"...all things visible and invisible"

The last few days I have had a heavy heart due to the low morale and political division in the USA right now. To this was added the self-confessed mass murder committed in Norway by the right-wing militant anti-multiculturalist Anders Behring Breivik. But rather than focus on the negative and the stupid, I decided to focus on something positive.
 

...all things visible and invisible... 

I grew up in a Catholic home. Every Wednesday, after going to public school, I went to catechism class at my local parish where I learned the stories of the Old Testament, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the inspiring stories of the saints of the church from the first disciples down to modern times. I learned the great creeds of the church, particularly the Nicene Creed, so named because it was adopted by the first ecumenical council that was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 CE and held in the city of Nicaea in what is now modern Turkey.

Of all the creeds, the Nicene Creed is the most widely used by churches both for worship and instruction in the central beliefs of Christianity. In the first sentence of the creed, the Christian declares belief in Almighty God who is the creator of "heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." I learned of course that this meant that God created all there is on both the physical and spiritual plane, and that as a human being living on earth, I was part of the "visible" creation of God. But when I was growing up, I did not feel very visible.

As a Latino person of color from a working class family, I was utterly invisible in the public school curriculum. Most teachers had zero cultural competency in Latino communities and were unapologetic about it. In fact, schools played a significant role in undermining Latino culture, even telling parents not to speak to their children in Spanish: just one of the many ways America welcomed its non-anglo "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

There were no role models who looked like me in America's political culture, the world of fame, fortune, film and fashion. Even the countless billboard signs that propagandized Americans from one end of the country to the other were completely devoid of anything resembling me or my culture. In fact, the only person who looked like me who was well known when I was growing up, was the Lone Ranger's Indian sidekick, Tonto, a name which means "Dummy" in Spanish. You can be sure we wondered if that name choice was deliberate.

I am grateful to the Catholic Church for contributing to that part of my education concerned with soulcraft, which was largely absent in public school and a wider American culture rooted in values that are first and foremost money-oriented. Whatever shortcomings the church as a whole can be blamed for, my local parish at least was the only community in American society (besides my family, relatives and close friends) where I did not feel invisible.

This was reinforced several years after high school, while attending a very peculiar Protestant church. It was quite a diverse congregation (as I said, unusual) where Hispanics, whites, some Asians and blacks all worshiped together, and I never remember once the Hispanic pastor having to give a sermon to deal with problems of prejudice among us. It was a little taste of multicultural heaven on earth (Revelation 7:9-10); a  heaven that Anders Breivik would no doubt loathe intensely.

It was a wonderful time (not the least of which because I met my future wife there), and I always say that it is because of visible, proven human love, that I came to believe the otherwise unprovable message that I am unreservedly loved by an invisible God.

Unprejudiced love, love without borders, the kind of love depicted on a cross almost 2000 years ago, cured invisibility and its causes. Despite all attempts by the Anders Breivik's of the world, I am visible still.

"...and the Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it." (John 1:5)

Wisdom Does Not Have To Be A Lamp Post

By Ruben Rivera© 16 July 2011
For Elisha

As a child, school was for me what Winston Churchill once called the Soviet Union: "...a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." No, I can do better than that. My experience in public school could be summarized by the word "awesome," in the sense that the Greek philosophers meant "awesome": namely, it displayed what humans could be wonderful at as well as terrifying.

Public school is embedded in an American culture of consumer-oriented youth and a winner-take-all economy that are in many ways hostile to actually getting an education, certainly education as soulcraft, as I have written elsewhere. When I was growing up, many of us kids -- white, Latino, Asian, black --  got trapped in a youth culture that did not see school primarily as an enterprise of education. In this sense, youth in school then were not that different from youth in school today.

To me and most kids I hung around with, school was a social thing. Classes, lessons, bells, books and homework were the price of admission we had to pay, the motions we had to go through, the means to an end: to be with our friends, to play in some form or another.

