Resting in the Arms of the Great Wide Open

When I am driving and I want to listen to music, my tendency is to put a CD in and leave it there. Several years ago, a friend gave me a recording of a Bob Dylan concert at URI and I listened to it from East Greenwich to Georgetown, Maine. 

Over and over for four hours. 

Needless to say, I was making that trip alone.

When my daughter gave me a CD of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, I listened to it for weeks (around town). The music is brilliant and ultimately life-affirming, but there is a deep melancholy.

Not long ago I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the song that most caught my attention is called “Almost Home.” It’s about looking at your life, seeing the things you have saved and wondering why you find it so hard to let go of the past. In the chorus she sings:

I'm not running

I'm not hiding

I'm not reaching

I'm just resting in the arms 

of the great wide open

Gonna pull my soul in

And I'm almost home

At a very basic level, faith is about “resting in the arms of the great wide open.” It is about trusting enough so that we don’t have to be running or hiding or reaching. A lot of ministry is about running and reaching. 

Our church, especially our leadership, has done a lot of running and reaching over the past few years. And in the process we probably have not taken enough time for faithful Sabbath rest.

In the song, she sings about being lost “in the ache of old goodbyes.” Over the recent months and years, we have gone through many of those painful times. We have said “goodbye” to many friends. Some have moved and others have passed on. And we have grieved with friends who have lost parents and grandparents and loved ones.

It is painful to leave the past and difficult to trust the future. And sometimes our reaching and running are little more than an ultimately unsuccessful effort to escape the inescapable.

In the twelfth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, a man asks Jesus what is the most important thing that he should do. Jesus answers by quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” After the man agrees and affirms the wisdom of his response, Jesus says, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

Not far. Almost home. It’s not about reaching or running or hiding. It’s about loving God and neighbor. 

Resting in the arms of the great wide open.

Who Do You Trust?

A Protest in New York against the Iran Nuclear Pact

He shall judge between the nations, 
and shall arbitrate for many peoples; 
they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 
and their spears into pruning hooks; 
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 
neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 2:4

Once upon a time there was a quiz show called, “Who Do You Trust?” In its original incarnation it was called, “Do You Trust Your Wife?” Johnny Carson hosted the program before going on to his more famous role as host of  “The Tonight Show.” The contestants competed as couples and the quiz format had the man (always the man) choosing a category and then, after hearing the question, deciding whether to trust himself or his wife to give the correct answer.

The proposed nuclear deal with Iran has all of us playing a variation of that old game show. The critical question is, “Who do you trust?”

Technically, I think, it should be “Whom do you trust.” But since we no longer trust the grammar experts we now go with the common usage. Because most people would use “who” in that context, we have decided that “who” is proper, even though it isn’t.

Which is part of the problem. We no longer trust the experts. We don’t trust physicians about vaccines or scientists about global warming. We don’t trust historians. And we certainly are not going to trust diplomats and scientists to tell us whether or not the Iran deal is worth supporting.

Some of our not trusting is a good thing. Heaven knows that we have not always been well served by experts in many areas. The people who got us into Vietnam were, as David Halberstam wrote, “The Best and the Brightest.”

It is not a bad thing to question authority. The Hebrew prophets questioned authority. Jesus questioned authority. On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, it is worth remembering that Protestantism is founded on the questioning of authority.

But we have gone far beyond a healthy skepticism. 

It’s not just that we don’t trust the experts. We don’t believe there are such things as experts. For some people, the very idea that a person is an expert is an automatic disqualifier.

And that is part of what is going on in relation to the proposed deal with Iran. 

Some of the criticism should be dismissed out of hand. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is indulging in outlandish  campaign  rhetoric when he says that President Obama is using this nuclear deal to “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” This is not appeasement. Secretary of State John Kerry is not Neville Chamberlain. And no one is giving away the Sudetenland.

It is also worth noting, as we consider our concern for the security of Israel, that the Israelis already have a nuclear capability. Although the official government position is that they will neither confirm or deny the possession of nuclear weapons, there is widespread agreement that they do have nuclear weapons. It is the official position of the Israeli government to promise that they will not be the first nation to use a nuclear weapon in the region. 

