BREXIT and the Flopidemic of Slurrds

The Brexit vote in the UK set off a global panic. In part, because we assumed that people in England, if not the rest of the United Kingdom, would always think about a decision and be sensible. They would never vote without knowing what the implications of that issue might be. Apparently, we’ve been wrong.

The first problem is the word “Brexit.” It’s a combination word, and I think that is why Europe is coming apart. We are not using enough words now. Words were a way, in the olden times, like the 1990s, to actually describe something in detail and debate it. Think of the most powerful places to communicate now—non-existent “platforms” named, ironically, “Twitter,” “Instagram,” “Facebook” and “YouTube.” Four major media with only 27 letters total between them. We don’t use enough letters and words anymore.

The Brexit, we are told, has great impact for the POTUS election and thereby SCOTUS appointments. And I don’t really know what I just said.

Because we now use pictures instead of words—after all a picture is worth a thousand, so 20 pix is 20K, right? The core problem is the flopendemic of Slurrds (for old people, this means, “a flood and epidemic of slurring words together.” Get with it, Geriatrics).   Brexit is the chief example. Brexit sounds like a breakfast cereal. When I went to England years ago, there was a cereal called, “Wheatabix.” I am sure confused many voters. “Exit from cereal? Continue reading BREXIT and the Flopidemic of Slurrds

Lessons in Politics from a Baptist Preacher

I don’t know many people who aren’t generally disgusted with the political process right now.  Left to right, top to bottom, it’s a mess.  I thought I’d put a little advice together for would-be leaders.

Further, Baptist preachers are about the most able politicians around.  They are more like small-town sheriffs, who have to lock you up AND get your vote.  Since Baptist churches are about the purest form of democracy around, where even the least of these can topple the most of those with enough work, a Baptist preacher learns to hone the skills of

We are one in the spirit

diplomacy, bridge-building and persuasion.  We have to run for election every year.  It’s called “the budget.”  A lot of high-handed Baptist preachers take over churches, of course, with dictatorial ways, but it doesn’t last long.  Turns out that once you deceive people they decide, for some unknown reason, to stop funding your foolishness.

So here are some lessons from a 33 year veteran who has survived some titanic battles over camellia bushes, building programs, and even got a church to vote for a letter of apology to an offended church member once who got mad when his name wasn’t read at the centennial celebration thirty years before.  He wobbled back into church on his walker a few months before he died, looked up and said, “Preacher, you reckon the building will fall down if I come in?”  And a good old deacon said, “Well, if it does we’ll build it back.”

A little unsolicited advice:

  1. You have to learn how to build consensus.  Winning 51-49 is not winning.  You don’t need unanimity, but until you accomplish good for all, you haven’t won.
  2. You will learn humility willingly or eventually.  Willingly is much less painful.
  3. Since politicians seem to evidence almost no persuasive ability in the current moment—I add this one:  “Learn to tell a story.  Keep it simple.  Tell the truth.  Truth doesn’t need help.”
  4. The same people you defeat will have to help pay for it in the end.  They are not enemies, so unless you can regain their support, you lose in the long run.
  5. It’s dangerous to claim God is on your side and never leave room for disagreement.  Even if you and your mother think so.  God is not too keen on preachers as court jesters and God is intolerant of people misusing the divine name, so you’ve been warned.
  6. Preaching that doesn’t turn into good deeds doesn’t amount to anything.
  7. You have to trust others to make real changes.  Nobody does it by themselves.
  8. Those who live by demonization die by demonization.
  9. Forgive and move on.  It’s just that simple.  Holding grudges is a waste of valuable energy.
  10. Sometimes you just do what is right and let the chips fall.  There are worse things than losing your job.
  11. Believe in Someone or Something larger than you.  Without a real vision, not only do the people perish, but nothing really happens.
  12. It’s not your church.  It’s not their church.  It’s God’s church.  Seems to me this applies to countries, property, power and prosperity.
  13. If there isn’t any money, you can’t spend it.  It’s not rocket science.
  14. Doesn’t hurt to let someone else take credit now and then, even if it’s your idea.
  15. A good staff makes a poor preacher look great.
  16. Principles matter the most when they are most inconvenient and unpopular.  Lose ‘em and you might as well quit anyway.
  17. No matter how high and mighty you get, the Almighty gets the last word.
  18. Don’t do the Devil’s work for him.
  19. Know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.  Even a great idea ahead of its time will lose to anxiety and fear and misinformation.
  20. As a friend of mine put it, “Everything happens for a reason.  Sometimes the reason is you’re stupid and you make bad decisions.”
  21. Love really is the great truth of life.  Politics, even with the noble concept of “justice” will degenerate into darkness without the temper of love.