However, after high school, I realized I had spent far too much of my time doing things -- though "cool" at the time -- that had nothing to do with making me wise, nothing to do with preparing me for where life was going to take me: what it would mean to be a husband, adjusting to an America becoming increasingly hostile to common working people, grinding out what it takes to establish a career and then being forced to do it all over again because market trends demanded it, functioning well outside of my in-group or comfortable clique, learning to resolve differences -- political, racial, gender, religious, etc -- constructively. Back in school, differences were dealt with mano-a-mano; in other words, not at all, stupidly. So it's no surprise that our political parties and their leaders don't know how to overcome their differences either. I read about their dysfunction and cliquish stubbornness every day, or see it on TV and think: "Yep, that's how we behaved in high school."

I realize that one of the most important things we should have learned somewhere between the time we emerged from the womb and the time we start fending for ourselves in the great American experiment -- this Garden of Eden with claws -- is wisdom.

Speaking for myself, I'm sure I had some opportunity to learn wisdom from a few sources here and there: from adults who did more than just tell us what to do, but showed us how to do it; from teachers who dared to engage in education as soulcraft and model it too. But those relatively few examples were like prophetic whispers lost in the howling storm called culture.

For unfortunately, ours was and still is a culture where monied interests rule everything, where Americans are bred to find the reason for their existence in consumption, where schools try to fix every problem by placing more responsibility on the shoulders of teachers instead of courageously addressing our cultural problems, and where youth are too absorbed in what matters to youth to notice any of this.

Ours is a culture where wisdom is equated with age and age is a negative and youth is worshiped -- where many of the young and relatively inexperienced think that no one older than a high school senior can possibly know anything worth knowing. Which reminds me of the bumper sticker that says: "Hire a teenager now, while they still know everything."

Wisdom: honest and critical thinking, maturity, perspective, prudence, selflessness, interdependence, community good. Shouldn't public schools nurture these qualities of wisdom in us, and not just individualism, competition, money-driven values, or the cultural trends and merchandizing of "cool"? Because soon the current generation of children will be the next generation of politicians and CEOs and educators and parents. And because growing old in America does not by default mean growing wise.

In the Jim Carrey movie "Bruce Almighty," Bruce finds his life dreams frustrated. He is driving at night in the rain and finally as a last resort calls out to God.

Bruce: Okay, God. You want me to talk to you? Then talk back. Tell me what's going on? What should I do? Give me a sign.

After passing obliviously numerous road signs and other signals from God, Bruce finally grabs some prayer beads on his rear view mirror and prays not just for a sign but a full blown miracle. His car hits a bump and the beads fall to the floor. In the distracted search for them, his car slams into a lamp post. He emerges from the wreck, flings the beads into the roadside lake, and screams in maniacal fury at the heavens.

Bruce: Okay, if that's the way you want it. The gloves are off, pal! Let me see a little wrath! Smite me oh mighty smiter. What, no pestilence, no boils? Come on, you got me on the ropes. Don't you want to finish me off?! You're the one who should be fired! The only one around here not doing his job is YOU! What are we, you're little pet project? A hobby you tinker with now and again? Answer me. ANSWER ME!!!

This movie, which may not be suitable for children, nevertheless has a lesson for all ages. The signs of wisdom, direction and perspective may well be all around us. God (or, if you are not religions, "wisdom") may be speaking, through parents, through friends, through difficulties, through common sense which needs no miracle, through something as unlikely as a comedy film, repeatedly, so often that we're jaded or unimpressed with the answers: since the answers usually demand ongoing patience and hard work on our part. As a result, we're simply not attentive to the signs, or worse, we consciously ignore them. We're too young or too old, too wired or too tired, too doubtful or too sure of ourselves. If our schools our culture or public leaders are unable or unwilling to be the sign posts on the road to wisdom, we must look elsewhere.

However, at some point we need to realize that the really important question is not, "Where are the signs on my road to wisdom?" But rather, "Will I allow the signs that are there help me to be a wise driver." We could wait until culturally-bred inattentive or even reckless driving habits stop our speeding lives and wraps it around a lamp post, and then get mad at God or the world about it.

But wisdom does not have to be a lamp post.

Faith and the 4th that's unfinshed.

 Norman Rockwell

As July the 4th approaches, I was meditating on its significance. There is much debate on the role of Christianity in the American Revolution. Some downplay or ignore Christianity's role, or see it as negative altogether (part of the reason we needed a revolution in the first place).