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian Revolution, after Khomeini's death in 1989, is a genuinely scary guy, but he is not to be confused with Adolf Hitler. Hassan Rouhani, who was elected President in 2013 is generally perceived to be a moderate (admittedly a relative term), at least in comparison to his more bellicose predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This deal will not cause the Iranian people to “greet us as liberators,” as Vice President Cheney famously predicted of the Iraqis when we went to war in 2003, but it could be the beginning of an improved relationship which would ultimately benefit the entire region. In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof observes, “Iran’s people are perhaps the most pro-American and secular of those of any country I’ve been to in the Middle East. (On my last trip to Iran, I took two of my kids along, and Iranians bought them meals and ice cream, and served them illegal mojitos.) The public weariness with the regime’s corruption, oppression and economic failings is manifest. I would guess that after the supreme leader dies, Iran will begin a process of change like that in China after Mao died.”

Opponents of the pact have made much of the crowds celebrating the deal in Tehran. We should note, however, that not everyone is celebrating. The people of Iran are celebrating what they expect will be the end of economic sanctions and a movement toward more freedom within their country. The militant Ayatollah’s have condemned the pact in a mirror image of the more hawkish leaders in the United States. Opponents in Iran warn that the United States government cannot be trusted.

Some have pointed out that our Saudi Arabian allies are against the deal, but these are the same “allies” who have supported Wahhabi Muslim extremism at home and exported it abroad in the various forms of the Taliban, Al Queda and ISIS. The Saudis are also the ones who provided the manpower to staff the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The people who negotiated this deal are experts in diplomatic relations, foreign policy, atomic energy, defense, and international economics. Thanks to C-Span, I was able to watch parts of the congressional hearings last week as members of the House of Representatives questioned Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew. They were impressive, answering antagonistic questions with an almost encyclopedic grasp of the situation and a calm demeanor.

The Iran deal is not perfect, but it is a lot better than the alternative. In spite of the critics, there is very little downside. We are giving up sanctions that would erode anyway in return for closer oversight of Iran and the possibility of a much more peaceful future.

Sam Harris and the Sacred Journey

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
Psalm 19:1-4

In a recent column in the New York Times, Frank Bruni comments on Sam Harris’s new book, “Waking Up,” which will be published this month by Simon and Schuster.

He focuses on a passage in the middle of the book, where Harris describes an experience that might surprise those who know him as “the country’s most prominent and articulate atheist.”

Harris was in Israel, by the Sea of Galilee, walking where Jesus had walked, and he had what many Christians would describe as a religious experience. Harris writes: “If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit.”

It was “an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon,” Harris writes. “As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self — an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ — vanished.”

Bruni asks, “Had Harris at last found God? And is ‘Waking Up’ a stop-the-presses admission — an epiphany — that he slumbered and lumbered through the darkness for too long?”

No, Bruni explains, Harris is asking a profound question which is seldom considered, “The question is this: Which comes first, the faith or the feeling of transcendence? Is the former really a rococo attempt to explain and romanticize the latter, rather than a bridge to it? Mightn’t religion be piggybacking on the pre-existing condition of spirituality, a lexicon grafted onto it, a narrative constructed to explain states of consciousness that have nothing to do with any covenant or creed?”

My question for Bruni and Harris is, “Is this a trick question?”

Of course, the experience precedes the description of the experience. How could it be otherwise? And yes, religion is precisely the language we use to describe our experiences of transcendence and wonder. To speak in Christian terms, when we read the Bible, we are reading about how our spiritual ancestors experienced transcendence.

Explaining his position in a phone call with Bruni, Harris said, “You can have spiritual experience and understand the most thrilling changes in human consciousness in a context that’s secular and universal and not freighted with dogma.” Commenting on the conversation, Bruni writes, “It was a kind of discussion that I wish I heard more of, and that people should be able to have with less fear of being looked upon as heathens.”

Harris is right; you can have those conversations outside of a religious frame of reference. But it is also true that the church is a place where those conversations are encouraged and nurtured. We don’t think of our context as secular, of course, but we do reflect on spiritual experience and “the most thrilling changes in human consciousness in a context that’s universal . . . and not freighted with dogma.” At least that’s what we try to do.

The subtitle for Harris’s book is “A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” Many Americans, Bruni observes, “are looking for a different kind of scripture, for prophets purged of doctrine, for guides across the vast landscape between faithlessness and piety . . . .”

Isn’t that the task of the church, to guide people across the vast landscape between faithlessness and piety? Our goal is not to move people from a place called “faithlessness” to a place called “piety,” but to help each other recognize that the journey itself is sacred. This is true, not only in those high moments, beside the Sea of Galilee, when we walk where Jesus walked, but in everyday life when, as the Psalmist observed, The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.