The Mark of Paul

[A version of this article under the title "Sinners and Saints" first appeared in the September/October 2012 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The centerpiece of the Christian narrative is the concept of human nature.  Are we inherently flawed and in need of outside assistance or imminently sacred and inherently unified with the divine?  How the apostle Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teachings shaped the Christian view of sin.

The Early Years

Although they were contemporaries, Jesus and the apostle Paul never met.  They never walked together down a dusty road, sharing figs and dried fish as they talked.  Paul, the Pharisaic Jew, never had the privilege of sitting in the shade of an olive tree and listening to the teacher share his fresh take on the Kingdom of God, a vision unmoored from the teachings of the Temple and rooted deep within his own experience.  Paul never felt the loving gaze of his teacher’s eyes, or the touch of his hand, or the way his wordless presence awakened others to their own divinity. 

If Jesus and Paul had met, things might have turned out differently.

Instead, in the heady years that followed the state execution of Jesus, long before the first word of the New Testament was written, Paul did his best to cobble together a set of doctrines and practices from the scattered recollections of Jesus’ students and his own insights. 

Paul became a follower of the nascent Jesus movement, known simply in those early years as “the way.”  It is Paul’s understanding, some say misunderstanding, of Jesus and his teachings that shaped Christianity more than any other source.  Paul pulled the movement together by writing letters to fledgling groups scattered around the Mediterranean in places like Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus and Rome – letters that set the tone for everything that was to follow.  Four hundred years later those letters were canonized by the bishops of the Church and became the inerrant word of God.  It is impossible to overestimate Paul’s importance in the formation of Christianity.  Almost half of the New Testament was written by Paul.

The Nature of Sin

Jesus spoke a regional dialect of Aramaic.  For him, the word sin would have been hob or hobha, a term borrowed from a commercial context meaning “debt.”  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, hob or hobha became hamaratia, meaning “internal flaw.”  For centuries, ancient Greek tragedians had employed hamaratia as the driving force of their plays, the plot element that brought down the protagonist in a paroxysm of pride and obstinacy.  For the Greeks, the most common internal flaw was hubris, a destructive, self-obsessed arrogance. 

As soon as they were written down, the teachings of Jesus were altered by the unavoidable distortions of translation.

            When the Bible was rendered into English, hamaratia became sin, derived from the old English word synn, an archery term meaning “to miss the mark” – yet another layer of meaning.

            So what is sin?  Is it a temporary debt we can repay?  Is it a permanent stain no self-effort can alleviate?  It is a deeply rooted psychological flaw that will inevitably spell our doom?  Is it a simple mistake, quickly corrected when we release another arrow from our bow?

            And how do we repair the damage?

            How do we climb out of the hole and get back on level ground where we are no worse than anyone else, and no better than anyone else?  How do we restore our original status as beings of infinite value?  How do we lay bare the lie of our unworthiness and in the light of forgiveness walk across the bridge that spans the chasm of our alienation?

War and Peace

Paul and Jesus characterized our relationship with sin quite differently.  In Paul’s dualism, the material world and the spiritual world are locked in an eternal battle.  In The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell writes, “For Paul, the moral life is difficult, muscular and perilous.”  In Paul’s often violent portrait of the human predicament, we must cultivate the vigilance of warriors and gird our loins against the weakness of the flesh.  Declaring that “nothing good lives in me,” Paul seems to loath his own humanness and pines for the triumph of his spiritual nature, a transcendent force that comes from above.  The cancer within is “our sinful nature,” a power so great that we cannot overcome it with our will, yet struggle against it we must.

            In his letter to the Romans (7:21), Paul writes, “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my own members.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  Two thousand years of traditional Christian dogma take birth in this single passage – the claim that this world, including our own bodies, is hopelessly mired in sin, that sin is a condition, not an event, and that we’ll really only be free when we’re dead.

