Give It Away

The Paradox of Generosity, part 1

Give it away. Just...give it away. What is life for except the giving of it away? You only get a few years, so spend them joyfully, which is to say lovingly. The meaning that life has is in giving our time, our energy, our resources to others.

Social scientists Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson (The Paradox of Generosity) empirically studied how generosity worked. They surveyed two thousand Americans, then did four-hour interviews with forty households. Their in-depth interviews turned up some case studies. You don’t know these families, but will probably recognize the preoccupations that govern their lives.

Here’s one:

“A middle class family, the Arnolds, fall into the daily grind just to be able to keep up with their bills and afford little luxuries along the way. They like many others are not able to define the limit of “enough money” thereby trading what could be a richer life to serving their own interests. Privacy and an attitude that does not way to be involved in other’s business is a ‘mantra’ that they live by in their upper middle class, white neighborhood in a cul-de-sac surrounded by people with similar ideas and beliefs. They call it the Switzerland Effect, staying neutral in everything. While they might give a few dollars here and there they however, live mainly to accumulate wealth and then protect that wealth. There is a vicious cycle of not having enough and therefore clamoring for more and yet happiness that is goal is found to be illusive. They want to stay in a close knit community but don’t want to give time to build relationships; they have anxieties and worries that cause sleep deprivation; they wasn’t to live and let live, yet when life hands them a curve ball they have no one to fall back on, exposing the fault line in this kind of logic. For this family, happiness will remain elusive.”

Or consider the Ramirez family.

“At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the Ramirez family’s definition of a good life is to be happy. Sylvia and Danny share the 1970s ranch style home with her mom and uncle. They are frustrated with the neighborhood, the government, the health care system and Sylvia blames the ‘illegal immigrants’ for most of the economic problems. Hard upbringing and a modest income has made Sylvia just look out for her own interests and those of her immediate family. She would give if she had more money because it would give her a tax break. She does sporadic acts of donating canned foods and used clothes but that is the extent of her generosity. Danny on the other hand has seeds of empathy for friends and the environment, but feels strongly that human beings and society is in a downward spiral. People just don’t care, however, he is one of those who is too caught up in his own life to really care about anything or anyone else. Apathy and anxiety mark this couple who are far from their goal of happiness.”

The issue isn’t how much you have, it’s how much you expect – how much you think you deserve. The poor can be very generous, but if they’re bound up in resentment because they think they shouldn’t be poor, then they’ll be ungenerous. Moreover, we know that wealth itself can make people less generous. A year ago, I mentioned from this pulpit various studies that showed the wealthy, on average, will act more entitled. In one experiment, wealthier people were more likely to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children.
One study:

“showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.”

If you’re wealthy and think you should be wealthy, you’ll tend to act more entitled and less compassionate. If you’re struggling economically, and think you shouldn’t have to be, you’re also likely to be ungenerous.

Whether we think we deserve what we have or think we deserve more than we have, the focus on “I deserve” is toxic to our spirits. Gratitude – often and repeated – is the antidote. When we practice gratitude, expressing thanks for our specific blessings out loud to other people, written in our journal, and whispered in prayer, we are training ourselves out of entitlement. Focus on gratitude supplants focus on deservingness.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "The Paradox of Generosity"
See also
Part 2: Generosity and the Need for Inexact Scorekeeping
Part 3: Ten Percent

The Proper Beginning

Rev. Meredith Garmon, Liberation, part 3

Does liberation come from yourself? From your situation? What are the chains that constrain you from a more full, joyful, peaceful, loving life? Did the chains come from you – habits of thought, attitude, or behavior? Or were the chains imposed? Do you have a role to play in other people’s liberation?

In this month's issue of On the Journey, there’s a wonderful quotation from Lilla Watson that brings these different questions together into one. She says,

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Lilla shows us how to get unstuck from the interminable politics of blame. Lilla Watson is an Indigenous Australian woman, a visual artist, activist and academic. This quote for which she is most known has served as a motto for many activist groups in Australia and elsewhere. She said it in an address to the UN Conference in Nairobi in 1985, but she said it is the product of a collective process and she’d prefer that the quote be attributed to “Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, Australia, 1970s.”