Think Globally Listen Locally

Corporations are not necessarily evil in and of themselves, but the net effect can be the disappearance of everything that makes the place where you live distinctive.

Got a notice from my friend Steve Norris that our friend Dale Short put us on his “Music From Home” radio program yesterday.  (LISTEN) (SMA is on the first program)

Thanks, Dale!  “Music From Home” is local artists.  I appreciate that there are still programs here and there in a world in which globalized corporate mass culture (which is short for “controlled by a few people who are not always interested in the music”) threatens to gobble up everything.  Music and making money have a long and unhappy marriage.  They love one another and need each other but they can’t make each other happy.  Their families were so different.  They hurt each other and use each other all the time.  Sometimes they have to separate to get on with life.

Dale Short of “Music From Home”

The internet and programs like Dale’s provide hope that artists, musical worlds and songwriters can collaborate and pursue their craft in different ways.  The web is already having a salutary effect on music.  It is possible to skip the narrow funnel of corporate mass marketing that has produced some great stuff but also turned away some great music that people would like.  This is why listening rooms like Keith Harrelson’s Moonlight On the Mountain and other great places struggle to make it and deserve our support.

These changes will be painful for a while, as they are in publishing and in every field.  But as with all things human, there is also possibility for many good things, too.  Hope you’ll support local artists, internet radio and local radio programs, and local venues and businesses.  Corporations are not necessarily evil in and of themselves, but the net effect can be the disappearance of everything that makes the place where you live distinctive.  Supporting local life (which means “I am willing to pay more for what I like’) is a way to protest the gobble ’em up and kill ’em off so I can have a house in Santa Fe culture.

We need to pay attention–how we spend our money, what we listen to, and where we direct time has massive implications for our future.  Be purposeful in your life.  It matters.

 

 

The Songs Remember When Part II by Gary Furr

…there are aspects of humanity that are not reducible to particles, chemicals and rational analysis.

In my last post, I reflected on the interesting work of Oliver Sacks on memory.  A few further thoughts about the whole notion of science, faith, and humanity.

Sacks has been criticized roundly for his “anecdotes” that don’t meet all the rigor of some scientific requirement, especially by the radical reductionists.  Some believe that  “there is no self or soul.  We are merely the product of our acculturated experiences and brain physiology and when it’s gone, so are we.”

But there is something instinctive that we know—that there are aspects of humanity that are not reducible to particles, chemicals and rational analysis.  Beauty, humanity, value abide somewhere beyond all our curiosity about mechanisms.  Even when the mechanisms are explained, there is yet Something.

I once asked a group of scientists with whom I meet from time to time to talk about religion and science (none of whom are six-day creationists, all but one of whom are yet theists and Christians), “My question for you is not why you believe in evolution or why even intelligent design is not logically necessary from the perspective of scientific method.  It is this:  you are committed scientists, are convinced of its methodology, humble about what we can know.  And yet you still worship, believe in God, go to church. I am much more interested in that than boring college-dorm debates where someone has to knuckle under at the end and say, “You’re right.  I give up.”  Why do you do this?”  What is it that you DO believe?

Then I heard something fresh.  “Even when you understand these things, it causes wonder.”  There is Something underneath that can be alternatively explained but it seems vulgar to do so.  Wonder.  Amazement.  Delight.  Joy.  They can be explained as neurons, nerves, responses, brain centers, blah blah blah.  But why do they exist at all?

On December 27, 1992, I did a funeral of a real character in the town where I lived in South Georgia.  Mr. Earl “Tige” Pickle (short for “Tiger,” a peculiar name for such an outgoing man!) was a newspaper columnist, leader in the community and local radio personality.  Everybody who was anybody in Early County eventually was asked to be on Mr. Tige’s radio show. Since our paper came once a week, people depended on Tige to get the day-to-day necessities.  He kept us up on things like the funeral notices and what the coach had to say about the big game and how the peanut crop might do this year with the lack of rain and that terrible fungus the county agent had just identified.

