“the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.
Henri Nouwen
Prayer is largely just being silent: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is commonly a willingness to say “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.
Richard Rohr
She did not, in the ordinary sense, "pray for" Nancy; she did not presume to suggest to Omniscience that it would be a thoroughly good thing if It did; she merely held her own thought of Nancy stable in the midst of Omniscience.
Charles Williams
These quotes and countless others exalt a sort of prayer that while not in itself evil, (how could these activities be wrong?) is completely unknown in the Gospels, untaught by Jesus and, while it might be looked at as enriching one aspect of prayer, that is, adoration and/or contemplation, I argue is hardly the central essence at the core of our interactions with God. Do a quick online search for ‘the prayers of Jesus.’ Lists abound. And if you look through the lists, you will find none that fit into these admittedly pleasing molds. You might argue that records of the Lord praying all night indicate that he ‘must’ have been doing something like this, but that is pure conjecture. He does teach directly on the subject of prayer (“when you pray, pray like this:”), and, crudely, actually gives his disciples a prayer to pray, that only barely touches on what the above luminaries tell us is the very kernel, the very soul of prayer. (“Hallowed be thy Name.”)
I have said that these mystical statements about prayer are naturally pleasing. Of course they are. They evoke bright imagery of high thoughts and a place of peace and beauty where all is taken care of as we rest in God’s love. If this is where you often find yourself, I would not want to take that away from you, but I suggest that most of the time we are not there. Rather we merely yearn for it without actively doing the one thing that might give us a fleeting taste of that bliss. We yearn for it and we exalt these ideals by sharing these beautiful quotes on social media. And our fellow pilgrims “like” them and everyone goes “ahhh.” And if our prayers are more in the manner taught by Jesus, which I submit is far more intuitive and natural for needy souls such as ourselves, it’s possible we feel guilty that we are not silently flowing down the river as Richard Rohr says we should.
But it’s not merely their implied beauty that draws us to share and reshare words like this about prayer. I think the real reason is a bit more harsh. Prayer like this is never tested for results. By making this the central task of prayer, we completely avoid the nervous question of whether and how our prayers were actually answered. In this we diverge greatly from the one we claim as our rabbi, our model, our guru. Jesus prayed for things to happen, most of the time for things to happen as he spoke them. If he flowed in the river that has been described for us, and there is evidence that he did, he spoke out of his understanding of its current clearly as if what he said was the missing component that the river needed to accomplish its work. This is why I included the quote from Charles Williams. (It’s from one of his novels. The Greater Trumps can be read online at the Canadian and the Australian gutenberg sites. Good read!) The character of Sybil who can safely in the context of the book be called a sage and displays many worthy qualities, is unlike Jesus, because she never presumes to find out what ‘Omniscience’ might want to happen to her niece and therefore never actually prays anything specific for her. It’s the supplication equivalent of the other two quotes. Beautiful and without risk.
I think that the intimacy actually comes in the risk. I think that it comes in finding out one was wrong to pray a thing or wrong about what to pray. I think that the intimacy comes in the agony of asking for something and not getting it for a long while or maybe never. I write this from experience. I have found that the statement, “you can’t always get what you want” applies to my prayer life. But I have found that some of what I ask for, I get, and really, I recognize the hand of God in that. I think the intimacy comes in sensing what God wants prayed and praying that, having a sense that yes, he could have done it without my help, but that he hadn’t just the desired result but also my participation as the end in view. (Daddy, can I help?)
So I really don’t have any use for the “prayer” outlined above. What starts out looking beautiful becomes unattainable, off-topic and counter-intuitive.
Thursday, December 24, 2020
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
The Bill of Goods
(With some editorial assistance from ansak.blogspot.com)
In the 80's most of us Christians were duped by the political puppets of the aspiring super-rich who sold us a bill of goods as part of a covert class war that they have ultimately won. Amazingly this bill of goods is still out there being touted by any number of people who after all these years, still see each entry on this intellectual invoice as obvious and axiomatic, standing by the same liars who promoted it in the first place. I say 'liars' because there is ample evidence that many of these talking points were known to be false by the people that originated them. That we bought into their ideas amounts to a swindle and a con game, and makes one wonder when reparations will be possible. It's been on my mind recently to itemize these ideas and provide some refutation of each. I recognize that my refutation will not be enough for many to simply about face on any of them as each are exploiting a deeply ingrained part of our cultural outlook, such that when what relate what I have now found to be true, many will simply read, and angrily dismiss. But that is the way of such things. So here, in not any particular order, the conservative bill of goods:
1. Small government is better than big government. Not true. We need adequate government. When reducing government in size is an end in itself, regulatory measures are put at risk. These regulatory measures, ideally, are there largely to limit the ability of corporate interests to endanger the public in any number of ways. These are not "job killing regulations". They are "life-and-health saving regulations." An undersized government lacks the appropriate power to inspect and enforce regulations. Frustration over weak, bad, or even nonsensical regulations (government is a human institution) is not a justification for wantonly slashing government size. Achieving an under-regulated, under-enforced "small government" can only advantage the rich and give them a free hand to increase their advantage.