            Jesus paints a startlingly different portrait of sin and the means of our release from its grasp.  Instead of battling against an adversary we can never conquer, Jesus asks us to abandon the entire paradigm of life as a struggle and move instead into a condition of consciousness characterized by surrender and ease.  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” he says in Matthew 11:28.  “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

            The Sanskrit word yoga is etymologically linked to the English word “yoke”, and it is no accident that Jesus employs this potent agricultural metaphor to describe a deep psychological state.  In the same way a yoke channels the vast and undirected energy of oxen toward a specific aim, the disciplines of yoga seek to channel the vast and undirected energy of consciousness toward a specific aim, a fruitful harvest of awakening.  We’re always yoked to something, whether we’re aware of it or not, because our thoughts bind us to words and actions.  When we are bound, or yoked, to selfish, destructive thoughts, we are led down a path of suffering.  When we choose instead to follow our higher nature, our Christ-consciousness, we feel the struggle slipping away, replaced with serenity and divine alignment.  Conflict is replaced with cooperation, agitation with contentment. 

Mitchell puts it this way: “For Jesus, there is no drama.  The more we surrender, the more we are carried along in the current of God’s love.  Not that good and evil don’t exist, but when you see into the realm beyond good and evil, where everything is pure grace, we are much less likely to be caught up in our own judgments and moral categories, and much more ready to experience every action as easy and natural.”

           

Know Peace, No War

By emphasizing the dualism of good and evil and our own inherently sinful nature, traditional Christianity bears the mark of Paul.  But what if Paul got it wrong?  What if the early church’s reliance on Paul set Christianity off on the wrong foot? 

What if Jesus and Paul had met and become friends?  Perhaps Paul’s strident self-loathing would have softened in the loving gaze and unconditional acceptance of the master teacher.  Maybe he would have seen himself differently and written some very different letters.

Guitar Solos That Made Me Cry

I love guitars.  And I really love a good guitar solo.  In the history of recorded music there are so many good ones.  We could argue all night about which are the best or the most important.  But I want to take a more personal angle.  You would no doubt write a very different list, but for me, these are the guitar solos that break me down and start the water works.

            A guitar solo is a funny thing.  Commonly sandwiched between verses and choruses of sung lyrics, it’s time for the singer to step back and let the music shine.  A good guitar solo comes in many forms.  Sometimes it’s a primal, pre-cognitive scream.  Other times it’s a homey, back porch hug from grandpa, all pipe tobacco, flannel and Old Spice.  But no matter what shape it takes, its wordless language speaks to the deepest part of us, that part so few things ever reach.  In “Yellow Ledbetter”, an outtake from the first Pearl Jam album Ten, singer Eddie Vetter invokes Mike McCready’s guitar solo with the words “Make me cry.”  Indeed.  Here are the guitar solos that make me cry, even now, after all these years.

            I have to start with David Gilmour’s iconic, whammy bar infused Stratocaster manifesto at the end of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”  This is as good as it gets.  A rich, gorgeous tone, long fluid lines, ice hard flurries, and long shafts of tonal light reaching deep into the chasms of the unconscious – this is what all electric guitar solos aspire to be.  Gilmour doesn’t play over the song – he inhabits it.  This is the mistake so many lesser guitarists make.  They see a guitar solo as an opportunity to stand out and shine.  But Gilmour knows better.  He knows that a guitar solo is a chance for one pair of hands to lift the whole song into transcendence.         

            There are many outstanding Neil Young guitar solos, but the one that really gets me the most is the one from “Words”, the last track on his essential album Harvest.  Like so many other Neil Young songs, this song is a meditation on the cost of fame and the strange isolation that world adulation creates.  With its loping time changes and syncopation, “Words” is one of Young’s most sophisticated arrangements, yet it still retains its rustic recorded-in-a-barn charm.  In the middle he builds up a slow solo on electric guitar over a bed of bass, drums, piano and pedal steel.  Some critics have compared Young’s guitar work to Coltrane, and no other song makes the point better.  The halting, stuttering stops and starts of his lines perfectly embody the uncertainties of any life, let alone the life of a young man on the cusp of wealth and fame in the patently insane world of pop music, a life Young has never comfortably embraced.  His confidence in the midst of awkwardness becomes our own.