Your liberation is bound up with mine. Mine is bound up with yours. How can that be so?

For one thing, freedom is contagious. Imagine a child running across a meadow, arms in the air. Don’t you feel more free just witnessing, imaginatively, her freedom? Or think of support groups, where people struggling for liberation from substance dependency or debilitating grief can find that liberation through supporting others’ liberation.

Zen practitioners will notice, and sometimes say, that when you sit – that is, quietly and still – you sit for the whole world; you sit as the whole world. That path of liberation from identifying with our own thoughts represents the liberation of the world.

The Buddhist origin myth tells us that Siddhartha Gautama, after six years of arduous spiritual discipline and searching, on the evening before he became the Buddha, simply sat himself down beneath a pippala tree, resolving not to get up until he had seen his true nature.

All night he sat, unmoving. As dawn was beginning, he lifted his eyes and looked upon the morning star, Venus. In that moment, he experienced enlightenment, awakening, the falling away of body and mind, the one-ness and the inter-being of all things, liberation from the illusion of a separate self that our brains work so hard to maintain.

He saw his true nature, and what he saw was that it was everything and no thing. When that kind of experience comes to a person, the words that they find to express what has happened are as various as poems. According to legend, what the Buddha at that moment said was: “Behold, all beings are enlightened just as they are.”

Seeing others in the light of their liberation IS your liberation.

“Realize” has a double meaning – to become aware of, and to make real. These seem like very different meanings, but in fact, they are the same. Realizing liberation is realizing liberation – that is, becoming aware of your own and others inherent liberation is the same thing as making real the liberation of yourself and other. Then joy flows unhindered into compassion, and compassion into joy.

When liberation is realized, the question, “Whose fault is it?” elicits puzzled expressions – or laughter.

That’s what “your liberation is bound up with mine” looks like.

There is suffering. Yes. Your suffering is mine, and mine is yours. And there is the easing of suffering, which we do together.

I know that this does not answer all the political questions. There are important questions about what parts of our bound-together liberation are best realized through government, what parts through nonprofit organizations, what parts through the marketplace, and what parts through unplanned, uncalculated spontaneous expressions of love. Enlightenment does not impart the answers to those questions any more than it imparts the proof of a calculus theorem. But what it does do is shift us into a politics of interconnection, bringing us out of zero-sum politics.

In the politics of interconnection, there is no winning, no winners, no losing, and no losers. There’s just us, with our liberations bound together. White working class, black and brown working class, lower class, middle class, upper class, Mexicans, Chinese, Wall Street bankers, and main street shopkeepers, the overworked and the underemployed and unemployed – they’re all us, our liberations bound together.

In zero-sum politics, our gain necessarily comes only at the expense of someone else’s loss. In interconnected politics, our gain necessarily comes only with everyone’s gain.

If we start with the recognition that Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court actually was Meredith Garmon’s – and also actually was your nomination to the supreme court – and that so was Antonin Scalia’s nomination back in 1986, and all the others – and that Walter McMillian’s wrongful prosecution and sentencing to death row was your wrongful prosecution, and mine – and that Darren Wilson pulling the trigger to shoot Michael Brown is you pulling that trigger – and that Michael Brown’s body lying dead in the middle of Canfield Drive, Ferguson, Missouri is your body -- then, though we leave a lot of political questions still to answer, we have, at least, properly begun. If we start by calling one another by our true name – which is, “each other” – then, though we leave many strategic matters still to determine, we have, at last, truly started.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Liberation"
See also
Part 1: Politics and Blame
Part 2: Fault Line

Fault Line

Rev. Meredith Garmon, Liberation, part 2

One approach (mentioned in part 1) is to blame the poor and the un- and under-employed for their misfortune. The problem is a "crisis of values." The other approach puts the emphasis on social forces and conditions. This side argues that, “Tens of millions of people don’t suffer a collapse in values for no reason” (Krugman). A social safety net, increased minimum wage, programs of job creation and job training – these things are ways that all of us together can pull up the bootstraps of those at the bottom. That way of being lifted is at least physically possible. On this side, the issue actually is a crisis of opportunity, rather than a crisis of values.

