Hitch-hiking--sort of

A while back I joined a small group of Quincy University friends that call themselves “the writers’ circle.” They write poetry.  

 

Poetry is not my favorite way of expressing myself, but I try.

 

I’ve been occupied for the past few weeks trying to get a version of the Catholic “Liturgy of the Hours” up and running on a separate website (friarzimm.com). So, just to keep this site moving, I am sharing a poem I wrote for the writers’ circle a couple of years ago.

 

 

Hitch-hiking—sort of

 

Ancient phrase: hitch a ride.

 

Never did it in my life. Yet . . .

          hang on,

          get pulled along,

          piggy-back,

          how I pray.

 

What is God? Where is God? Who is God?

          All question marks.

What to do?

I hitch rides.

 

Words in the driver’s seat.

Words of psalms,

          words more than 2000 years old.

 

Once, 1958, old retreat-master:

          “Love the psalms.”

          Words stuck.

 

Grad school, 1968. Didn’t know if there is a God.

          In case of emergency . . . use psalms,

                   say the words,

                   read the words,

          maybe there’s a God somewhere listening.

 

Today, 2022. Same problem.

          Same solution.

          Use the words.

 

Tradition packages the psalms;

          people read, say, sing

                   same words

                   at same time

                   on same weekday.

 

Time zones? Trust that the Lord adjusts.

          How many men,

          how many women

                   are singing, saying, reading, these words

                             right now

                             along with me?

 

I am not alone.

 

Latin.

          Latin joins me to multitudes across time,

                   beyond space.

          How many people prayed in Latin

                   across centuries?

                             Augustine, Gregory, Francis,

                             Clare (did she know Latin?)

                             Decatur hospital sisters, 6:00 am.

                                      Were they chanting Latin?

                             Then me.

 

Greek.

          Same words, different sounds.

                   70 men in Alexandria,

                   Luke, Basil, Chrysostom,

                   the Orthodox world,

                   Today, me.

 

I am not alone.

 

I hitch rides,

          get carried along.

          Best I can do.

 

Keeps the heart warm.

 

 

 

 

That remarkable amendment

 

[published in Muddy River News, May 13, 2024]

    Here is how part of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    Protestant friends once told me that their minister told them that Catholic priests were so close to the devil that they had tails. Fortunately, by the time they told me that, they were no longer checking me out for a tail, if they ever were tempted to do that.

    But people did believe things like that. Years ago they might have been tempted to do something about it. They would have acted on their belief that evil should not be allowed to exist.

    Here is a translation of the First Amendment: Even though you think your neighbor is seriously wrong, keep your beliefs to yourself and behave with courtesy.

    Our country seems to be in danger of too many people forgetting the lesson that prompted the First Amendment: religious wars that went on for decades and centuries.  We are divided over two issues: is abortion an evil that our government should prevent? Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?

    These beliefs are held so strongly that we could call them religious beliefs. But our country has a tradition of dealing with conflicting religious beliefs without violence.

    Violence is a tool of control. We are not called to control people who have religious ideas different from ours. We are called to treat them with respect. Maybe, like with the people who believed priests had tails, things will calm down enough that we can lock up the guns for good. We have learned that such an outcome is possible, and has happened many, many times in our history. Let us hope that it happens again in our time.

 Brother Joe Zimmerman

What about truth?

I have grown up with the firm belief that there are truths that God has revealed and that anyone who denies those truths is on the road to damnation.

Of course there are scriptural passages that support such a belief.  “If you remain in my word, . . . you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32).

But there is this philosophical movement labeled “postmodernism”  that is influencing the way a lot of people think, and, following our Franciscan tradition of facing challenging ideas head on, for example, the way William of Ockham did, not to mention Thomas Aquinas using Aristotle, I have struggled to appreciate what writers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are saying to us.

Definitions are important, both in philosophy and in my field, sociology. We cannot measure something until we define what we are measuring, and we cannot talk about something until we have some common understanding of what we are talking about. So I have developed two definitions:

Truth: Truth is the story that God would tell.

