The Learning God

In the Mayan creation myth the Popul Vuh God very much wanted to create human beings.
He was lonely. The animals – jaguars, pumas, and brightly feathered birds – were delightful to behold, but they could not say any of God’s names, or love him the way he needed to be loved.

So he tried his hand at making human beings. He made some men out of mud. They could talk, but none of the things they said made any sense. They were soft, could not stand, and melted in the rain.  He tried again, this time out of wood. They were much better than the mud men. They built nice houses, had many children, and didn’t dissolve in wet weather. But something was wrong. They were dull and expressionless because they had no minds, souls, or hearts. They beat their dogs and burned the bottoms of their cooking pots. Worst of all, they could not remember any of God’s names. God sent a great flood to destroy them.

Then God tried a third time to make humanity. He shaped corn meal into four men, and infused them with strengths and energies made from nine kinds of corn liquor. The men were very strong and handsome. While they slept, God made four women. When the men awoke and saw their beautiful wives lying beside them they were very happy.

“How does it feel to be alive?” God asked. “What do you see?”

“We see and know everything!” And they sang songs of praise and gratitude to their Creator for having made them.

But God was troubled. They saw and knew too much. God needed humans, not gods. So he blew mist into their eyes. Now they only saw what was right in front of them.

As mythology scholar Joseph Campbell reminds us, the primary function of creation stories is not to answer questions like, “Who made the world and how?” but “Who are we, and what is the nature of the cosmos?” It’s self-knowledge we’re after. If we knew where we came from, we might understand our essence and purpose, and how we fit into this mysterious universe.

The Popul Vuh teaches us that we were made to live in loving relationship with the sacred source – that both we and God are defined by love.

But we also learn that God isn’t perfect, that he’s learning on the job, and that frankly, the universe is an ongoing experiment littered with wreckage. This stands in stark contrast to traditional Western theology where is God understood as changeless, perfect, and all-knowing. But is he? In the book of Genesis God made Adam and Eve only to, five chapters later, kill everyone on earth for their irreparable wickedness. Does that sound like the work of a perfect, all-knowing creator to you? And if God is growing, learning, and evolving into higher consciousness, maybe we should too.

And that it’s o.k. to make mistakes.

The study of world mythology makes clear that creation myths tell us much more about the people who wrote them than they do about the origin and nature of the cosmos. When we read the Popul Vuh, or Genesis for that matter, we hold a mirror up to our own longing for love, meaning, and the hope that someday we might understand this long, rough road of being human. Until then, with full voice, we will sing songs of gratitude that we were ever born at all. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2021 edition of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Storm Before the Calm

From Jesus to John Lennon wisdom teachers have asked us to give peace a chance. In times of widespread unrest and social disruption, it’s understandable that well-meaning people call for peace and love. But a note of caution is in order. In our calls for peace, is it universal love we’re after, or silence and compliance?

Is the light of truth meant to comfort us, or jar us awake?

When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference went to Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 they went there to cause “good trouble,” to borrow a phrase from John Lewis. Even though school segregation had been struck down nearly a decade earlier by the US Supreme Court, many southern states continued to enforce Jim Crow laws. King went to Birmingham to protest these ongoing segregation statutes, and his method was to purposefully violate a court order banning parades, protests, pickets, boycotts, and marches. They went there to cause good trouble. And they did.

King and his movement filled the streets of Birmingham, braved Bull Connor’s fire hoses and dogs, and through television, brought the nonviolent struggle for human rights into America’s living rooms. Many were arrested, including Dr. King. In the Birmingham newspaper there was an op-ed penned by eight white clergy criticizing King’s methods. King grabbed a pencil and began writing a response in the margins of the newspaper, then on scraps of paper a fellow prisoner gave him. In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King makes the case that nonviolent “good trouble” is a necessary last resort because it’s the only thing that brings the dominant culture to the negotiation table. “Nonviolent direct action,” he wrote, “seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

King grounded his argument in the philosophy of Augustine, Aquinas, Niebuhr, and Thoreau – the idea that it is right to break human laws that violate moral or natural law, as long as we do it in an open, self-sacrificing, and compassionate way. In fact, it is our sacred duty to do so. As King famously wrote, “Everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily,” King wrote. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given up by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Now it is our work to re-perceive social unrest not as lawlessness and disorder, but as the messiness required in any birthing process. Think of it as “creative tension.”

The source of Dr. King’s greatest frustration was not the explicit racist, but the well-intentioned white moderate who agreed with the goals, but counseled patience while mouthing platitudes of law and order. “The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the Ku Klux Klanner,” King wrote, “but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers…the absence of tension to…the presence of justice.”

Peace and harmony is the ultimate goal – on that we all agree. And when all human beings are afforded their God-given rights of dignity, access, and abundance, then peace and harmony will break out all on their own. But until there is justice, the façade of peace is reserved only for a privileged few, bought with the wages of systematic oppression. And that is no peace at all.

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the November/December 2020 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reprinted here with permission.]

The Paradox of Power

 God didn’t know what to do. He wanted to destroy Sodom because of its wickedness. But ever since that flood he was second-guessing himself. God vowed he would never again curse the ground. But Sodom was really bugging him. He knew he had to do something. Maybe a targeted hit, just one city? “Shall I tell Abraham what I am about to do?”

