Tuesday, March 24, 2009
In-line Skating and AIG
Skating at a roller rink on Saturday can be hazardous to your health. But conducive to epiphanies?
You wouldn’t think it at first glance. Saturday brings out the kids, and kids bring out the chaos. Many are first-timers so of course they don’t know the safety rules. They cut across traffic, skate in the wrong direction and come to a dead stop—right in front of you. Multiply by about 100 kids and you can see that every linear foot presents a new and very sudden obstacle to anticipate, or navigate, or react to.
Think giant video game, and you’re in it.
I never thought of these weekend skates as training for the spiritual life until last Saturday, when the insight hit me right there on the rink: this is about mindfulness. The threat of constant surprise forces me to focus completely on the situation. If I lose focus, I risk injuring myself or, worse, running over a small child.
Thinkers from all faith traditions have long touted the value of mindfulness. When we are mindful, we devote our entire attention to the moment at hand. This enables us to encounter all its vividness, to appreciate its complexities, to see the Divine therein. Such full attention also makes us more effective in the task before us, whether it is a serious talk with our life partner, a complex project at work, or a collaboration to tackle social problems.
Mindfulness is in desperately short supply these days, and we’re seeing a classic example in the media coverage of AIG. To be sure, the bonuses are reprehensible; they symbolize the company’s astounding insensitivity to those outside the world of Wall Street. No wonder the public and the media have been glued to the story.
Ultimately, though, we focus on it at our peril.
Here’s why: the AIG story, involving about $200 million, draws our attention away from the larger question of how to recover from this mess—which involves $2 trillion. Every day that government leaders devote to punishing AIG is another day’s delay in working through the root causes of the crisis, which continue to weigh down the financial system. (Even now that the Obama administration has put forward a plan to deal with those root causes, the furor over AIG might make it much harder to implement.)
It’s true that the distraction might deliver some benefits. If the whole brouhaha motivates our government officials to improve oversight of the financial world as a whole, perhaps it will have been worth all the attention devoted to it. But as things stand now, they are focusing only on AIG while the rest of the system bogs down.
In short, they are distracted, as we all are these days. And that makes mindfulness as important as ever. In my case, it might keep a handful of kids at a roller rink a little safer. Applied to our government officials, it might hasten our journey on the road to recovery.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Turning the Faith into Flesh and Blood
Our church is at an impasse. Or so you’d think.
We are searching for a new priest. In the Episcopal Church, any candidate for the job must win the approval of both the church’s vestry (like a board of directors) and the bishop. But what if the two don’t see eye to eye on an essential issue?
That’s our situation in a nutshell. The bishop has told the vestry that he will never approve anyone who might possibly—someday, somewhere, whatever the conditions—bless a same-sex marriage. The parishioners (or at least some of their most respected members) have told the vestry that they will not embrace anyone who believes in anything less than full acceptance of gays and lesbians. To top it all off, why would any self-respecting candidate put herself in the inevitable crossfire?
You can see the problem.
But here’s the fascinating part: it’s a problem in theory. A situation like this, we were certain, would result in zero candidates. And yet about 15 priests have expressed interest. At least one of them—and quite possibly more—have articulated a sort of middle ground that, other things being equal, might be acceptable to all sides.
This just might work.
The lesson here, I think, is that we fill our heads with abstractions to our peril. Impasses that can never be rationally resolved suddenly resolve themselves when concrete examples appear. We can’t imagine how something will work, and then lo and behold, along comes someone who, far from having the solution, embodies the solution.
This shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. Christianity is a flesh-and-blood faith. According to our traditions, Jesus was a concrete example of God. The people of his time could listen to his words and watch his actions and, perhaps more fully than ever before, see what God was like.
Not that concrete examples necessarily make our lives easier. Sometimes we can happily hold to a certain doctrine until a living breathing example upsets our theological applecart. In my fundamentalist days, I was certain that homosexual practice was a sin until an elder in our church—one of the gentlest, most godly people I’ve ever known—came out and forced me to examine the scriptures afresh.
Should we abandon abstractions? Not at all. But if we live in our heads all the time, we tend to go off in high-minded (and often high-handed) directions without looking at the people involved. So our faith traditions argue over theoretical issues and write authoritative reports and make grand pronouncements. How curious, in contrast, that the greatest commandment in the law involves a concrete object of affection: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
We are searching for a new priest. In the Episcopal Church, any candidate for the job must win the approval of both the church’s vestry (like a board of directors) and the bishop. But what if the two don’t see eye to eye on an essential issue?
That’s our situation in a nutshell. The bishop has told the vestry that he will never approve anyone who might possibly—someday, somewhere, whatever the conditions—bless a same-sex marriage. The parishioners (or at least some of their most respected members) have told the vestry that they will not embrace anyone who believes in anything less than full acceptance of gays and lesbians. To top it all off, why would any self-respecting candidate put herself in the inevitable crossfire?
You can see the problem.
But here’s the fascinating part: it’s a problem in theory. A situation like this, we were certain, would result in zero candidates. And yet about 15 priests have expressed interest. At least one of them—and quite possibly more—have articulated a sort of middle ground that, other things being equal, might be acceptable to all sides.
This just might work.
The lesson here, I think, is that we fill our heads with abstractions to our peril. Impasses that can never be rationally resolved suddenly resolve themselves when concrete examples appear. We can’t imagine how something will work, and then lo and behold, along comes someone who, far from having the solution, embodies the solution.
This shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. Christianity is a flesh-and-blood faith. According to our traditions, Jesus was a concrete example of God. The people of his time could listen to his words and watch his actions and, perhaps more fully than ever before, see what God was like.
Not that concrete examples necessarily make our lives easier. Sometimes we can happily hold to a certain doctrine until a living breathing example upsets our theological applecart. In my fundamentalist days, I was certain that homosexual practice was a sin until an elder in our church—one of the gentlest, most godly people I’ve ever known—came out and forced me to examine the scriptures afresh.
Should we abandon abstractions? Not at all. But if we live in our heads all the time, we tend to go off in high-minded (and often high-handed) directions without looking at the people involved. So our faith traditions argue over theoretical issues and write authoritative reports and make grand pronouncements. How curious, in contrast, that the greatest commandment in the law involves a concrete object of affection: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
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