2. Government salaries as well funded support for the less able constitutes waste. Related to point one in that the focus is misdirected onto the money that it takes to fund even adequate government and likewise not true. Government waste as a whipping boy is a huge talking point of those who wish us to vote in such a way as to limit their tax bill. As long as we are focused on that, we remain unaware of the obscene amount of wealth that is being removed to stay into the bank accounts of those who have promoting this. Even worse is the vilifying of the needy, who need the support of government to live, judging them by a standard which requires them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. "if only they would just get a job," or some such. Exploitation of this natural judgmentalism in our culture is par for the course. But there is again ample evidence that when support is made available, that many of the less fortunate are able to get far enough ahead as to be self-sufficient. But even if they are not, as humans and citizens of our country it's right to always give them that chance.
3. Tax cuts are good for everybody. (related lies: trickle down economics, "rising tide lifts all boats") Manifestly not true. Tax cuts are a measure that only marginally benefits the low and middle wage earner and egregiously over-benefits the top earning brackets. What tax cuts do is produce a downward spiral supported by points one and two whereby government is now underfunded and we demand that it become leaner and certainly meaner. People that were supported in some way lose their support because that is now labelled 'waste.' This deplorable state is even legitimized with a semi-virtuous sounding name, that is, austerity. But austerity is really not the enforced necessary poverty it appears to be. What it is is when those who are advantaged by wealth are allowed to increase their advantage utilizing government, which should have been in place to defend us against them but has now become their weapon.
4. Labour unions are evil, are all about greed, etc. etc. Very wrong. Most of the labour laws that benefit us today, limiting work weeks to ensure that families can have a life together outside drudgery, adequate wages, extended health plans come to us via union bargaining and since they came to us, have been steadily chiselled away again by big business. Parallel to that has been a successful propaganda campaign to vilify the unions and tar them with any number of charges. Okay. its a fact is that the unions haven't been pure. Organized crime has had its grubby paws on some unions. But the current wage differential between labourer and brass is yet another indication that the class war being waged by the super-rich against the rest of us is going very well for them. We would be wise not to invoke Paul's advice to slaves (a gross misapplication) or other authoritarian claptrap when a union votes to strike. After the current covid-19 crisis is over, I guarantee the nurses will want a better deal, for instance and they will deserve it.
5. Free enterprise. Yes, you heard correctly. Just the phrase itself is questionable. Money is based on, wait for it, money. This is something that we've learning about as society recently. It's called privilege. If you start with any sort of advantage you can increase your advantage. If you start with a disadvantage, you will likely not transcend it but probably end with a greater disadvantage. The ableist myth propagated by the idea of Free Enterprise is that anyone, through hard work and God-given smarts, can start any business and get ahead. I think it's an example of the true Scotsman fallacy (look it up) because as soon as you would limit that 'anyone' and demonstrate that many cannot and have indeed failed utterly, the proponent will, by circular reasoning claim that they simply didn't work hard enough. And while Christians argue amongst themselves in this manner, Big Enterprise happily continues to tell its success stories in this rubric pointing to themselves as proof that "free" enterprise works. But until the government levels the playing field through progressive taxation, redistributing the advantage, we would be wiser to refer to this idea rather as privileged enterprise.
6. We must enshrine Christian morality in law. Here's the one where the super-rich (such a moral group) lead us along by the nose. They know our hot-button issues -- our nostalgia for the way things were when “evils” by the score were invisible because they were underground. Drugs, abortion, Feminism, LGBT, etc.: The super-rich know that if they can get us riled up about these issues, we are distracted from their depredations.They know that if they can package up promises to bring back the past along with all of their other dastardly schemes, we’ll vote for their said puppets. Secondly each of these categories represent people whom the donor class want to silence. The war on drugs for example is evidentially a creation of the Nixon Republicans to silence the hippy and black left. Outlawing abortion does nothing to help children live. The evidence is out there. Countries with liberal abortion laws have fewer abortions because co-incidentally they also have in place what actually helps children live, which is social support for the mothers of said children. But that eats into the profits treasured by the super rich. In the case of LGBT, it's not so much a political silencing but more of a divide and conquer tactic. While we waste our time wishing that this segment didn't exist thinking 'if only we could ban them through legislation,' we are distracted from finding the real culprit.