            For sheer minimalist brilliance, let’s turn to guitarist Keith Scott’s work on Bryan Adams’s power ballad “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” from the 1991 Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves soundtrack.  Scott and fellow Canadian Adams met in 1976 and began recording together.  They’ve been together ever since.  In this solo, you can almost feel the trust they have for each other, the way Scott lets each note hang, waiting patiently for the song to shift beneath him.  This solo is a perfect example of one of the most difficult things for any guitar player to do – nothing.  Wielding silence and emptiness as masterfully as sound and fullness make’s Scott’s solo one for the ages.

              At the age of fifteen Neal Schon landed a job as a sideman in an early formation of Santana.  It was either that or accept Eric Clapton’s invitation to join Derek and the Dominos.  Not bad for a kid.  But Schon really made his mark a few years later as a founding member of Journey.  Schon’s solo at the end of “Faithfully” is a masterpiece forever schooling guitarists on how to support and stay within the bounds of a pop song while simultaneously elevating its themes to celestial heights.  Following a fluid jazz idiom, Schon first anchors the melody, then varies it, then goes completely nuts taking us all with him.

            David Lindley is a multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire with countless album credits to his name.  But his work with Jackson Browne remains his most powerful.  In “These Days,” Lindley finds the beating heart of Browne’s paean to lovelorn sadness and lays it bare for all to see.  Every time I listen to this solo it seems brand new again.  Lindley makes it clear: a solo, like a work of literature, should have a beginning, a middle and an end.  A solo is not just noodling around or stringing a bunch of notes, lines and figures together.  And a solo should never be about the guitar player and his or her prowess and technique.  A great guitar solo burrows so deeply into the soul of the listener that the guitarist and the band disappear leaving only a wide open expanse of beauty, space, light and redemption.  That Lindley accomplishes this so effortlessly ranks him as one of the finest instrumentalists of our era.  And don’t get me started about his violin solo on “For a Dancer.”  Different column.

            “Gypsy”, a Stevie Nicks composition that didn’t fit on her solo album, found its way onto Fleetwood Mac’s thirteenth studio album Mirage.  Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar solo, echoing the format of their earlier masterpiece “Go Your Own Way”, doesn’t appear until the end.  Employing his trademark finger style approach Buckingham creates a cascade of shimmering notes that pour down like stardust and build upon the magic spell that Nicks created with one her most personal and powerful vocal performances.  When you hear a song like this you kind of feel sorry for all the other bands that will never in their wildest dreams reach these heights.  Buckingham’s solo plays the song out in a long, slow fade.  Woe unto the DJ who talks over this solo.  I will find you.

            The history of pop music is filled with great partnerships and the sub-genre of Americana is no exception, from Buddy and Julie Miller to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.  On “Barroom Girls” from Welch’s 1996 debut album Revival Rawlings plays a plaintive and heartbreaking solo that deftly encapsulates the world-weary pathos of this lament – so simple, yet so rich.  Who knew two unadorned acoustic guitars could create such a flood of emotion.

            Over on the mainstream Nashville side of country music, Paul Franklin’s pedal steel guitar solo on Vince Gill’s “When I Call Your Name” perfectly exploits the inherent ability of a pedal steel to create a shifting, sliding, fading, falling, slippery slope where you can’t find your feet and you fall powerless into the dark heart of the song.  I’ve listened to this a thousand times, and never in a million years will I understand just exactly what Franklin is up to.  But it breaks my heart every time.

            There are others.  I could go on.  And I know you have yours too.  Some other time we’ll argue about “best” guitar solos, or “most important” guitarists.  So many of my favorite players aren’t even on this list, like Angus Young of AC/DC, or unquestionable greats like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page.  But in the end, the solos that grab me the most are the ones that keep me in the car in the driveway, unable to turn off the radio and go inside.  And besides, you don’t want your wife to see you crying. 