This is our political situation – this is our main political fault line. It is a fault line in the sense of a crack in the firmament of “we, the people.” It is also a fault line in the sense of a dividing line over whose fault it is.

Something’s wrong, so whose fault is it? Is it the immigrant’s fault? Is it the Chinese? Is it our government? Is it ourselves? Candidates and op-ed journalists and political essayists marshal arguments about where the blame goes. Or, rather, some of the candidates do. Others marshal no arguments. They just blame, providing no supportive evidence or reasoning.

Sensible people appreciate Emersonian self-reliance, grit and determination, focus and hard-work. Sensible people also appreciate that some kinds of help can be disempowering, can be co-dependent, can create or encourage dependency. As the great community organizer, Saul Alinsky, said, “Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Never!”

At the same time, sensible people also know that collective action can create more opportunity for people who have little.

Beyond that, we get stuck. We disagree about how much blame to place where. How much is society’s responsibility to create opportunity and how much is the individual’s responsibility to find and seize what opportunities are already there? At that point, our differing political opinions take us in different directions. Is there a way to get past that?

Before I answer that question, let me illustrate the issue in a slightly different way. It’s an old issue, and it’s one with which both the historically privileged and the historically less privileged wrestle.

I was on the faculty of Fisk University before I went into ministry. It’s a historically black university, and they used to have a tradition of the annual W.E.B DuBois vs. Booker T. Washington debate. DuBois, born 1868, was an advocate of various governmental reforms to address and ameliorate the condition of blacks in this country. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 as an organization to advocate for such reforms. (Another of the co-founders, incidentally, was the white Unitarian minister, John Haynes Holmes). Washington, born 1856, put the emphasis on African Americans working hard, going to school, getting the training they would need to get ahead.

At Fisk, every year for many years, long after DuBois and Washington had died, a public debate would be presented with one upperclassman representing the W.E.B. DuBois position and another representing the Booker T. Washington position.

By the time I arrived they were no longer holding this debate as a public event for the student body to attend, but there was a class that I taught most semesters that included readings from both DuBois and Washington. Those classroom discussions, in their own way, continued the tradition.

Students generally quickly saw that the two approaches were not mutually exclusive. They recognized that government action and self-help were both good ideas. At that point, I would say, “Right. So to which one would you give more emphasis? Right now, what is more needed: more energy into federal, state, and local action to address inequality – or more energy into guiding and encouraging young African Americans how to improve themselves?”

Opinions were divided. Sometimes one of the more thoughtful students would observe that there was a chicken and egg problem here. Neither strategy can get very far without a boost from the other. On the one hand, we’d be more powerful advocates if we develop our own skills and respect. On the other hand, more of us would get the self-improvement training we need if there were certain policy changes. I had some wise students.

What they were sensing is that the debate comes down to where the fault is, who is to blame, and that debate is very hard to resolve – and we’re left stuck.

It is in the context of that issue that we reflect today on liberation. Does liberation come from yourself? Or does it come from your situation? What are the chains that constrain you from a more full, joyful, peaceful, loving life? Did the chains come from you – habits of thought, attitude, or behavior? Or were the chains imposed?

Do you have a role to play in other people’s liberation?

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Liberation"
See also
Part 1: Politics and Blame
Part 3: The Proper Beginning

Politics and Blame

Rev. Meredith Garmon, Liberation, part 1

READING: “Please Call Me by My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin a bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
could be left open,
the door of compassion.

SERMON

Hardly even looks like me.

After President Obama announced his Supreme Court nomination on Wed Mar 16, I received many congratulations from friends and acquaintances. I went along with the joke and posted on Facebook that I was a little surprised to be nominated, but more surprised that newspapers were so consistently misspelling my name "Merrick Garland."