7. Capitalism is Christian. False. No governmental system is Christian. But capitalism more than any system has few friends in the pages of scripture. Where do I start? Try the book of James. Condemns in no uncertain terms the oppression of the rich and the obsequious toadying of the rich by the church. Look at the Jubilee economic system (maybe never really tried -- we don't know) presented in Leviticus. Every fifty years, a reset. A limiting, balancing factor par excellence. Look at all the prophet's words against oppression by the rich on the poor. Oh, but you say, that's not against capitalism, that's against oppression by the wealthy. Let's have a wake up call, if you please. Wealth is oppression. If I have, it means that someone else doesn't have. If I have more, then someone else has less. Sounds terrible, but this thing has a scale. Here in the middle class, the oppression factor is maybe not as egregious. But when we realize that half of the world's wealth is owned by 1% of its population, the oppression is extreme.
The wealth gained this way represents legalized tax evasion. Legalized through swindling the Christian white middle class vote through this bill of goods in the 1980's. We voted this way (tax cuts!) thinking it would do us good. but little gain has come our way and our ranks, which should have been swelled by many others entering the middle class as wages went up instead of down have been depleted and we are losing power to what are now not merely the wealthy but oligarchs, people who can and do outright buy political power to ever increase their hold on society. Democracy is dying. The legalized tax evasion has other dimensions too. The rich have access to tools the poor do not. Holding companies, offshore accounts, stocks, etc. etc. represent an upward spiral accessed through privilege. It's a thing crying out for a societal limiting factor. (something Judeo-Christian maybe, like the Jubilee year?) But no, we've eviscerated government so that they haven't the resources to control this. Maybe it's time to wake up.
In the 80's most of us Christians were duped by the political puppets of the aspiring super-rich who sold us a bill of goods as part of a covert class war that they have ultimately won. Amazingly this bill of goods is still out there being touted by any number of people who after all these years, still see each entry on this intellectual invoice as obvious and axiomatic, standing by the same liars who promoted it in the first place. I say 'liars' because there is ample evidence that many of these talking points were known to be false by the people that originated them. That we bought into their ideas amounts to a swindle and a con game, and makes one wonder when reparations will be possible. It's been on my mind recently to itemize these ideas and provide some refutation of each. I recognize that my refutation will not be enough for many to simply about face on any of them as each are exploiting a deeply ingrained part of our cultural outlook, such that when what relate what I have now found to be true, many will simply read, and angrily dismiss. But that is the way of such things. So here, in not any particular order, the conservative bill of goods:
1. Small government is better than big government. Not true. We need adequate government. When reducing government in size is an end in itself, regulatory measures are put at risk. These regulatory measures, ideally, are there largely to limit the ability of corporate interests to endanger the public in any number of ways. These are not "job killing regulations". They are "life-and-health saving regulations." An undersized government lacks the appropriate power to inspect and enforce regulations. Frustration over weak, bad, or even nonsensical regulations (government is a human institution) is not a justification for wantonly slashing government size. Achieving an under-regulated, under-enforced "small government" can only advantage the rich and give them a free hand to increase their advantage.
2. Government salaries as well funded support for the less able constitutes waste. Related to point one in that the focus is misdirected onto the money that it takes to fund even adequate government and likewise not true. Government waste as a whipping boy is a huge talking point of those who wish us to vote in such a way as to limit their tax bill. As long as we are focused on that, we remain unaware of the obscene amount of wealth that is being removed to stay into the bank accounts of those who have promoting this. Even worse is the vilifying of the needy, who need the support of government to live, judging them by a standard which requires them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. "if only they would just get a job," or some such. Exploitation of this natural judgmentalism in our culture is par for the course. But there is again ample evidence that when support is made available, that many of the less fortunate are able to get far enough ahead as to be self-sufficient. But even if they are not, as humans and citizens of our country it's right to always give them that chance.
3. Tax cuts are good for everybody. (related lies: trickle down economics, "rising tide lifts all boats") Manifestly not true. Tax cuts are a measure that only marginally benefits the low and middle wage earner and egregiously over-benefits the top earning brackets. What tax cuts do is produce a downward spiral supported by points one and two whereby government is now underfunded and we demand that it become leaner and certainly meaner. People that were supported in some way lose their support because that is now labelled 'waste.' This deplorable state is even legitimized with a semi-virtuous sounding name, that is, austerity. But austerity is really not the enforced necessary poverty it appears to be. What it is is when those who are advantaged by wealth are allowed to increase their advantage utilizing government, which should have been in place to defend us against them but has now become their weapon.
