses to dance. In choosing to dance, we choose a brighter future. So while the number with majority indigenous blood is small, the number with remnants in our character is a very great number indeed.
“Life and seasons must surely change:
Perhaps the whispering wind knows
Why the Fall must follow Summer.
Whis’pring she follows where warmth goes.”
Ella Wilcox Sekatau Narragansett Tribal Elder, as recorded in Dawnland Voices
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Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the absence of self.
The speaker about courage is Pastor Des Wadsworth who has not written any books (yet). However, he is from England, a culture that knows a thing or two about a stiff upper lip. If you have written a book that you believe people outside your family and friend circle will want to read, you must think of your potential readers and how much they will miss out on if you a) do not finish or b) fail to get the word out about your book.
Even John H. Olcott, a vet with three purple hearts and a relative with access to television, says he fears promoting his book. He has a message for vets, and hopefully he will think of them and be successful. In war, there is an organization driving you to do what must be done and an enemy threatening your friends. In writing you must find elsewhere the discipline to advance, in addition to the creativity to write.
My advice to all new writers is to think of your readers and step out there with your art. You may succeed or not, and you may not know which you have done in your lifetime (keep your day job meanwhile). Anne Frank’s diary was not even published until after death. No matter, carry on. Success requires first and foremost the discipline to carry on both in writing and in marketing. In failure you may learn more than in immediate success.
About 85% of the people in the world want to write a book. People love stories, and stories are a powerful way to convey our experience to those who come after. Based on the number of titles out there, perhaps 10% will see the project through to publication in some form. About 2% of the 10% will have a marketing plan that attempts to reach readers. Of those a few will broadly succeed. It is a little like the kid playing basketball at the park hoping to be in the NBA. Plan to work hard to be the best. The average book sells about 2000 copies. However, that is millions of copies for the best of the bestsellers averaged with a couple hundred copies for millions of books.
That is a long tail and you must plan a life that is affordable should you spend time in this tail. Even John Grisham spent time here before his second book took off. Strive for the best, prepare for the worst. Unless you have enough money to invest in your own high-risk start-up business you should find a publisher to make the investment. Book-selling is a business and publishers are the venture capitalists. That said, if you do have some money to invest, you are the one that believes in your book the most. You can cut a lot of time out the process of reaching your readers by putting your money where your heart is. However, getting the book “available” is not the same amount of resources as getting it “known”.
To create the business plan think this way: you are about seven links away from the most distant readers in the world. Someone that you know, knows someone who knows someone etc. and by seven links you have covered the population of the globe. If you have written a good book it will spread as people talk about it. If you start with more readers that talk to many other readers, it will go faster. Bookstores, online or off, may know some of your sought after readers.
Your first job is to write a book worth talking about. Your next job is to get enough people talking about the book, through as many links as needed, to get to your readers. If the book is good enough, a percentage of readers will talk about it. Do not underestimate the time it takes — people buy books and then put them in a pile to be read, or on a shelf hoping they’ll have time to read. People take time to read, and then time to reflect on what they read. This is a business cycle with a long turn around time to the next cycle of readers, unless your book is short, or documents an already successful work of art — e.g Hamilton, the musical. That is one reason traditional wisdom is to write a shorter book as your first title.
If the book is not good enough, no amount of pushing can ignite the book beyond what direct marketing will do — you are better off planning the next release of that book or writing another better book.
The beauty of books is that they last, they do not expire. There is no rush. You can alternate back and forth between writing and marketing as opportunities present themselves. With a self-published book you can improve it and re-release, much like new software is released with additional features. There are few hard set rules.
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The Latin translates to the Joy of Love, and it was released on Friday. It clocks in at 263 pages. The news media focuses on “rules” that weren’t changed to make popular first world stuff ok. They miss the boat.
I hope everyone reads the original, downloadable here. I recognize no one has time. The document is 325 paragraphs. Read one paragraph a day and you’ll have it done within a year.
This document is ground-breaking, inspirational, and potentially church unifying all in one breath. It is an easy read. OK maybe I’m biased there…I spend a lot of time in 17th century documents that are not such an easy read.