• They point out for example that founding fathers like Washington, Jefferson and others were not Christians but Deists who, once the bullets stopped flying, promptly codified their Enlightenment convictions by establishing the separation of church and state. This observation is correct. 
• They point out that some Christians supported loyalty to Britain, while other Christians (pacifists like Quakers and Mennonites) supported no warfare at all. This too is correct.

Others, however, argue that Christians contributed much to the revolution.

• They point out that churches were in the vanguard of developing ideals that we associate with American values of liberty: that the individual conscience (not rulers or states) is the final authority on moral matters; that membership in a church is not a birthright, nor decreed by a government, but is a voluntary choice of the redeemed; that church governments and their representatives are the product of the will of the people. These and other "democratic" developments in the churches were extended to the state.
• They point out the effect of the First Great Awakening (c.1735-c.1755) on the heirs of the Puritan "City on a Hill": that it was more than just a massive, years-long revival; it instilled the conviction among the revived colonials that Christ was establishing his kingdom in America, and that oppressive British rule was in the way. 
• They point out that pulpits throughout the colonies, which at the time functioned as a chief source for information and learning, were among the greatest rallying points for independence and the call to arms.
• They point out that the Calvinist emphasis on the depravity of humankind would be reflected in the future U.S. government with its system of checks and balances and the separation of powers as means to curb innate human selfishness, greed, and tendency to corruption.
• They point out that numerous speeches and writings which are among the most famous in American revolutionary history were thoroughly imbued with religious rhetoric, or were sermons direct from the pulpit, that painted rebellion against Britain as a holy war.

“Gentlemen may cry, ‘Peace, peace’ [Jeremiah 6:14] but there is no peace. The war is actually begun....Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”  Patrick Henry before the House of Burgesses, St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775.

Rightly do we celebrate the 4th of July for such a representative freedom as the world had never known that was purchased at the cost of so much blood.

But, make no mistake about it, the liberty won was extremely limited. It did not end slavery (which actually worsened after the revolution). It did not include women. It did not include Native Americans. Even poor white men where often little better off than indentured servants.

It is sad to say so, but the American Revolution established "elite liberty," and failed monumentally in achieving equality. The same thing happened in Latin America's revolution. "The elite," said the great revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar, "want liberty, but only for themselves." And we are still struggling for an America that benefits "the least of these" (in the words of Jesus), not just men, or light-skinned people, or the rich.

Before and since the Revolution, many have challenged America's glaring inconsistency in the application of liberty. In a 1773 letter to Quaker Robert Pleasants, the great Patrick Henry himself admitted his own inconsistency: he could not free his slaves from "the general inconvenience of living without them."

Translation? Give me liberty or give me death, but I can't afford to free my slaves.

Henry said he could not justify his conduct and lamented lack of conformity to his belief that slavery was "evil." His hope was that his generation would transmit Christian virtues and "an abhorrence for slavery" to their children, and if they could not abolish slavery then at least they should "treat the unhappy victims [slaves] with lenity [not harshly]" and that this was "the furthest advance we can make toward justice."

If you love America and if you are a Christian, I want you to think carefully and honestly about the inconsistencies in the application of equality and liberty you see around you, or perhaps committed by you from "the general inconvenience of living without" such inconsistencies. Is it inconvenient to treat others as you want to be treated? Is it inconvenient for the ancestors of the old immigrants to see any hypocrisy in their nativism against new immigrants, even the undocumented ones? For what "pioneers" and "progress" were to Europeans was theft and conquest to the Indians. Is it inconvenient to resist financial practices or business ventures that earn you wealth but diminish the earning power and quality of life of working people? Is it inconvenient to pay women the same as men for the same job.

The revolutionary fathers admitted that the American experiment had gross inconsistencies of EVIL (their word). And this was their answer: (1) Let's hope our children will love liberty so much that they'll sacrifice their conveniences so others can enjoy it; (2) or let's just try to soften the evil by being nice to our inferiors.

Maybe it's not the rhetoric of liberty but living the creed, "do to others as we would have done to ourselves" that makes it possible for there to truly be "liberty and justice for all."

If we celebrate the 4th of July without taking practical steps to ensure that freedom from oppression and exploitation (racial, gender, economic, corporate, etc) is not just something we want for ourselves and our loved ones, but for everyone, then we will be just another in a long line of generations that let the 4th go by unfinished.