Ten Truths from the Kitchen

I’ve been studying cooking for a few years with Chef Bernard Guillas of the Marine Room in La Jolla, California.  When he isn’t running a group of top-tier restaurants, writing award winning cook books, flying off to New York for a Today Show appearance or Paris for induction into the prestigious Maître Cuisiniers de France (Master Chefs of France), he shares his boundless love of food in bi-weekly cooking classes at the Macy’s Home Store in San Diego.  Each class costs a whopping five dollars, every penny of which goes straight to the San Diego Food Bank and helps feed thousands of families in need.  My wife and I and a few friends have been attending regularly and it has really boosted the quality of our dinner gatherings, to say the least.  But something surprising and unexpected happened along the way.  Whether he intended to or not, while Chef Bernard was teaching us how to cook, he was teaching us how to live.
 

1.  If your process is chaotic, your results are chaotic.  Before you begin cooking, clean and organize your entire work space.  Gather all of the tools you will need.  Assemble and measure your ingredients.  That way, once you begin cooking nothing will interrupt your flow and you’ll be able to feel your way through the process without having to constantly stop and go looking for something.  And clean up as you go.  Your kitchen should start clean, stay clean and end clean.  The French phrase for this is mise en place.  It means “putting in place.”  How much easier would our work lives be, how much smoother would our homes function, and how much richer would our creative output be if we applied this principle to all the processes of our lives?

2.  Do one thing at a time.  When you are mincing shallots, mince shallots.  When you are filleting a salmon, fillet a salmon.  A divided mind is the enemy of awareness.  That’s when you burn the butter, drop a glass or cut your finger.  In every task we must be present and in a state of relaxed focus.  Only then do solutions and pathways appear.

3.  Keep it simple and let the ingredients speak for themselves.  As you create your own recipes or adapt the recipes of others, don’t over-think it.  Never let flash obscure substance.  When possible, eat in season, eat fresh, eat local, and let the natural flavors, scents, textures and colors of your ingredients suggest combinations and techniques that bring out their natural beauty.  And just because you have every ingredient in your pantry doesn’t mean you have to use them all.  Less really is more.  As in life, when in doubt, leave it out.

4.  You eat first with your eyes.  When you plate food, pay special attention to the way things look.  Every meal begins as a visual image, followed by aroma, then flavor.  But it all begins with the eyes.  So too in life, don’t discount appearances – of course inner beauty matters, but so does outer beauty.  Make your homes, offices, gardens, indeed your lives beautiful.  Follow and amplify the natural lines of your raw materials.  Celebrate the splendor of the visual dimension.  Take a tip from nature.  Look sharp.  Let your personal appearance be your primary art form.  Make it easier for others be drawn to the treasures within.

5.  Follow your senses.  We are cerebral creatures.  The name of our species, Homo sapiens, means “man the thinker.”  We are justifiably proud of our intellectual and rational accomplishments.  But we are still animals sensing our way through a world of bewildering sights, sounds, scents and textures.  As you assemble the earth’s bounties into dishes that feed and delight, allow the authority of your senses to speak.  And as you struggle through life’s challenges, let intellect guide your steps, but let your senses show you the path.

6.  Practice.  Cooking requires the mastery of a core set of techniques – knife handling, heat management, traditional prep processes, culturally specific ingredients and the regional methods that accompany them.  There is no short cut to mastery.  Simply begin cooking everything you can.  Then do it again, and again.  Eventually mistakes fall by the wayside, instincts sharpen and results improve.  So too in life, how can we demand mastery in any endeavor without a long and arduous apprenticeship littered with failure?