No, it didn’t change any rules. Instead, in easy-to-read scripture-based (citations provided) language that feels like a gentle father talking to his children it inspires us to ideal. It sets that ideal up and relates it to the modern world. Over and over again as a family member in a fallen imperfect modern world I felt, “He got it!” I don’t know how an aging guy sitting in the Vatican could do that, but he does. He went to great effort, even consulting the married Catholic clergy from the Eastern church. That effort comes through in every paragraph. Even if we can’t attain the ideal in our own fallen lives, he helps us explain in relevant language why our children will still want to shoot for that ideal.
Pope Francis recognizes in simple language that we are fallen, often incapable of fully reaching those ideals especially after a wayward period, and wants us in the church accepting salvation and being welcome in the church anyway (e.g., paragraph 243). He talks a great deal of mercy and grace. You can’t receive mercy or grace unless you learn the ideal and how you are apart from it.
First Read Highlights:
- In paragraph 37 he blasts away a religion based solely on rules and commands the church to help people form consciences capable of determining right in situations beyond the rules, encouraging the faithful to get as close to the ideal as their unique complex situation would allow. It is in this area some media missed the whole point. He’s not going to amend the ideal as revealed by God in scripture to take into account fallenness, he is rather giving God’s children, with the help of the local church, dispensation to figure out the right ethical response to real life situations.
2. In paragraph 156 he eliminates from Catholic teaching (and I hope from all Christian teaching) erroneous interpretations of the Bible about submission of wives to husbands in favor of the mutual submission interpretation combined with at-that-time cultural examples. That correction validates a broader view of marraige Jesus feminists have been advocating toward for a long time. In paragraph 156 and 286 he comes down hard on patriarch-based systems that enslave, subjugate, or disempower the leadership of women. That seems revolutionary in a church with an all male priesthood. It corrects the foundational definition of the ideal at the base in a way as important as the elimination of slavery.
3. The strongest language in the document is used four times to declare unacceptable and therefore worthy of civil disobedience if needed certain practices. Paragraph 42 condemns forced state intrusion in favor of contraception; paragraph 54 condemns customs inconsistent with the full human rights of women including verbal, physical and sexual violence, access to work, and the exploitation of the female body; paragraph 92 condemns setting aside the elderly, and paragraph 251 condemns states that would pressure a local church to deviate from scripture in the definition of the ideal marraige (e.g. to perform a gay marraige, international agencies withholding aid to a poor country based on that state’s definition of marraige).
4. Paragraph 250 declares every sign of unjust discrimination of persons who experience same-sex attraction is to be carefully avoided. While paragraph 251 makes it clear same-sex and other irregular unions (a.k.a., civil marriages) are not Catholic marriages, the document would seem to imply any civil benefits extended to married persons should not be out-of-reach to those with irregular unions (especially those with innocent children, he says in paragraph 267) so that unjust discrimination is avoided. For some types of irregular unions (paragraph 78) he provides that they may with time become regular and lead to Catholic marraige, but not all types of irregular unions are able do this, specifically not same-sex unions.
The above list does little justice to the inspirational tone of the original.
Some of the most eloquent language in the document characterizes the church as a family of families. It is with a family strength bond that Christians belong to each other.
Paragraph 273 distinguishes voluntary choice from free choice by using the example of a drug addict who while voluntarily choosing to obtain a fix has no practical alternative and therefore is not free. Many women facing pregnancy in our pro-choice countries can relate to situations where while the choice is voluntary, the economics of life are stacked such that they do not feel free in choosing an alternative to abortion — and that is on all of us to change.
Family in the church’s definition does not release children as they come of age, though it frees them to form a new hearth if they enter a marraige. The family is an extended organization, and parents have influence so long as they draw breath. Like Saint Monica of paragraph 288, it is most honored to pray for a wayward child no matter how long it takes.
Pope Francis declares the individualism of the West to be extreme and flawed. He draws us back to each individual as part of a larger family, and family of families, something once called institutional individualism. In this he draws back to a mindset more familiar to the likes of Roger Williams than to today’s self-centered mind. However, no one in Roger Williams’ day foresaw the breadth of justice, mercy, and grace declared in Amoris Laetitia.