Postmodernism: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because that person is angling to get power over someone else.”

The postmodern definition certainly fits the history of the Catholic Church. It also fits the recent history of truth in the Trump vs. anti-Trump struggles.

So I ask: isn’t it presumptuous to claim to know what only God knows?

No one can definitively tell the story of anything except God. All stories are fictions created by human beings.

We try to determine the truth in two important ways: courts and science.

In the courtroom, competing stories about what happened are compared. A judge or a jury makes a decision about which story is closer to the truth. No one can say definitively that either story is true, because judges and juries can be manipulated. We accept a decision by a judge or jury so that we can get on with life without resorting to armed struggle.

In science, we use observation as a tool in developing theory. Theory is fiction, narrative, a story. Observation without theory is meaningless—in fact, meaning in general is simply applying a story to something.

Because scientific theories are fictions, we use peer review as a way to determine whether a story is close to the story that God would tell. We know that peer review is imperfect. Peer review is assembling reports of observations that confirm a particular story. People are imperfect in describing their observations, and reviewers are imperfect observers of other people’s work.

We live in an age where scientific observations have upended many religious beliefs. “Evolution” is an older example. Today we are struggling for a story to describe the experiences that transgender people report. It is dangerous to turn too quickly to scripture, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.

Religious organizations are in trouble today because people are wary of religious leaders who want to share the truth with others, especially when the leaders’ version of the truth has political or other implications. So people are staying away from churches. They may still be seeking the truth. It is just that religion has lost credibility in the search because religion has been too confident about its knowledge of what God would say.

No one really knows God, and certainly no one controls God, or what God wants people to do. We are all seekers.

Here is how I approach the issue. I do not know God very well. The stories of Jesus Christ are my most important source for knowing what God is like, but when it comes to my own personal knowing God, I am speechless. Every day I spend about an hour carefully repeating words of the Old Testament psalms, in the hope that somewhere, somehow along the line, God will speak to me. I think that has happened, but God’s speech is always very very quiet and unclear. So I return to the psalms. Then I look for God among the people I encounter from morning till night, and in the times when I join others for worship.

And in the meantime, I am not disturbed if churches are losing membership and attendees. God is still active in the world. I have to go around looking for where God might be speaking to me, looking for people who want to know God without telling me how I should live my life. And trying to be open to occasions when I can share with and learn from other people’s visions of the truth, even when those people seem as committed to their visions of the truth as much as I am to mine.

 

 

Lattices

 

        A lattice is a structure around which climbing plants can grow. The image suggests an inanimate thing, the lattice, providing a means for a living thing, a plant, to flourish.

        Churches are lattices.

        A church provides a structure within which people can experience God. The life is in the people and their experience, not in the structure.

        Take the Catholic Church. It provides places where people can gather, and gathering is essential for experiencing God. It provides scripts for behavior when the people gather. It provides resources like books and music that enrich the experience. It uses life events like marriage and death as hooks on the lattice to catch passersby. It creates a lattice of time (celebrating the story of Jesus in the liturgical year) that keeps reminding people of where their lives can go.

        Within the lattice, all kinds of different experiences occur. Some people experience God through mysticism, some through acts of service to others, some through a disciplined routine of prayer with others. Many withdraw from the lattice but continue to find God through memories of their experiences in the lattice.

        People who have never had contact with the lattice never benefit from what the lattice can provide. They are like athletes who grow up without coaching, and whose abilities may not ever fully develop, or like musicians who have not had people around them to nurture their musical gifts. Some people will overcome such disabilities and develop a relationship with God in their own way. Many will not.

        That is the cause for regret on the part of us religious people. We are like people who love music and regret that some people never get to experience the wonders of musical performance.

        That regret is the motive for what we call evangelization. We do not evangelize for the sake of numbers—statistics about church membership and ritual attendance miss the point. We who manage the lattice are managing wood and nails, not living things. God is moving in our structures, we hope, and sharing abundant life. Our role is to let mushrooms and plants grow.