7.  Let the mystery be.  Food is energy embodied, made from the elemental substance of the earth just as we are.  When we eat, we commune directly with the mystery of existence and with our own deepest nature.  When we break bread together we enact a ritual that grounds us in the fundamental unity of all life beyond the veil of birth and death.  Don’t turn eating into an intellectual puzzle.  Embrace your animal nature.  All eating is killing, and as such, involves loss.  Eat mindfully, compassionately and reverently.  Honor the earth’s gifts.  And honor your heart.  Each of us must draw our own ethical lines and avoid imposing our views dogmatically on others, for in the end it is only a matter of degree between the omnivore and the vegan.  We vote with our forks and with our dollars.  Support growers, ranchers and fishermen who share your values and treat the earth with dignity.  Still, no matter where we draw the line, we all must participate in the sacrifice of life.  Trust your gut, and do what you feel is right.

8.  The process is the outcome.  Don’t put all your stock in the end result.  Make every step of the journey a destination in and of itself.  “Sometimes it’s better to travel than to arrive,” wrote Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he’s right.  Sometimes the dish you slaved over all day doesn’t turn out right.  But you have most certainly not wasted your time.  There is joy in the stages of becoming that the end result doesn’t know anything about.  Let the path itself be your reward.

9.  Cultivate gratitude.  After your mise en place is complete and you’re ready to begin, check in with yourself.  Don’t touch anything until you have a grateful heart.  Respect the plants and animals who gave their lives for your table.  Work with them consciously and compassionately.  Respect the fishermen and farmers who dedicate their lives to bringing you the fruits of the earth from every corner and continent.  Feel their passion and their commitment to excellence.  A sacramental offering is placed before you on the altar of your kitchen counter.  Don’t poison it with resentment or self-pity.  Preparing food is not a burden – it is a sacred ritual.  Really see.  You are surrounded by miracles.  Let gratitude fill your heart and guide your hand.

10.  Let your work be play.  Cooking shouldn’t be a chore, it should be fun.  If you cannot cook with love and an open-hearted sense of wonder, step away from the stove.  Slap yourself in the face and get it together.  Your mom was wrong.  You should play with your food.  Get your friends involved.  Lead your kids into their own life-long love affair with food by your example.  Explore the myriad wonders of the earth together.  Food is communion that erases all boundaries.  A chef is a shaman, a priest, and an alchemist who uses fire to turn the base elements into the Elixir of Life.  Cooking and eating binds us to ourselves, to each other, and to the sacred source from which all things come.  Learning how to work with food teaches us how to work better with the whole world.  Who knew all of that could begin in the kitchen? 

God and America: Our Nation's Uneasy Relationship with Religion

[A version of this article originally appeared in the June/July edition of Unity Magazine, and is reprinted here with permission.]

In November, Americans will head to the polls to choose the next president.  Whether it’s Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, one thing’s certain: At the inauguration in January, the victor will place his hand on a Bible and make a stirring speech invoking the name of God and imploring Him to guide and bless our great nation.

            Religion has always been at the heart of the American experience, from the first pilgrim to tomorrow’s opening prayer in the House of Representatives.  Leaders from all points on the political spectrum scatter religious references like cherry blossoms on the Washington mall.  The Promised Land, the new Israel, the land of milk and honey – it’s as if a divine mandate were written across her purple mountains majesty and her amber waves of grain.  Still a nagging question remains; whose religion?  In a land founded on the principles of freedom, particularly the freedom to think and believe as one sees fit, America has always had a tempestuous relationship with religion.  When the two conflict, to whom do we owe allegiance, our nation or our faith?

            Like the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome and the kings of medieval Europe, political leaders have long claimed a special relationship with the divine.  Yet in the creation of the American political system, the Founders made a conscious break with the concept of the divine right of kings.  In its place, many of them envisioned an empire of Reason, a republic founded on the inherent human capacity to steer a course through the vicissitudes of life with the rudder of rational discourse.

Was the United States founded by and for Christians, as some claim?  The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) reminds us that when we go searching for origins what we usually find is our own prejudice.  Looking back, Christian revisionists see the Founding Fathers as devout Christians building a theocracy while atheist revisionists see Freethinkers erecting a secular state beyond the crippling reach of old world superstitions.  In other words, no simplistic, reductionist and self-serving portrait can ever do justice to the rich diversity of thought present in early America.  Like contemporary America, colonial life was characterized by a plurality of positions on all questions, especially those regarding religion.  Simple platitudes like “America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles” are not borne out by the evidence.