Alas, neither Merrick Garland nor Meredith Garmon appears likely to get a Senate hearing. The Senate majority leader says, “let the people decide,” to which the answer – to repeat what everyone with a grasp of the obvious has said -- is: they did decide. The people decided in 2012, understanding that the term of that decision was four full years. Ah, but it is an election year – and this Supreme Court hold-up is only a small part of the shall we say surprising developments of the campaign season thus far.

I want to talk today about liberation, and I want to talk about it in the context of the issue that, one way or another, underlies much of the campaign rhetoric with which we are inundated. That issue is responsibility, fault, blame, the cause of inequality.

If some group of people is having a hard time, to what extent is that their own fault, and to what extent can we expect that, acting collectively and compassionately, we can establish the conditions for better lives for all our neighbors?

How much of the quality of your life right now is a product of your individual virtue – or your personal flaws – and how much of it is a product of the way the social system is set up?

One line of thought has it that poverty is the fault of the poor. If minorities or women succeed less well, it’s because there’s something they aren’t doing that white men do. Lately we’ve been seeing that now it’s certain sectors of white men who are having a harder time. Mortality rates for white, middle-aged Americans are on the rise – their suicide rate is up, as is their alcoholism and drug abuse, notably prescription opioids. “Life expectancies of non-college-educated white Americans have been plummeting in an almost unprecedented fashion.” (Kevin Williamson, National Review, 2016 Mar 28)

Some writers can at least claim the virtue of consistency. They are sticking to the “it’s their own fault” line, even when the group in question is white men. Kevin Williamson, for example, writes in National Review about “the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy” that is besetting the small-town white working class. He says,

“It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington,... It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico. It wasn’t any of that.... The economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.... Nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.” (Kevin Williamson, National Review)

So that’s one approach. People just need to get themselves together; do what they need to do. If people aren’t doing that, it's a crisis of values, not of opportunity. They don’t value hard-work. Gumption and determination is all it would take for them to make more of their lives. “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” they say. This is, it’s worth remembering, actually a physically impossible thing to do.

The thought that you could pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is a failure to see the whole picture. In the case of literal bootstraps, it’s a failure to see all of the physics at work. It’s easy to see the upward pull of the hands, but when you tug on bootstraps there’s also, necessarily, an equal and opposite downward push of your feet. In the case of metaphorical bootstraps, it’s a failure to see all of the social system at work.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Liberation"
See also
Part 2: Fault Line
Part 3: The Proper Beginning

What Will Save Us

Rev. Meredith Garmon, Acceptance and Resistance, part 3

While Christianity may often seem to be predominantly concerned with private, individual salvation, there have been, within Christianity, counter movements to the privatistic version. The Social Gospel movement of the 19th century, and liberation theology in the 20th have aimed to reclaim Jesus' social revolution. Those are positive developments.

The temptations of private salvation can also afflict Budddhists. Withdraw from the world, do intensive meditation, attain enlightenment, nirvana, satori. The rest of the world doesn't matter. Take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, and have a turtle life.

Indeed,

"The view of Buddhism as a mystical religion far removed from the realities of the workaday world has been a major part of the faith's appeal in the West." (Brazier)

To be sure, the message also spoke of Buddhist compassion to one another. Buddhist compassion, however, like Christian love, has too often been taken to mean being nice to people with whom we are in face-to-face contact rather than the faceless people far away who sew our shirts, or work the fields of our sugar and coffee. There is, within Buddhism, a counter movement to the privatistic version. Liberation Buddhism aims to reclaim Buddha's social revolution. This is a positive development.

And it has always been a part of Buddha’s teaching. Social transformation is an intrinsic dimension of Buddha’s – no less than Jesus’ -- original goal.

