Go Not Left, Not Right, But Deeper

In his scan of the current Christian spectrum during the U.C.C. General Synod in Grand Rapids, Jim Wallis, renowned author, speaker, preacher, and founder of Sojourners Magazine and community, sees people finally embracing that the church needs to be anti-poverty, anti-war, and anti-pollution. He's been blown away by people saying to him, "I didn't know I could be Christian and against poverty."

Whoa.

And, Wallis said, people are hungry for an alternative that is for something rather than simply against things, affirming what we've been trying to do for some time. In light of this, he offered an analysis of three major shifts he sees happening: religious, political, and economic.

Religion

"The Religious Right was a Christian mistake," Wallis said bluntly. "Alignment with a specific segment of any political party is always a problem....Left and right are political categories, not religious ones."

Christianity, he said, has always been and always will be a minority faith with a counter-cultural stance tempered by what's right for the common good. President Barack Obama reflects this in his use of "Jesus" more than George W. Bush. Calling Obama the "most Christian president in a long time," Wallis said that while he invokes the name of Jesus unapologetically, he also leaves room for others.

We can learn here to be open enough to make the space for new conversations on issues important to all people rather than narrow segments of the population. One of the major shifts Wallis sees is that for people under 30, multiculturalism is assumed and faith cannot be separated from social justice.

"They understand that Jesus cares more about 30,000 kids dying from preventable diseases each day than gay marriage being on the ballot," said Wallis. "Don't go left, don't go right, go deeper."

Political

"We haven't had a budget that prioritizes the poor like this in our lifetimes," Wallis said Marian Wright Edelman told him as they walked into the President's faith council together recently.

He said that while most elections are simply rearrangements of power, this one seems different. Obama seems to understand that the only way to turn swords into plowshares is for people to have their own vines and the assurance of safety -- words straight from the Hebrew prophets (to whom he also compared favorably Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report"; he also compared them to Jesus overturning the tables in the Temple).

In general, our nation's capital has been "all about access, not results," he said, "and access becomes it's own reward." Now Obama has opened the doors to many more people, recognizing that, Wallis said, "disagreement is finally a way to offer deeper support."

In other words, just because someone is in office whose values are closer to ours, we can't stop working. We need to continue to challenge the status quo and offer our words of disagreement rather than simply being happy that this is better than the alternative.

"We need a powerful movement now more than ever," Wallis said. "Social change happens when we push on open doors."

Economy

"A crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste," Wallis said, quoting others. "We must ask, 'How will this crisis change us? and not just 'When will this crisis end?'"

"The invisible hand has let go of the common good," said Wallis, "and we can't go back to business as usual. What are the values in this crisis we have lost? And how do we have that conversation?"

Wallis went on to site the Seven Deadly Social Sins as listed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1925:

• Politics without principles
• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice

He encouraged churches to reclaim the idea of a parish - a geographic area or neighborhood that we are responsible for and then to engage in different economic practices, such as sharing and bartering.

Wallis brought tears to my eyes at the end as he retold the story three times of progressively younger children coming up to his book signing table after a talk and saying they had been inspired by him. The last one was eight years old and said, "I think I'm the youngest!" Wallis had talked about the lives of children being lost. When he asked about her response to his talk, this young girl responded, "You said there's a silent tsunami that's killing us. I better change it!"

"We bring the faith than any change is possible," Wallis said. "Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change."

The two most recent books by Jim Wallis are the best-selling God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It and The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Also see more at the web site Sojourners: Faith, Politics, and Culture (http://www.sojo.net/).

Life as Story

In her speech at General Synod's River City Saturday, the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor cited the nonfiction book While They Slept, by Kathryn Harrison, which unpacks Billy Gilley's brutal killing of his parents and sister with a baseball bat. One sister, Jody, escapes. Years later, Harrison relates Jody's description of that day as the 16-year-old was aware of what her brother was doing in the lower level of the house:

“She tells me she remembers knowing what she knew, and telling herself it was happening in a book. How many books had she read in which terrible things happened, the situation appeared hopeless, the heroine doomed, when somehow, against all odds, she was saved? Now, Jody told herself, she was a character in a book, she was the girl for whom things looked bad — very bad — but turned out all right. In the end, they always did turn out. ... How did she escape? Jody asked herself. Did the heroine jump out the window?”

And so Jody did. She jumped out the window and now lives a "normal" life while her brother languishes in prison. In a 290-page book, there's obviously much more to the story. Brown Taylor's point in telling it, though, was that stories - narratives - can save our lives. Elsewhere in the book, Jody tells Harrison that reading these books, which she calls "cheesy romances" her rigid Baptist mother bought at flea markets and never would have allowed in the house had she known what was in them, gave her an idea of what "normal" life is like. Clearly "normal" life was different from the one which she was living - her packrat mother, her abusive father, her crazy brother.

With a sense of hope that something else did indeed exist, a life worth living, she jumped out the window.

What is the story that motivate our lives, that helps us decide what to choose in moments both crucial and mundane? More realistically, what are the stories?

Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, teacher, and one of America's best preachers and religion writers, titled her talk, "The Fate of Narrative in the Age of Twitter." In the end, she said, the narratives we choose to pay attention to form who we are. Maybe the 140-character text messages of Twitter (known as tweets) are life-giving. Maybe not.

"The stories we take as our own have everything to do with the story we make of our lives," Brown Taylor said. "So many of those stories today are too shallow or too violent that they don't make meaning. We need large, mythic stories."

Which is exactly the enduring power of sacred story. And the reason that story-telling is so important to not only our faith but to our very lives as human beings. We are governed by narratives: the stories of our faith, the stories we read, the shows and movies we watch, the stories of our friends and families, and, as Liz likes to remind me, the stories we tell ourselves.

Statements of belief hold little water against story - so long as the story is deep enough, potent enough, real enough.

"We have to consciously decide what has meaning and what does not," Brown Taylor said. "The shorter, shallower, and less lovely our stories are, we will be, too."

Steeped in the biblical aura and language of the deep South and of the Christian tradition, Brown Taylor then described how "the Bible is the library I've chosen to decide what other narratives have meaning in my life." She gave three criteria from the stories of the Bible that filter the rest of life's stories for her.

One, "they must honor and defend people not like me. Otherwise they're not true."

Two, the stories have to let her argue with them - or even have arguments within themselves, in the spirit of Jacob wrestling with the angel/God and potentially even getting hurt. If there is not internal or external argument, she said, "they are not deep enough to see the controversies that matter."

And three, "they must level with me about the cost of love. They can't lie about the pain of being alive. It's difficult to speak about that as being 'helpful,' but it is," she said. Too many of our culture's narratives say that if we do the right thing, we'll be rewarded. The real Story is that we cannot love without losing a pound of our very own flesh.

This perspective informs what we do each week in worship. We come to not only hear, but to partake of in so many ways the Story that love overcomes apathy and hatred, healing overtakes pain, suffering produces new life, justice outruns oppression, peace replaces war, meaning is found in serving others, and, ultimately, life triumphs over death.

Each week, and each moment of each day, we choose which story or stories we will give preference to, all the while creating the story of our life. Sometimes we forget our stories. Brown Taylor relates that in trying to keep up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, email, cell phone, television, etc., "I was following so many narratives that I was losing touch with my own. It was time to privilege a couple narratives so as not to lose the power of them all."

And what is that power? She ended by saying:

"Our narratives must be big enough to save a life, starting with our own."

Read a book review of While They Slept at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/books/review/Pinsky-t.html

Barbara Brown Taylor's most recent book is this year's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061370465/Altar_in_the_World_An/index.aspx). See also Leaving Church, published in 2006