Faith and the Founding Fathers

Many leading figures in Colonial America were Deists, espousing a deep and lingering animosity toward organized religion.  Deists also hold the view that God created the world as a distant engineer, and is not involved in the day to day affairs of humanity.  Our only salvation, Deists argue, lies in the proper application of our God-given capacity to reason.  Deists also deny many traditional Christian doctrines like the trinity and the divinity of Christ.  Yet Deists like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson believed that God imbued his creation with Natural Law and that it was our primary duty, both as individuals and as a whole, to discover, expand and perfect that Natural Law by envisioning and creating a just society.  And one of the hallmarks of a just and free society was, in Jefferson’s words, a “separation between church and state.”   

“In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Horatio Spafford on March 17, 1814.  Like his friend John Adams, Jefferson had little but contempt for organized religion and what he derisively called “the churchmen.”  Yet in his extensive study of classical literature and philosophy no figure enjoyed greater esteem in Jefferson’s mind than Jesus whom he regarded as the most important ethical philosopher of all time.  So keen was Jefferson’s conviction of Jesus’ importance that he took a knife to the Bible in order to free Jesus from “the errors of his biographers.”  Using two copies of the Bible and a pen knife, Jefferson carefully cut out all of the best sayings of Jesus and pasted them in a new volume, now known as the Jefferson Bible, separating, as he put it, the “diamonds” from the “dunghills.”  No virgin birth, no miracles, no resurrection and indeed no unique or divine status.  The Jesus of the Jefferson Bible is a Deist, a humanist and a philanthropist who has absolutely nothing to do with the institutional Church that calcified around his name.  “The religion-builders,” Jefferson reasoned, “have distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus.”  In a letter to Charles Thompson in 1816, Jefferson said of his deeply redacted Bible, “it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian [his emphasis], that is to say, a disciple of the true doctrines of Jesus.”

Our true salvation, according to Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and Adams, lay in our capacity to reason.  Only through a vigorous and vigilant application of our God-given minds could we gradually realize a human society aligned with the ideals of Natural Law.  For Adams, a Unitarian, “the question before the human race is, whether the God of Nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether the priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles.”  The God of Deism is available to everyone without priestly or institutional mediation in the hallowed light of our own higher minds.  “The Infinite Father expects or requires no worship or praise from us,” wrote Franklin in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.  And in a letter to Peter Carr dated August 10, 1787, Jefferson calls us to “question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

Christian apologists often point to George Washington as the counter-example of the prevailing Deism of his time.  They cite his mention of Jesus in several early writings and his talk of God’s providence in the American project.  While it is true that Washington observed Christianity and attended church regularly, he refused to kneel in prayer as was his congregation’s custom, and he always slipped out of his pew before the communion sacrament, much to the chagrin of his wife and family.  Abraham Lincoln was even worse, described by his long time friend and law partner as a true-blood infidel who “had no faith in the Christian sense of the term.”  Things sure have changed.  Presidential candidates who exhibit the open disregard of mainstream Christianity that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln did would today be utterly unelectable.

“In God We Trust”

The turmoil inherent in any open and free society often results in strange and deeply imbalanced eruptions of power.  Out of the fearful spasms of the McCarthy era grew a campaign to change the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrase “under God.”  Originally penned in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, the pledge read “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  As a socialist Bellamy wanted to include the word “equality” as in “with liberty, equality and justice for all,” but knew that it would never stand given the dire plight of African-Americans and women in his time.  Despite his restraint, the socialist themes of his sermons got him defrocked by the Baptists.  Sixty years later, in the long shadow of World War II with its specter of nuclear proliferation and the global expansion of communism, conservative religious forces campaigned for the inclusion of the words “under God”.  Thanks to vigorous activism by the Knights of Columbus, congress passed a law in 1952 giving us the pledge as it exists today.  Conservative anti-abortion activists continue to campaign for one last change – adding the phrase “born and unborn” to the end of “with liberty and justice for all,” while those on the left want to honor Bellamy’s original impulse by adding the word “equality” alongside “liberty” and “justice.”  Once again, the human tendency to project one’s own private convictions onto the whole pushes against the inherently decentralized nature of a pluralistic society.