God told Abraham his plans to blow up Sodom, and Abraham went to work. “What if you should find 40 innocent people there?” Abraham asked. “Wouldn’t it be wrong to punish the innocent and the guilty alike? Should not the judge of all the earth deal justly?” God was swayed by Abraham’s argument. “Fine,” God said, “if I find 40 innocent people, I will spare the whole city.”

But Abraham wasn’t done. “What if there are 30? 20? 10? Will you not spare the whole place for the sake of the ten?”

“Fine,” God relented, “I will spare the whole city for the sake of the ten.”

Look what just happened. In the most remarkable story in the book of Genesis, (and that’s saying something), Abraham models for us one of the core values of Judaism – that justice is a higher truth than power, and that we, as human beings, are morally obligated to intervene when justice is endangered, even if the source of the danger is God himself. It is not blind obedience God longs for – it is our awakening to a sense of moral responsibility. By speaking truth to power Abraham demonstrates that we are made in God’s image and must, therefore, join in the project of the furtherance of justice. Abraham is the first lawyer, arguing a pro bono case for his clients, the hypothetical innocent of Sodom. His willingness to wield the tools of reason, language, and persuasion to change God’s mind shows us how powerful we can be and must become.

In a later story, God asks Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Now, with the stakes so personally high, Abraham is oddly compliant. “Sure,” he says, “no problem.” Abraham sets out to complete the grisly task and is, at the last second, stopped by the angel Gabriel. “That was only a test,” said Gabriel, “we wanted to see if you had it in you.” Apparently Abraham did.

So which is it? Which Abraham should we be? Should we challenge authority in a struggle to co-create justice? Or when given an order, dutifully comply?

The answer lies, as it so often does, somewhere in the middle. In the paradox of Abraham our lives meander like streams around hard boulders and through soft meadows in turn, toward a sea beyond our reckoning. Reason isn’t the only tool in the box. We never have enough information. And we’re not as smart as we think we are. Sometimes we have to trust. Real empowerment has nothing to do with rigidity. It’s about fluidity in the face of obstacles, and the willingness to assert and acquiesce in turns.

In the wisdom of Judaism, we are morally obligated to participate in the healing of the world – tikkun olam. But it is also true that we are not in charge. COVID-19 taught us that. At best we can, and we must, join together to wield every tool – reason, science, and assertion, as well as empathy, sacrifice, and surrender. Only then does the best of all possible worlds begin to rise into view.

[A version of this piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the September/October edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Building the Beloved Community

After hours of soul searching, truth telling, and digging deep, the group fell silent. The African American members of The Unity Center in San Diego looked at each other, then turned to the one white face in the circle – Reverend Wendy Craig-Purcell.

“What’s the next step?” she asked. After a pause, one of them finally spoke.

“Calling all white people.” Everyone nodded. The project of dismantling racism must begin within the dominant culture that perpetuates it – including in subtle ways not always recognized. That’s why this is white people’s work to do.

We came to Unity for healing. We thought that we might find something to assuage our wounds, and we did. We found fellow travelers and learned new principles and practices. However, something was missing. We thought love was enough, but it wasn’t. Unfinished business and untreated trauma were hidden in plain sight. In any relationship or spiritual community, there can be no intimacy without honesty.

When Rev. Craig-Purcell announced from the pulpit that she was forming a white allies group, my wife Lori and I jumped at the chance. We read Debby Irving’s book Waking Up White. We watched Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13^th. And we studied The White Ally Toolkit, written by David W. Campt, Ph.D., which teaches anti-racism allies how to have more effective conversations with white people who think racism is not real.

We shared our decades-long confusion and ignorance around the vexing question of race. It was life-changing, and it was difficult. We lost some folks along the way, and facing our own unwitting complicity in a system that has harmed so many wasn’t easy. But we persisted, encouraged each other, and kept our eyes on the prize.

One of the most bracing things we learned was that as white people we had the option of checking out. Whenever it became uncomfortable we could retreat to the safety of denial and avoidance. African Americans don’t have this privilege – they live in this work 24/7. Feeling uncomfortable, we decided, is a small price to pay compared to enduring daily harm from racism.

The next step was to bring the black and white groups together to merge our converging journeys. Through the weave of our shared endeavor, and through our willingness and vulnerability, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “beloved community” began to rise from aspiration to realization.

If we are serious about our commitment to awaken universal compassion and co-create a world that works for everyone, then challenging structural racism and unconscious bias within our midst is job number one. It is not political work at root – it is spiritual work, because it is about transforming consciousness, not systems. When consciousness changes, systems will change.

We named our combined group Braver Conversations Together. Through the focused actions of our subcommittees we built a calendar of events to broaden our outreach and influence throughout the congregation, and God willing, the world beyond.

It isn’t enough to take refuge in vague principles like love, diversity, and unity. We have to find the courage to look each other in the eye and admit we don’t know everything. We can’t do better until we know better. Action is the antidote to apathy, and there are people all around you who will help. They are only waiting for you to take the first step. Inspire one another with your boldness. Trust, show up, do the work, and allow the beloved community to emerge right where you are.

[This article first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the July/August 2020 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]