"The Sun" by Mary Oliver

Dear friends,
I try my best to post once a week, but I have been busy with other writing that is for publication. However, I did not want to skip a post, so I am for the first time including a small item not written by me. It is a short poem by the wonderful (and mercifully accessible) Mary Oliver. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Please feel free to comment on how she speaks to you.

Ruben
===========

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
========

It's Raining Outside

By Ruben Rivera©


It's raining outside, countless little reflections.
Vintage mirrors everywhere, desilvered with time,
beautiful but useless.
Who hears the rustling of the oak leaves? Not I,
and I am not alone.

It's raining outside, raining on my mirrors.
Tears of memories, even good ones,
rinsing, refreshing the eyes,
make it hard to see,
and I am not alone.

It's raining outside, raining on the world.
The first drops on the asphalt make me nauseous.
I know what's flowing into rivers besides water.
I am part of that, and it makes me nauseous.
But I am not alone.

It's raining outside, but I want no shelter.
The memories, even the sad ones, beclouding.
We may miss what made us sad, or we may not mind.
But they are all part of us, shaping perspective, and faith
that we are not alone.

------------
Photo 1: The Rain, found at kaiscorpyscorpoinz
Photo 2: Author unknown

The Heartburn of Rumors

By Ruben Rivera©

We've all had false rumors spread about us. I am certainly no stranger to false rumors spread about me. The first one I can remember was when I was in the 5th grade.

That year I was so sick that I missed 2 weeks of school. When I got back (and despite a letter from my mom informing the school I was sick), everyone looked at me differently, like I'd walked onto the set of some B-grade horror film. Some kids feared me. Others thought I was cool.

Why? Because the rumor had spread that I had been sent to juvenile hall. My teacher even pulled me aside, got down on one knee, looked at me with the comical seriousness of hound dog, and asked: "Ruben are you square with the law now?"

Am I square with the law?

"Mr. D'amico, the whole thing is a rumor. I was home sick."

Ironically, I think I disappointed him -- I mean, after his groveling humanitarian reaching out to the most troubled youth in the black board jungle and all.

I don't think we ever spoke again after that. But maybe it wasn't him. Maybe it was me. Maybe because even then, at 11 years of age, I knew that the teacher, everybody, had accepted the premise of the rumor. And I think that bothered me; for it said something about the way people saw me. (Maybe it said more about them than me. But an 11 year old can hardly be expected to accept such things with the zen-like tranquility of a cow.)

But alas, for the next few years my nick name was "Juvy Ruby."

No denials or explanations of mine were remotely sufficient to quell the rumor, because of course that's what criminals do: lie.

The truth of it is that not all rumors are deliberate attempts at coercion (call these rumors of propaganda; and some can be malicious and destructive indeed). Some rumors are a kind of spice that we all seem to need from time to time to enliven the ordinary and the dull (call these rumors of entertainment). A 5th grader being sick is simply not in the same league, interest-wise, as a 5th grader going to jail.

But, what is true of spice is also true of some forms of entertainment: too much can give you heartburn. So please, don't just swallow the premise of a rumor. Find out if it's true. And even then, take no joy in the folly and misfortune of others.

Yours truly,
Juvy Ruby

------
(Originally posted elsewhere 18 May 2011)
Photo: unknown

View From Other Worlds Part 3: Can You Pass the Voight-Kampff Test?

By Ruben Rivera©

In my last two posts I mentioned that the rise in modernity was not just about advancements in science and technology, but a shift in worldview and the sources of authority for it. Throughout the Middle Ages, the chief source of authority in the West for understanding the world and our place in it was religious.

For the Catholic Church the sources of truth were Scripture and tradition -- which included the teachings of the church fathers, the creeds and pronouncements of the great church councils and of popes. Protestants (in direct opposition to Catholics) stressed sola scriptura: that "scripture alone" was the Christian's final authority for truth and living -- though they didn't mention that a great many things influence how everyone, even Protestants, interpret the Bible.

Among the things that modernity began to reexamine was something that the West assumed had long been answered: the human being. What was the nature of human beings? What was our purpose? What was our destiny? How did one become fully human, what would it mean, and what would it look like?