4. Labour unions are evil, are all about greed, etc. etc. Very wrong. Most of the labour laws that benefit us today, limiting work weeks to ensure that families can have a life together outside drudgery, adequate wages, extended health plans come to us via union bargaining and since they came to us, have been steadily chiselled away again by big business. Parallel to that has been a successful propaganda campaign to vilify the unions and tar them with any number of charges. Okay. its a fact is that the unions haven't been pure. Organized crime has had its grubby paws on some unions. But the current wage differential between labourer and brass is yet another indication that the class war being waged by the super-rich against the rest of us is going very well for them. We would be wise not to invoke Paul's advice to slaves (a gross misapplication) or other authoritarian claptrap when a union votes to strike. After the current covid-19 crisis is over, I guarantee the nurses will want a better deal, for instance and they will deserve it.
5. Free enterprise. Yes, you heard correctly. Just the phrase itself is questionable. Money is based on, wait for it, money. This is something that we've learning about as society recently. It's called privilege. If you start with any sort of advantage you can increase your advantage. If you start with a disadvantage, you will likely not transcend it but probably end with a greater disadvantage. The ableist myth propagated by the idea of Free Enterprise is that anyone, through hard work and God-given smarts, can start any business and get ahead. I think it's an example of the true Scotsman fallacy (look it up) because as soon as you would limit that 'anyone' and demonstrate that many cannot and have indeed failed utterly, the proponent will, by circular reasoning claim that they simply didn't work hard enough. And while Christians argue amongst themselves in this manner, Big Enterprise happily continues to tell its success stories in this rubric pointing to themselves as proof that "free" enterprise works. But until the government levels the playing field through progressive taxation, redistributing the advantage, we would be wiser to refer to this idea rather as privileged enterprise.
6. We must enshrine Christian morality in law. Here's the one where the super-rich (such a moral group) lead us along by the nose. They know our hot-button issues -- our nostalgia for the way things were when “evils” by the score were invisible because they were underground. Drugs, abortion, Feminism, LGBT, etc.: The super-rich know that if they can get us riled up about these issues, we are distracted from their depredations.They know that if they can package up promises to bring back the past along with all of their other dastardly schemes, we’ll vote for their said puppets. Secondly each of these categories represent people whom the donor class want to silence. The war on drugs for example is evidentially a creation of the Nixon Republicans to silence the hippy and black left. Outlawing abortion does nothing to help children live. The evidence is out there. Countries with liberal abortion laws have fewer abortions because co-incidentally they also have in place what actually helps children live, which is social support for the mothers of said children. But that eats into the profits treasured by the super rich. In the case of LGBT, it's not so much a political silencing but more of a divide and conquer tactic. While we waste our time wishing that this segment didn't exist thinking 'if only we could ban them through legislation,' we are distracted from finding the real culprit.
7. Capitalism is Christian. False. No governmental system is Christian. But capitalism more than any system has few friends in the pages of scripture. Where do I start? Try the book of James. Condemns in no uncertain terms the oppression of the rich and the obsequious toadying of the rich by the church. Look at the Jubilee economic system (maybe never really tried -- we don't know) presented in Leviticus. Every fifty years, a reset. A limiting, balancing factor par excellence. Look at all the prophet's words against oppression by the rich on the poor. Oh, but you say, that's not against capitalism, that's against oppression by the wealthy. Let's have a wake up call, if you please. Wealth is oppression. If I have, it means that someone else doesn't have. If I have more, then someone else has less. Sounds terrible, but this thing has a scale. Here in the middle class, the oppression factor is maybe not as egregious. But when we realize that half of the world's wealth is owned by 1% of its population, the oppression is extreme.
The wealth gained this way represents legalized tax evasion. Legalized through swindling the Christian white middle class vote through this bill of goods in the 1980's. We voted this way (tax cuts!) thinking it would do us good. but little gain has come our way and our ranks, which should have been swelled by many others entering the middle class as wages went up instead of down have been depleted and we are losing power to what are now not merely the wealthy but oligarchs, people who can and do outright buy political power to ever increase their hold on society. Democracy is dying. The legalized tax evasion has other dimensions too. The rich have access to tools the poor do not. Holding companies, offshore accounts, stocks, etc. etc. represent an upward spiral accessed through privilege. It's a thing crying out for a societal limiting factor. (something Judeo-Christian maybe, like the Jubilee year?) But no, we've eviscerated government so that they haven't the resources to control this. Maybe it's time to wake up.
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