        We of the structure are human beings, which means that we are sinful. We develop pathologies of structuring. We fall in love with controlling other people, or with pride in creating beautiful buildings and objects. We love creating rules, because rules let us gain power over other people. We get into fights with other religious people. This is especially true when we merge our lattices with political structures. Church and state merge, and smother life instead of nurturing it.

        For some reason we church people got the idea that we have to control the world in order for people to come to God. No. We just have to provide the lattice and get out of the way.

 

A poem

 Weeds

 have sympathy for weeds

            flowers out of place

true, not so pretty

            don’t look like flowers

            have to look close

but persistent

            even in sidewalks

 

God works that way

            life out of place

often not pretty

            have to look close

churches are sidewalks

            weeds are life

Jesus talks with a capitalist

Jesus:

Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Capitalist:

I'm sorry, but I have to take exception to that. In a capitalist society, if you are a loser, that means you or your family haven't tried hard enough to play the game. The game has rules. You have to play by the rules or socialism will happen, and we know that socialism is the work of the devil.

Jesus:

But that doesn't fit with the way I treated people who were poor, right?

Capitalist:

That may have been true in your time, but that was before the United States and other industrialized countries discovered the marvelous power of capitalism to make lives better for the poor. You just don't understand today's world. We have come a long way since the first century. Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, you know.

Jesus:

I think it is you who doesn't understand the world. The way you see the world is not so different from the world governed by the Roman Empire. And I know that world, first hand.

Let me explain it this way. Your capitalism is founded on a fine insight: that people do better when they can compete in a fair game. People don't want to be spoon-fed. They want to compete. But the game has to be fair. When the game isn't fair, the players get discouraged and walk away from the game. Your capitalism makes people compete with one hand tied behind their back. Then you blame them for being poor losers.

Capitalist:

But look at all the good capitalism has done for the world! Billions of people lifted out of poverty, billions living healthier and longer lives.

Jesus:

True, but look at the billions who are living on the edge of deprivation. Look at the people who have to leave their homes because it never rains any more and their crops and animals can't survive. Do you think those people don't want to play in the game?

Capitalist:

If they are losers, they must not want to play in the game.

Jesus:

I would say that you need to change the rules of the game. You have to make the game fair for all the players, not just for the ones who got there first.

Capitalist:

I hate to say it, Jesus, but you sound like a socialist.

Jesus:

They have called me worse.

Look. How will you lose if you change the rules so more people can compete on a fair playing field? The way I see it, God creates every human being to live life with abundance. When more people can do that, you should be happier.

Capitalist:

I wish I could, but the world just doesn't work that way. You are too soft-hearted. Life is hard. I said it before and I'll say it again, people just have to play by the rules.

Jesus:

You sound like some Pharisees I know. They get carried away multiplying the rules so people can't get in the game. I tell them that it is not God's will that one person gets lost. Translated: not one of them gets kicked out of the game.

Here's the problem. The system you call capitalism has a fine insight into how people live. But a disease has infected the insight--call it a demon--that inspires people to take as much as they can get even when they ruin the game for others. I'd like to do something about that demon--I have some experience with such things. But these days I have to depend on human beings to drive out such demons. I suggest you pay attention to people who talk like I do. You can learn, you know. You can change your mind. We call that repentance. It can lead you to a more abundant life yourself.

Capitalist:

I'll think about it.

Jesus:

One more thing. This fine way you play the capitalist game, it is heading for disaster because it is making the world unlivable. It is chewing up resources and pouring things into the air that are making the whole world hotter. You say that capitalism has done more for more people than anything before it. But it is on the brink of doing more harm to more people than anything before it. That is the way things go when they are infected by a demon. You should think about that too.

Capitalist:

You are messing with my head. You would mess up the whole capitalist world.

Jesus:

That's the idea. I appreciate your honesty. Do think about it.

 

The great commandment

A recent homily in the Quincy University Chapel 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.”

There is an apparent contradiction in the way this commandment is stated. How can you command someone to love? Love is supposed to be given freely, as a gift to the other person.