Addendum:
Dr. Albert Mohler hears something I did not in paragraph 297. Pope Francis says no one can be condemned forever, that is not the logic of the gospel. Dr. Mohler worries that means universalism, a path to salvation without repentance and acceptance of Jesus as Lord. But Pope Francis said his statement is in order to be consistent with the gospel — which is that all can repent so long as live, no matter how wayward. All can be saved upon acceptance of Jesus as Lord.
Before, Catholicism gave no path forward for wayward children of certain types of sin to return, but now that teaching is corrected to be gospel teaching. That is what I saw in paragraph 297. Dr. Mohler has perhaps never been Catholic and experienced the foreverness of its prior shunning — no matter the repentance — to understand why Pope Francis would need this paragraph. The apostle Paul addressed those who persist in active sin, while Pope Francis points toward situations that are consequence of past sin, and of being continually inviting to those still called to repent (which by the way is all of us).
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What are we fighting for?
“We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” John Winthrop Senior, 17th Century
John Winthrop Senior was the new governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he made this statement. His ship was about to sail for the new world carrying the Great Migration, a set of people fleeing a mandatory state religion that persecuted them. However, when he arrived, they set up a new mandatory religion they thought better represented truth. They punished dissenters mercilessly, eventually even hanging Quakers like Mary Dyer.
John Winthrop’s primary invention was not to state where the investors in the colony would meet to run the colony in the charter they got the king to sign — once out of town he was the first to have the investors meet in the new world. That is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first to passively resist control by a King. We Americans still are not ruled by king.
The rest of what the Massachusetts Bay Colony stood for is not necessarily to be emulated. Sure, they were Christian. However, they mistook what is in the Bible a spiritual light emanating from God’s called people for a physical city in a fallen world. They punished aggressively anyone that didn’t agree with them, including Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. They inspired by negative example in rejecting Roger Williams, so that founded a new settlement in order to separate church and state. They were the first people north of the Chesapeake Bay to import African slaves, and they did this in return for indigenous people they had exported to the Caribbean because of their defense of their own way of life, the way of life that existed before the English arrived. They come as close to being an ISIS-like version of Christianity as I hope any will ever come.
It took the next generation of colonists to begin to correct the situation. John Winthrop Junior established in Connecticut a religious freedom that still enabled an established state religion, while his peer Roger Williams set up Rhode Island based on the principle of toleration of anyone not disrupting civil peace.
Roger Williams’s version of the separation of church and state is what made it into the Bill of Rights. All the experiments in freedom that included a sanctioned form of religion were discarded as in practice, there was still a class system shunning dissenters from the established religion. What Roger Williams knew, that John Winthrop Senior and John Cotton did not seem to, is that the light shining from the Christian City on a Hill is spiritual. The city is not in this fallen world, though we can see glimpses from it in the hearts of Jesus followers.
When we masquerade as Religious Freedom establishing in the law a particular conscience, we discriminate like the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the worst case, and like the Connecticut of John Winthrop Junior in best case. Codifying into law a practice that we know a significant number of upstanding people do not share should not be what we’re fighting for. Both polarized establishments are guilty. The Democratic party currently in power wants to require people to pay for things that are against their conscience. It proposes to substitute for the stockades a punishment by removal of federal funding to any state that disagrees. The right wants an established religion of marriage as one man and one woman only, even though they know it is a contested concept. Neither case makes a complete accommodation (yet) for people with alternate consciences that are respecting the civil peace.
An individual with a conscience that will not let him support (via dollars, signature , etc. ) either contraception or gay marraige should be respected. However, the individual that seeks the currently legal contraception or gay marriage must be accommodated, by another individual that does not have the conscientious objection. What is lacking is the notion of accommodation and toleration. It is a travesty that corporations are taking sides about which conscience is correct based on marketing opportunity instead of requiring accommodation from all. The highest class corporations have for years found ways of letting Christians be salt and light while respecting LGBT community members. We know how to do this.
Both of these issues stem from technology that makes the consequence of what the Bible defines as serious sin less impactful in first world life. Both may take generations to sort out heresy from innovation, as we see consequences roll out in subsequent generations.