Since I was the new preacher in town and he had more or less run out of interesting guests, Tige invited me to be interviewed.  He was particularly interested in the fact that I was from Texas and, as people usually do, assumed that I knew all about things Texana.  I didn’t know these things, of course, but like any good Texan,  what I lacked in fact I simply invented, added and padded.

He was a wordsmith who appreciated a good story and a well-written sentence.  He often came up to tell me how much he appreciated some joke I had told in a sermon or some point well-made. Of course, as in all lives, the day came when life began to take his gifts away, and it took them in a most cruel fashion.  This dear man with a sly grin and quick wit began to lose his words.  They said it was Alzheimer’s.

One day, long after the ravages of senility had begun to take their toll, I went out to the nursing home to lead a worship service.  As always, Tige was present, sitting in a rocker at the back. By now he had become silent and unresponsive. This particular day I invited the residents to join me in singing “Amazing Grace.”    As we began to sing, something came over Tige.  He got up as though moved by an invisible and ancient force of habit and moved toward me.  Now he was no longer in the day room at the nursing home.  I believe he was sitting again in his mind in the pews of First Baptist Church and worshipping in his regular place.

He sang out loud and continued to make his way forward until he stood shoulder to shoulder with me.  There he continued to sing as though he were leading the congregation itself until we finished the song.   When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun; we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.

Then he went back to his seat.  When nearly everything else had left his memory, the power of a lifetime of faithful worship and faith had marked his life.  Though he rarely spoke those days, something raised him out of that chair and moved him to sing every word of that great old hymn.   Religion has just about lost its soul in America trying to control the culture, run politics and come up with glib answers to everything.  We’d do better to settle back into mystery, in my opinion.  Humility is not such a bad place to be, not if you really believe in something.   Especially if you think there is Something that comes from beyond us, beyond death, beyond decay and Alzheimers and suffering and loss.

Oliver Sacks’ work may also remind us that the practice of faith is deeper than what we “feel” or “decide” or experience.  There is something entirely worthwhile about the practice of faith that resides at the level of gestures, behaviors and trusting actions.  Liturgy, devotions, singing, and prayer become habits of a life.  Theologian Greg Jones once wrote:

Two of the most powerful intellectual and social forces in our culture are the hard sciences and capitalist economics. Together they have conspired to produce images of personhood that undermine Christian understandings. According to these images, persons are defined by their rational capacities and their productive contributions.

 The loss of reverence and respect for human life and human bodies, whether they retain capacity for memory or not, is the result of our obsession with reason and the GNP.  But institutional religion can commit the same sin.  People can be valued only for being young, for the contributions they make to the community or for their sameness to us.  This is as far from the religion of Jesus of Nazareth as can be.  The One who welcomed lepers, outcasts, children and the sick reminds us that pragmatism is a useful tool but not a way of life adequate to all things.

I find it frankly puzzling to meet conservative Christians who effusively praise Ayn Rand.  In the words of Liz Lemon, “What the WHAT?”  We can love, value, care for people poorer than us, less fortunate, weaker or damaged.  This is not misguided but actually a humble bowing before mystery.  There are yet things in a silent woman sitting in the activities room of the nursing home unknown to us.  And so we care for her, not only for her past, but for the simple fact of respect and care for her deep fellow humanity.  That is enough.  To learn this is the beginning of wisdom.

 

 

The Best Time to Give

Carson-Newman College

Life-giving leadership is not being in control so much as persuasion of others to offer their best selves to that which matters the most.

I got an email from former classmate, Vicki Butler, now in the Advancement Office of my old college, Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee.  She was in town and wanted to visit with us.  I do this  in my work as a Pastor, so I know that institutions need money.  I have moved from being a disdainful idealist as a teen to a reluctant fundraiser to a committed realist.

So my wife Vickie and I met Vickie in the lobby of her hotel.  She told us what Carson-Newman College is facing and how they hoped alumni would help out.  I was preparing my protests:  (“Do you know how much I gave last year?  The TaxCut preparer always flags my giving.  Americans don’t give this much!”)  But our conversation moved on to how things are going, how the school has adjusted to hard times, and to what a great mission it has.

We were at Carson Newman from 1972-1976.  Vickie and I married early—Christmas of our sophomore year.  I was 19, she 18, and in love.  That this did not pay bills had not yet occurred to us.  We lived in the little house right behind the infirmary in 1973 Continue reading The Best Time to Give