A few years later in 1956 the phrase “In God We Trust” began appearing on paper money and officially replaced E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) as the national motto.  The long reach of religious authority, specifically Christian authority, was gradually replacing the free-thinking secularism of an earlier age.

Religious Diversity in the White House

When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, his Catholicism raised a lot of eyebrows.  American presidents had always been Protestants of one form or another.  Anti-Catholic voices grew bolder in the months leading up to the election, wondering aloud whether or not Kennedy would be taking orders from the Vatican.  John Adams expressed a similar concern in a letter to Thomas Jefferson when he asked, “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic Church?” 

Questioning the religious beliefs of a presidential candidate seems at once an invasion of privacy and terribly salient – all the evidence you need of a mixed mind at the heart of the American experience.  But in the end does it really matter?  Nixon was raised as a Quaker.  Did the deeply pacifist convictions he learned as a boy shape his Vietnam War policy?

Today both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face similar scrutiny.  Because Obama’s father was a Kenyan Muslim, because his middle name is Hussein, and because he lived in Indonesia for a time as a boy and attended a Muslim school, his Christianity will forever be seen by some as little more than manipulative political theater designed to render him electable. 

Even more remarkable is Romney’s successful campaign to become the Republican nominee, given the fact that his family’s faith, Mormonism, is widely regarded by mainstream evangelical Christians as the fourth Abrahamic faith and not a form of Christianity at all – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism – a claim Mormons strenuously reject.  Yet clearly, mainstream Christians are willing to overlook this as well as some of Mormonism’s more curious deviations from traditional doctrine in the name of party unity.  Perhaps they are digging deeper.  Perhaps they are going back to a time when the promise of America was the vision of a pluralistic, multicultural and authentically free society, where on the big religious and philosophical questions we are left to the privacy of our own conscience. 

In spite of Obama’s embodiment of racial, ethnic and religious diversity and regardless of Romney’s outsider status as a Mormon, no matter who becomes president in November and stands on the Capitol steps to take the oath of office next January, the idea of God will hang ever-present over the proceedings.  The idea of God and the idea of America are forever joined.  But the question of whose God and what sort of God will always draw us into a vigorous and vitalizing dialogue that compels us to speak and listen respectfully, compassionately and humbly, knowing that the voices of the many really are united in a common enterprise that ennobles and affirms us in our ultimate unity.

My Dad

My ninety year old dad is in hospice. He stopped eating. He says he doesn’t remember how to chew. The IV drip administers hydration, nutrition, and morphine for his chronic pain. No one knows how long he has. No one knows how long any of us has. It’s just that with him the problem is a little more apparent.

My dad no longer bothers with the distinction between the dreaming and waking state. He often describes incidents that could have only happened in dreams. Actual events in his immediate surroundings no longer interest him. He’s slipping into a spirit world. Who my father was is mostly gone. Alzheimer’s took care of that.

Whoever we are, whatever a human being is – bits and pieces of consciousness and a few pounds of flesh – is never just one thing. We are a gathering of light, a swarm of bees, a cloud of vapor. Gradually the light fades, the bees fly away one by one and the vapor vanishes leaving only a dry and empty clarity as silent as a windless day in the desert. Left behind are the traces of a thousand moments – and never once in the middle of any of them did we recognize their significance – moments that drew us together in communion. For an instant we shared one pair of eyes, one pair of ears, one mind. These are the marks we bear and carry forward with us until the end of our days. These are the stones of our gratitude with which we build our lives.

I’m grateful I had a father who loved me, and who was kind, and who worked hard day in and day out, year after year, and who showed by his constancy and presence that he loved, honored and respected each of us. To grow up in a family knowing that you are all loved, honored and respected – that is all a child needs to thrive. He gave us that.