Toleration is what Roger Williams stood for, assured that the gospel message would resonate with called hearts in a free and fair debate. He had no doubt his concept would dismantle the establishment of his day, and was aiming to dismantle a system in England by the success of his experiment.
Unfortunately we seem to need the establishment dismantled once again. The current left and right are too busy championing intolerance. You can learn the story of how Roger Williams escaped the City on a Hill to form a foundation of the United States of American in my book, Rekindled. We should know this story, and we should not want to repeat it.
I’ll let Ronald Reagan close this piece with his view of our earthly City on a Hill, one that I contend is more like Roger Williams’s vision than John Winthrop Seniors’s Massachusetts Bay Colony.
“The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.” Ronald Reagan
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He is an OUTSIDER. He doesn’t fit —for example not pro-life or pro-choice pre-molded positions.
He actually uses his brain cells. He doesn’t get it right on the first try but he listens. Eventually he’ll make a good deal.
Think about the furor over his latest abortion comments. He has shown the hollowness of BOTH positions in a few brief sentences.
First, he pondered that there needed to be some form of punishment, and that surely that would include the woman, and perhaps not the man. Then his campaign said of course the woman was a victim, trying to pull back to an establishment pro-life position.
If you are in the pre-molded pro-choice camp, unless the woman has experienced rape, incest, or a medical condition threatening her life you don’t believe the woman is a victim. You think she is an accountable adult making decisions for her own life, and you do not acknowledge there is another life form yet that should have moral weight in that decision. You do not acknowledge any right of others to intrude for the best interests of a larger society. In this worldview there is no crime, and no victim, and no punishment required. There are also fewer babies to adopt, and a lower reproduction rate than our biology would drive. Whatever that potential baby is, it is alive. Whether you give it the moral status more like a human or more like a puppy or more like cells you grew in a petri dish, it is alive. This position as pre-molded rings hollow because whatever the woman is doing, it affects more than her life alone. Whatever her situation, it is difficult, and we all know the best decisions are not made alone in a crisis.
If you are in the patriarchal worldview that many pre-molded pro-lifers seem to occupy, and that some fathers who want out seem to push on their women, the woman is treated not quite as an adult fully capable of a rational decision. That is the only way you can consider her a victim if there was not a rape, incest or medical condition. What exactly would she have been a victim of? A bankrupt moral society that teaches her sex is just another pleasure and that she can have power over men with her good looks? A technology failure of her birth control?? If a woman is an accountable adult, and if she has failed to prevent pregnancy shouldn’t she be accountable, after all? You can see that thought coursing through Trump as he struggles with the question. He wants to treat women as adults, and the pro-life view takes her adult decision-making accountability away from her. It is equally hollow.
If the woman were a victim of drug addiction, we would seek to treat her but we would also examine if she should punished for any crimes she may have committed. We’d struggle with treating it as primarily a crime or a medical condition. Why are we so sure if women are adults and abortion is bad, that we wouldn’t want to counterbalance the pain of continued pregnancy with a consequence that would deter abortion? Say a tax large enough to give pause on the abortion, used for children’s health? Donald Trump’s outside view might not be tenable, but it is worthy of more thought than the politicians jumped to in their pre-molded positions. If it’s not tenable, at least he is still listening. I don’t see any of the other candidates trying to forge new territory here.
A growing portion of America is pro-life and pro-choice. Most of America recognizes women ARE adults and should be accountable as the assigned decision-maker. Most of America looks at the sonogram on the fridge of a pre-born baby and knows it is alive, and will be human. Most of us don’t think anyone should be sentenced by the status of our parents — we live in America, the land of the free, the land of opportunity! The potential baby should get its shot — be that with biological mom or adoptive parents. Donald Trump may be crass, and he may not be a professional politician, but he is thinking and listening and while he has escaped the clutches of past Democratic leanings, he is quite clearly not yet a captive of the Republican establishment.
Maybe he’ll figure out how to get more modern day Alexander Hamilton-like kids their shot at life. Hamilton’s mother wasn’t well off, or married, and didn’t survive long enough to fully raise him.
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