Medieval Christendom had answered the questions thus. (1) Humans are created by God and in his image (what exactly that meant could be complicated and confusing). (2) We ALL have a sinful nature from birth (going back to Adam and Eve's fall in Eden, when something of the image was lost). (3) But through Christ we are cleansed from sin and its eternal penalty and are being transformed into the image of Christ, the image God had always intended. (4) We participate with God, via our good works, in our salvation and transformation. (5) Our best purpose in the here and now is to glorify God in all our thoughts, words and deeds. (6) Our destiny is to be with and enjoy God in the hereafter. (7) However, none of this is possible, we were warned, outside of the Catholic Church.

Protestants answered the questions similarly, except X-out numbers 4 and 7 above.

In the age of the Enlightenment (18th century), also called the "age of reason", thinkers believed that at their core humans were rational beings. Poor environment and faulty education (especially religious) explained why humans behaved irrationally. For those rationalist thinkers (Deists) who still believed in a creator, the image that humans bore of the Deity was -- surprise, surprise -- reason.

By the time you get to Sigmund Freud (1956-1939), what it meant to be human was not reason at all, much less the image of God, unless God is a sex maniac. For humans, according to Freud, are defined primarily by our conscious and unconscious sexual drives.

With the phenomenal advancements in computer technology we are now asking very different questions about what a human being is. And religion has become such a diffused, individualized smorgasbord, that I simply cannot point to any one church for answers that a majority of people would agree upon, as they did in the past. Indeed, what is church anymore? Some people go to church online, choosing for themselves an avatar (a graphic image: a human with a tiger head, a ninja, a fairy, you name it) in a setting with other avatars. The "services" I've seen look pretty shallow, a computer game really. Some ask, can this qualify as church? I ask, can this qualify as human?

As computers get smarter and we get closer to realizing artificial intelligence, will that AI be human? Is "human" the ability to reason, to think in abstract concepts (which computers may one day be able to do)? Or is something more required. Emotion? Empathy? Love? Will an AI ever love -- on its own, without programming, indeed perhaps in violation of its programming? I have a hard time conceiving that will ever happen, for the same reason I know we will never travel faster than light: there is a little problem with natural laws. Though such ideas do make for great fiction.

Is what is human connected to our body? What happens when the body no longer works but the mind still does? Disabled persons would not be human, or only partly so. I'm sure many of them will tell you that they have at times been treated less than human. Poor Stephen Hawking. Mind is about all he has. But what would happen if we could download Hawking's consciousness into a computer, or an artificial body? Would he be considered more human, or less?

What happens when the body is working fine but the mind is ruined by accident or illness, is that person still human? Do we stop loving our parents and spouses and children and friends lying there in a vegetative state? No. But what do we love then, when, for all practical purposes, there is neither a body nor a mind to love?

The only thing remaining then would be the memory. The memory of who they "were", and who they will always be in our hearts. That would make sense, since that is certainly the case when our dear ones pass away. We still remember them, still love them, still talk about them, still talk to them, even though there is no physical presence whatsoever.

In Philip K. Dick's famous Sci Fi novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (the basis for the 1982 film, "Blade Runner", with some definite differences from the book) protagonist Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who must find and destroy renegade androids. But physically they are indistinguishable from other humans. So Blade Runners like Deckard must employ the "Voight-Kampff" (question and answer) Test on suspects. Because androids have no empathy, the Voight-Kampff Test will reveal it. No empathy? BOOM! No android.


Empathy, that's what it means to be human. And androids don't have it. But wait a minute, the androids are doing all they can to survive. They want to survive. That doesn't fit. Circuits and memory boards don't want to survive.

And for a while Deckard finds himself loving an android named Rachael more than his own wife (indeed, saying he would marry the android if it wasn't illegal).

Now I'm really confused. Androids want to live and not be slave workers, and humans kill them mercilessly. Who is more human? A wife wants her husband's empathy . He gives it to a machine. Who is treated more human?

Now I've got more questions than I started with. But I think I've discovered Philip K. Dick's central purpose. Maybe we've been asking the wrong question to start with. Maybe the best question is not: What is a human being. Maybe we should start with this: Am I being human?

Am I being human?

Ruben Rivera