Here is a restatement of that first great commandment that suddenly popped into my head. It contains language that may sound vulgar, language that preachers should not use in a homily, but I think it expresses something that is important. It is important enough to break the rule about vulgar language.

Here it is, the way I would re-phrase the first great commandment.

“Love me, dammit.”

Literally, that statement expresses a truth: if you don’t love the Lord, you are damned. But the spirit of the statement is the spirit of someone pleading to be loved. The Lord is showing vulnerability and frustration in the statement. The statement is saying that the Lord wants and needs us to love him.

When you look at it that way, the word “commandment” does not quite express what is going on. It is a commandment in the sense that the Lord needs compliance from us more than that the Lord is demanding something from us.

Vulnerability is part of love. Our God is pleading for our love. Our God needs our love. That’s the way our God has made us.

Love is a two-way street. When God commands us to love, God is telling us that our response is just as important as what God just said. We are to approach God the way a child approaches a parent. There is the child’s dependence in the relationship, but there is also vulnerability on the part of the parent. The parent needs the child’s love. The child knows this, and it is a source of the child’s dignity.

The reason that every child’s life is precious is that every child has the dignity of being able to love God and that God needs that response from the child. Don’t mess with the child, because the child is talking with God, and God is listening.

We all have that dignity, even when we are a long way from childhood, and even when we may have done things that can destroy a relationship. God is just as vulnerable to us when we have sinned as when we are children who haven’t sinned yet. Jesus’s favorite statement was “God forgives you.”

So the next time we think about the great commandment, to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, we might re-phrase it: God is saying to us: “Love me, dammit.”

 

The sparrow

"Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.”

        What is a sparrow?

        It is a collection of atoms and molecules, a collection that grew out of much smaller collections (sperm and egg) in parent sparrows.

        An infinitely aware God, which is what we say that God is, would know not only when the sparrow falls to the ground, but would know the location of every atom and molecule in a single sparrow’s body, both its location now and where that atom or molecule came from, and where it will go when it departs from the sparrow. Almost none of those atoms and molecules would have stayed in the sparrow throughout the sparrow’s lifetime—the atoms and molecules are continually coming and going.

        So what is the sparrow?

        The sparrow is certainly a physical object that can be seen and touched. That relates the sparrow to organisms outside the sparrow. Those organisms could include other sparrows, other animals that the sparrow eats and that eat sparrows, and human beings who observe the sparrow.

        One way to look at a single sparrow is to say a particular sparrow is the history or story of how a particular set of atoms and molecules combined for a brief period of time (the lifetime of the sparrow) to result in the physical object that relates to all the beings in its lifeworld.

        From a course in ancient philosophy I recall that Aristotle would say that the sparrow is a combination of matter (the “stuff” from which everything in the world is made) and form (the pattern which the stuff takes to make a particular individual object).

        What Aristotle called the “form” I call “the story.”

        The word “form” suggests a pattern that is fixed in time and basically unchanged. The word “story suggests a “diachronic” pattern which is always changing and always unique.

        The sparrow is the story of one unique set of atoms and molecules coming and going to form an observable animal for the brief period of the animal’s lifetime.

        If God is truly infinite, God knows the story of every atom and molecule in the universe, and the stories of the various ways those atoms and molecules can clump together to form stars and planets and rocks, trees, animals, and human  beings.

 

The human being

        The particular set of atoms and molecules that make up a human being  is unique in that it results in the mysterious experience we call “consciousness.” It results in other unique experiences, such as a sense of freedom, of love and other emotions.

        Each human being has a story beyond the story of its atoms and molecules. Each human does things and experiences things in ways so unique that authors can write thousand page novels about one human person.

        From my standpoint as a Christian, each human’s story can include moments of praise and worship of the God responsible for that human’s life and for everything else in that human’s lifeworld.

        The ability to freely and consciously honor God makes each human and the human species in general unique in the natural world. It gives each human being a dignity and value that is not shared by anything else in creation.

        We are part of the sparrow world, but we are more than the sparrow. God knows each of us, and we can know God. God loves each of us, and we can love God.