Socially engaged Buddhism looks a great deal like Unitarian Universalism. Engagement on behalf of justice, equity, and compassion. World community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. Buddhists in the west and east alike have in recent decades been recovering social engagement:

"action in society rather than reliance upon meditation and devotion alone;
-nonviolence and ecological awareness rather than monasticism;
-interreligious dialogue and a willingness to find allies among followers of other faiths;
-a search for a new economics at least to abate the destructive effects of wealth disparity and environmental degradation;
-a gender inclusivity;
-a concern with institutional as well as personal reform." (Brazier)

But how exactly do we get from a blissful acceptance of things exactly as they are to this kind of activism on behalf of changing things? How do those things which seem to pull in opposite directions turn around and become the same direction? For the beginning of an answer to that, let me turn to Ruben.

Ruben Habito was my Zen teacher for 10 years, up until a couple years ago. Ruben is a slight Filipino man now almost 70 years old. As a young man, he became a Jesuit priest, got stationed in Japan, and found himself practicing Zen at a monastery there for 16 years before coming to the states and taking a faculty position at SMU’s Perkins Theological School. In one of his books, Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Ruben wrote:

“To see the natural world as one’s own body radically changes our attitude to everything in it. The pain of Earth at the violence being wrought upon it ceases to be something out there, but comes to be our very own pain, crying out for redress and healing. In Zen sitting, breathing in and breathing out, we are disposed to listen to the sounds of Earth from the depths of our being. The lament of the forests turning into barren desert, the plaint of the oceans continually being violated with toxic matter that poisons the life nurtured therein, the cry of the dolphins and the fish, come to be our very own plain, our own cry, from the depths of our very being.”

With deep acceptance of our world and of our selves comes a seeing through of the artificial boundary between what is me and what is other.

Cultivating a love for what is turns out to also cultivate awareness that what is -- is me. “Mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars” – they are all me. The earth’s forests, deserts, oceans are my own body. When I stop believing those thoughts that judge everything in light of my own separated, isolated interests, then I start recognizing that I’m not separated or isolated. Loving the world and loving myself become the same thing.

And when that happens, I naturally reach out to soothe suffering. Resistance to social injustice, to the despoiling of our planet, doesn’t so much feel like resistance anymore. It feels like simply being carried in the flow of love for what is.

To put it in one word, the force which turns acceptance and resistance around so that they pull in the same direction rather than in opposite directions is this: compassion.

Of course, there is a great deal of resistance in this world that isn’t grounded in compassion. That’s the kind of resistance to practice letting go of – that’s where last month’s theme comes in: letting go. Resistance grounded in compassion rather than in the illusion of a separate self: that’s the kind of resistance that is also known as love and that, in public, goes by the name justice.

Social activism fueled predominantly by anger, by resentment, by condemnation of the evil other will burn out, will be counterproductive, will fail us. Social activism fueled predominantly by acceptance, by compassion, by loving all that is and therefore naturally moving to care for all that is – social activism that, while attentive to effective strategy, is not attached to results – that is what will save us.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Acceptance and Resistance"
See also
Part 1: Creating the Better, Accepting the Real
Part 2: Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional

Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason

Rev. Meredith Garmon, "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason," part 3

When zombie stories spread and began to be told and modified by the middle and upper classes, zombies represented a different sort of horror. These stories featured zombies terrorizing the oppressors -- which is to say, normal middle-class Westerners like you and me. Middle- and upper-class people in the developed world maintain a lifestyle that is possible only through considerable oppression, often tantamount to slavery, of large parts of the world who labor to feed our voracious, insatiable appetite for stuff.

In modern zombie stories, the zombie is still the living dead, as in the Haitian original,

"but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias....The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea." (Amy Wilentz, NY Times)

We push this uncomfortable fact out of our minds as much as we can, yet we who are the oppressor fear what we have oppressed and enslaved. These perfect workers we exploit and deny autonomy to may yet come after us. We have forced others, for our material gain, into a state of unthinkingness, yet we recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that that very unthinkingness puts them out of relationship with us, gives them a certain power to threaten us unconstrained by the mores our class takes for granted, the mores we call "rationality."

What began as stories expressing the fears of oppressed people have now become stories expressing the fears of the oppressors. Our own consuming appetite, we project upon the zombies. In our fearful imaginings, they come to consume us -- just as providing for our material comforts and conveniences has consumed so many of them. They want to eat our brains, for independent thought is exactly what we have sought to strip them of.

