Goulash – Part 1

“Do you believe that God is in total control of this world?” Someone asked me that question the other day. We had been discussing the difficulties of life and the trajectory our planet so dishearteningly seems to be headed. Being asked about God’s control of the universe is a lot like being asked, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Either answer you give condemns you. So rather than answering “yes” or “no,” I opted to talk about my Aunt Betty’s goulash.

Goulash is supposed to be an Eastern European stew of sorts. For my Aunt Betty I think it was more a way of cleaning out the refrigerator. Aunt Betty died last years, but when she was living she would whip up the goulash with noodles, tomatoes, paprika, onions, coffee grounds, peanut butter, grass clippings from the last time Uncle Joe emptied the bagger on the lawn mower. Everything. It consists of all these strange, typically unrelated ingredients. But my Aunt Betty was a good cook. Her dish tasted pretty darn good in the end. In the hands of a lesser cook, however, I’m sure goulash would be a culinary disaster.

This is my chosen metaphor to explain God’s “control” over the world. God takes all the ingredients of life as they jumble together in the pot: Heartaches, triumphs, failures, and accomplishments; bad decisions, injustices, and hope; our creativity and our stupidity – all these things. We can’t imagine how any of this fits together. How can this be worth anything? Yet, God is able to make something wonderful out of it. He masterfully brews this magnificent gumbo we call life, and it will taste pretty darn good in the end. But don’t dip in your spoon and taste it too early. It’s not done yet. It still has a ways to go. God is still bringing it all to a boil, waiting for a few essential ingredients to be added to the mix before it’s put on the table…

Talk About Not Of This World

I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

“Hell No” In Texas

KINGSVILLE, Texas (AP) – In this friendly little ranching town, “hello” is wearing out its welcome. And Leonso Canales Jr. is happy as heck. At his urging, the Kleberg County commissioners on Monday unanimously designated “heaven-o” as the county’s official greeting. The reason: “hello” contains the word “hell.”

“When you go to school and church, they tell you ‘hell’ is negative and ‘heaven’ is positive,’” said the 56-year-old Canales, who owns the Kingsville Flea Market. “I think it’s time that we set a new precedent, to tell our kids that we are positive adults.” The new salutation, according to the county resolution, is a “symbol of peace, friendship and welcome” in this “age of anxiety.” So on Thursday, courthouse employees were answering the phones, “heaven-o.” And the chamber of commerce was working on a campaign promoting Kingsville, a Rio Grande Valley town of 25,000, as a “heavenly” place to visit. “People seem to think that it might catch on,” said county Judge Pete De La Garza.

Not everyone is a convert to Kleberg County’s heavenly ways. Madolyn Musick, who runs a bookstore, insisted, and linguists would agree, that “hello” has nothing to do with “hell.” Besides, she added, “What’s wrong with, ‘Howdy, y’all?’” Canales, a Catholic but not a regular churchgoer, has been as serious as heck about “hello” since 1988, when he told his brother he might start greeting people with “God-o.” His brother suggested “heaven-o” instead. David Sabrio, a professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, noted that the Oxford English Dictionary says “hello” stems from an old German greeting for hailing a boat.

“Linguistically and historically, the word ‘hello’ has no connection at all with what we associate with the underworld,” he said. “People may make that connection in their own mind. I certainly don’t.” (December 15, 2007)

Take A Walk; And No Right Turns

This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News:

My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet. ‘In those days,’ he told me when he was in his 90s, ‘to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.’ At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: ‘Oh, bull—-!’ she said. ‘He hit a horse.’

‘Well,’ my father said, ‘there was that, too.’ So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars, but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together. My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. ‘No one in the family drives,’ my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, ‘But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.’ It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first. But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car. Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. ‘Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?’ I remember him saying more than once. For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work. Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustine’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. He was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, ‘Do you want to know the secret of a long life?’

‘I guess so,’ I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

‘No left turns,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘No left turns,’ he repeated. ‘Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.’