I’m grateful I had a father who was simple in his needs. He never wanted or needed a lot of things. He liked simple food. He took pleasure in the everyday world, as it came to him, through the grace of God and through the endless creativity of his loving wife and the home she made for all of us with her hands and with her heart.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved the road. We three boys were forever shaped by his love of open spaces, of forests and deserts and distant places. Visiting national parks and camping out under the stars and swimming in rivers and hearing the wind through the pines and campfires and cold mountain mornings and the promise of the next bend in the road – these were the memories he gave us.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved music. He showed us that music wasn’t something fancy, it is just something every day and normal. The way he sat down at the piano and let the fun and joy bubble out of his fingers and fill the house with song. He could read music, but rarely bothered, preferring to bang it out by ear. He hated rock and roll, yet unwittingly personified it. He showed us that music was just another way to give of yourself, to share love without words, to be present with family and loved ones, and to bring the inner world into alignment with the outer world by bringing beauty to life in the here and now.

I’m grateful that I had a father who loved books and ideas. I loved the way he always thought things through, and let there be time for reflection and contemplation. His curiosity about everything made him a life-long learner. Without effort, out of the depths of his own nature, he modeled for us the philosophic life, the love of wisdom, and the willingness to live inside questions and let answers come in their own time.

I’m grateful that I had a father for whom the line between spirituality and everyday life was blurred. I’m grateful that he never imposed his views on us and instead allowed truth to well up through the cracks of our own lives. He honored our individuality and authenticity by letting us follow paths and voices he could not see or hear. Underneath it all, he trusted that truth finds everyone in their own terms, because it is in everyone, and takes the shape of their own yearnings and realizations. This lesson shapes me and my work to this day perhaps more than any other.

I’m grateful that I had a father who understood the power of silence. His gentle temperament and quiet spirit is a powerful presence in my life to this day, and for all the days of my life. And I’m getting older. My dad has lived long enough to see all of his sons grow old, even me, his baby boy. That is a great blessing. And beneath the confusion and sadness of these long, last years, I still see in his eyes a quiet knowing that no matter what is happening, it’s alright, it’s o.k., and a gracious acceptance is the last gift we give to ourselves in the face of great loss.

I’m grateful that I had a father who was courageous enough to leave war-torn Europe and come to America. I have no parallels in my own life of the tremendous willingness, faith and decisiveness that my mom and dad exhibited by leaving behind family, home and homeland to sail across the ocean and start over in a new world. It is of course one of the watershed moments in our family story, and we three boys are Americans because of it. His courage, faith and willingness will always inspire me.

And I’m grateful for the way he showed me how to make peace with the sadness of the world. He never talked about it, but when depression fell on him like coastal fog he simply picked up and kept moving, keeping his promises, finding solace in the actions of daily life, and staying present in the simplicity of the moment. I will always see him standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes after every meal, everyday, without fail, even though he will never again stand at that kitchen sink. I still see him standing in the garage at the workbench repairing a lamp or framing a picture, even though he will never again stand at that workbench. I still see him raking leaves out on the lawn under a soft Ventura sun, even though someone else is raking those leaves now. And I still see him sitting on the patio typing long letters home to Holland on his red portable Olivetti typewriter, even though the keys have fallen silent.

Beneath all of the heartache there is a quiet stillness, a sacred presence, an eternal flame, a light that never wavers no matter how fleeting these frail and fragile lives are. We all arise and we all fade, leaving the world to a new wave of younger people who will never really know us, or see the things we saw. They will see the world through their own eyes and in their own terms, a world that we no longer recognize. And when they finally grow old they too will realize that none of us owns any of this – it is all borrowed. Everything we touch will be taken away from us. Even the people we loved were never ours to possess. It is all a gift, a glorious gift, and the only sane response is profound joy and gratitude that we ever got to touch any of it. That is how I feel in the emptiness between the waves of sadness – a profound joy and gratitude that this deeply humble and beautiful man was my dad.