Can it be coincidence that the contemporary boom in tales of zombie apocalypse coincides with alarming income inequalities that have been worsening since 1980? We know our world is out of balance. We sense it even if we don't say it. We are afraid of what that imbalance will lead to, and our zombie movies and tales express that fear.

The story of reanimation of the dead from 2000 years ago is very different. Jesus was no zombie. His resurrection represented the opposite: a liberation of mind and spirit. He comes into his full power as a spirit-being who can appear and disappear in our material world at will. Freed of the need to calculate – to solve problems, to advance and defend ideas any more – the resurrected Jesus is freer than ever to just be and to love. There are no more sermons on the mount or on the plain, no more parables and teachings to try to persuade, no more money-changers to chase out of the temple, no more exasperation over "ye of little faith."

The resurrected Jesus mostly simply appears to people. He shows his wounds to Thomas. He has a meal with the disciples. He tells Peter to “tend my sheep.” Mostly it’s just appearing: just being there, and shining a light of love. That’s not the activity of reason and rationality. It represents instead the liberation from the insatiable need to figure out this, and then figure out that, develop a strategy for accomplishing some purpose – all the things that reason is good for. The resurrected Jesus simply sees, and is seen, and his being itself blesses.

Zombies represent the loss of reason. Jesus' resurrected state represents the transcendence of reason.

Zombies are pulled out of the half-way house of reason into complete enslavement. Jesus transcends the half-way house of reason into complete liberation.

For zombies, death and reanimation represents the loss of the autonomy that comes with reasoning ability. For Jesus, death and resurrection represents the loss of the ego, that oh-so-rational part of us that marshals concepts, advances claims, and works so hard to preserve its self-identity.

Living in the rational mind is a half-way house, for, again, reason does liberate us from many of the chains of the mind. The zombie stories, told first by oppressed and then by oppressor, illustrate the ways that without autonomy, without being able to think for ourselves, to reason for ourselves about what to do, and the freedom to act on our rational decision-making, we are undead: alive yet not alive, the living dead. And forces of oppression that deprive others of that freedom risk triggering unreasoning, brain-eating reprisal.

Yet life in the rational mind is what I call a half-way house – which is a term from our correctional system. A half-way house is not as constraining as prison, but isn’t fully free either. Rationality cannot get us the rest of the way to freedom. We use rational concepts to cut through certain chains, but then we become attached to those concepts, and end up bound and limited by them.

Only love gets us the rest of the way to liberation: unreasoning, uncalculating, unstrategic love. Without reason, we are undead. Without love, we are also undead, alive yet not alive, the living dead.

May we, too, be risen. Maybe, as the Easter story suggests, it takes a kind of death -- a death of the ego, a death of the identified self with all its attachments, a death of what we thought our life was all about, a crumbling away of all the rational reasons we have constructed for living the kind of life we've been living. With that death, a resurrection into a liberated, liberating life of love becomes possible. May we be risen indeed.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason"
See also:
Part 1: Unitarians, Universalists, Reason, and Love
Part 2: Can We Talk About Zombies for Easter?

Can We Talk About Zombies for Easter?

Rev. Meredith Garmon, "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason," part 2

Love has subversive power, and I prefer subversion to open battle. I prefer, and recommend, for the sake of our own emotional and spiritual well-being, looking for ways to make connection with people of more traditional Christian faith. Let us connect rather than denounce and vilify.

Reason is very good at denouncing and vilifying. However, when it comes to my inner demons, the better strategy is to embrace, befriend, and then re-direct that energy -- and, likewise, when it comes to outer demons -- who are not demons at all, but people whose cognitive rational functioning is typically as high as mine is -- the better strategy is embracing and befriending.