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000.  (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, ‘You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.’ At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, ‘You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said.

‘Why would you say that?’ He countered, somewhat irritated.

‘Because you’re 102 years old,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re right.’ He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: ‘I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet.’
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: ‘I want you to know,’ he said, clearly and lucidly, ‘that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.’

A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.

From Shane Claiborne

This is an excerpt from Esquire’s piece on Shane Claiborne. For the whole article see: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/shane-claiborne-1209. 

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity. Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus…

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it’s that you can have great answers and still be mean… and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because “God so loved the world.” That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven, but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our “Gospel” is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy…but the sick.” And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven…

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, “I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.” If those of us who believe in God do not believe God’s grace is big enough to save the whole world… well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

And Now The Other Cheek

When I was in middle school we were always getting in trouble during P.E. I don’t know why; because in those days, not that many years ago, troublesome boys were not sent to In-School Suspension or assigned to detention.

The coach took you over to the water fountain. You gripped the sides of the thing, gritted your teeth and said your prayers as he commenced in lifting your heels off the ground via your backside with a wooden paddle. That was bad enough. But if you cried in front of your friends or the girls, well, it was an embarrassment worse than death.

On one particular day a fellow classmate of mine was accused of stealing something from someone’s locker. Before we knew it he was being dragged away to the gallows, uh, the water fountain rather, to face the consequences.

Now, this kid was no angel, but we all knew he didn’t do it. Not this time anyway. It seems that everybody knew he was innocent of the charges except the coach. When the boy got to the fountain of punishment he did something extraordinary – especially for a middle-schooler.

He dropped his gym shorts right there in front of everyone, including the girls who have such a magical power over adolescent boys, and he shouted in his skivvies, “I have nothing to hide. If you’re going to paddle me, it will be like this!” The coach couldn’t deliver the punishment.

The boy was wise beyond his years. He didn’t launch into a verbal tirade, take a swing at his accusers, or threaten to bring his parents to the school. Nor did he grovel on the floor and take the paddling as if he were guilty. He turned the other cheek – every cheek he had, actually.

We are called to turn the other cheek, not because it always works to disarm injustice or because it is always practical, but because it is the way of Christ. In following this way, it gives God the opportunity to act and speak, even in conflict, in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Turn the Cheek

Jesus said, “If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also.” These are some of the more knotty and uncomfortable words Jesus ever spoke. He seems to imply that his followers should be something like sponges. Our only response to injustice, we have sometimes been led to believe, is to grin and bear it.

When we are struck by a fist on the playground, we are to just take it. When sharp words lodge in our hearts at the workplace, we are to silently go about our business. When a violent husband assaults his wife in the bedroom, she should just accept it.  I don’t think this is exactly what Jesus is saying.

There is a subtle but important word in Jesus’ command that his original hearers would have understood well. It has been lost in translation to us. It is the word, “right.” If someone slaps you on the “right” cheek, offer the other one also.

Being struck on the right cheek was a description of someone getting backhanded, not someone in a fistfight. A strike on the right cheek was an act intended to humiliate, used by someone in power over someone who was powerless or vulnerable.

It was how a master would treat a slave or a landowner would treat a sharecropper. It was the common approach of the Roman soldier in his treatment of the Jewish citizenry. It was how many a husband behaved toward his wife in that very chauvinistic culture.

When facing this kind of unjust humiliation, Jesus proposes neither an act of violent retaliation nor a humiliated cowering on the ground in submission. He offers a third way: Turn the other cheek.

Rob the aggressor of his power to disgrace. By offering the other cheek the Christian says to his or her antagonist, “I refuse to be humiliated. Try again.” This is a nonviolent, dignified resistance that exposes the act as unjust, and turns the shame back on the perpetuator of the violence.

This kind of non-violent, though uncompromising response, trumps the violent power of the world. By turning the other cheek the Christian is saying, “I will not lift a finger to hurt you in retaliation, but I will never back down from what is just and right.”