A wise life recognizes the limitations of reason. A full life honors and celebrates all of who we are, including all our nonrational tendencies. Enjoying music, delighting in beauty and poetry, enjoying good food, falling in love -- these are not rational things. If those of us who do not identify as Christians can connect better with those who do, then we’re part of the conversation. We can introduce various alternative directions that those stories point. But we have no chance of subverting the dangerous ways of interpreting the gospels if we refuse to talk about the gospels at all. So, let Unitarian Universalists not be shy about knowing and referencing gospel stories.

Like Easter. There are four Easter stories – a different one in each of the four gospels. (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – which I mention for you just so you’ll know, because surveys are showing that only about half of Americans today can name even one of the gospels. Indeed, one article noted, "Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition.") Jesus, a charismatic teacher and healer was executed by crucifixion on a Friday. By the time his body was brought down from the cross it was late in the afternoon – with Sabbath beginning at sundown. Since there’s no burying allowed on Sabbath, his body was placed in a temporary tomb, a cave, until it could be buried on Sunday. Mary Magdalene, either alone or with other women, went to the tomb carrying spices to prepare the body for burial. At that point the four stories become quite different.

If we are interested in historically what actually happened, we don’t have much to go on. In the Gospel of Matthew, there’s a tantalizing clue. Some of Jerusalem's rulers, says Matthew, bribed the guards to affirm, “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep” (Matt 28:13). So maybe some disciples really did come by night and steal away the body. Maybe Matthew was trying to discredit the guards’ inconvenient testimony by saying the guards had been bribed to lie.

But historical accuracy is not the point. It doesn’t matter. The point is that each of the four different stories – whether they are history or fiction -- have something to tell us about loss and death. The dead are with us. Those who are gone continue to live in memory, where they are not merely stored but also grow and change, for every time the brain recalls a memory, the memory is changed through association with the situation in which it is recalled. Those who are gone from us are not merely entombed in memory, they are actually growing and changing there – living, we can say.

I do think this is funny. But, no,
Jesus was not a zombie.

So I was thinking about the Easter story, and how it’s a story about reanimation of the dead, and that reminded me of a very different sort of story about the reanimation of the dead: zombies. I am not comparing Jesus to a zombie. I am contrasting, because the contrast will illustrate how rationality is a half-way house.

Zombie stories, like the Easter story, come in many different versions. Zombies have become huge in popular culture – movies, and TV shows from World War Z to the Walking Dead to iZombie depict endless variations on the zombie concept. Zombie stories originated in Africa and were further developed in the voodoo culture in Haiti in the 19th century and probably earlier.

In the mainstream Haitian tradition, before Hollywood began making its modifications of the story, zombies are “undead” – animated, yet entirely under the control of the bokor, a sorcerer.

Zombie stories originated as an expression of the fears of an enslaved and oppressed people. Zombies represent a loss of cognition, of independent thought -- of rationality and of free will. As slavery and oppression led people to feel the loss of their minds, their freedom, their humanity, they told stories of zombies that represented what they felt like. It was a way for the enslaved and oppressed to depict what they feared they were becoming, and also a way to remind them that they weren’t quite zombies yet. Though their conditions deprived them, they could hold on to self-respect and dignity and refuse to be like zombies in the story.

Zombie scholar Amy Wilentz explains:

"In Africa, a dying person’s soul might be stolen and stoppered up in a ritual bottle for later use. But the full-blown zombie was a very logical offspring of New World slavery. For the slave under French rule in Haiti — then Saint-Domingue — in the 17th and 18th centuries, life was brutal: hunger, extreme overwork and cruel discipline were the rule....To become a zombie was the slave’s worst nightmare: to be dead and still a slave, an eternal field hand. It is thought that slave drivers on the plantations, who were usually slaves themselves and sometimes Voodoo priests, used this fear of zombification to keep recalcitrant slaves in order." (NY Times, 2012 Oct)

Zombies never get tired. For Haitian slaves, that was about the only kind of hell worse than the one they were living -- nothing but constant toil, without out even the possibility of death as respite.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason"
See also
Part 1: Unitarians, Universalists, Reason, and Love
Part 3: Jesus, Zombies, and the Half-Way House of Reason