Silence

Maybe God wants us all to shut up.

8-28-22

In case this message should feature grammatical or logical flaws, or if I appear more deranged than usual, I will offer as a flimsy excuse that I am writing in a motel room in Phoenix. I came out here to the blistering heat to hang out with my daughter Darcy and my grandson Nick. We spent a few hours together, and that was delightful. I feel elated right now just from getting that time with them.

Darcy is, as some of you may remember, a school district administrator who spends much of her energy -- psychic and intellectual -- attempting to prevent the Arizona legislature from gradually turning the State's public schools over to for-profit charter school companies. But her latest efforts have concentrated on the battle over what can and can't be taught. She is lobbying against the passage of a bill that would mandate banning books for reasons that remind me of the CBA (Christian Bookseller's Association) which -- from my perhaps simplistic perspective -- has long been a minion of the Southern Baptist Convention. In addition to banning anything sexually explicit, this ban would include any material that might cause students to encounter unwelcome historical truth.  

Here in the blistering desert, this morning I walked to a coffee shop and sat with coffee and a raspberry bar by a window that overlooked a patio where a young woman sat with a small dog at her side. Then her friend arrived, looking rather glum, and went inside to fetch them coffee. After he returned, delivered the coffee, and sat, he reached out his hand and she took it. He offered a prayer. She responded with one of her own.

A flashback: My dad was raised by a mean, devout Christian Scientist. Though I don't remember him criticizing her, I do remember him criticizing people who pray at breakfast then go out and swindle customers all day before coming home and praying at dinner. Even my meager knowledge of psychology leads me to suspect my dad's criticism came from a distaste for hypocrisy based in part on his experience with a devout yet mean mother. 

Today, while watching out the coffee shop window, I felt quite ornery, and I realized just how skeptical I have become. For a long time, maybe fifteen years, after I started attending church regularly, I felt uplifted whenever I witnessed a baptism, a conversion, a profession of faith, or a gesture or act that implied someone was a believer. Such as the people I watched through the coffee shop window.

Now, the same scenes touch me with dismay. Because, at least for this season, I don't trust  "Christians" unless I know them well.  Like my dad, I have noticed way too much of what appears to my limited mind to be blatant hypocrisy.

Darcy told me it's not actually the legislators who make the problems she contends with on her job. The legislators, she informs me, are only simple people (in some cases, simple crooked people) who only want to get elected (and/or pass legislation that will enrich them). Her real foes are what she refers to as "the people on the ground," the organizers and ringleaders who, for reasons unfathomable to me, consider themselves so smart they know more about history than history teachers do, and more about how to teach kids to love reading and think critically than do English teachers such as my mom, my son, me, and Pam, my ex-wife and my Zoë's mom. Apparently, these people reason or suppose that our combined twenty-three years of college rendered us either clueless or evil.

The people too many Arizona legislators bow down to -- what makes them so smart, I wonder. Maybe tv news. Or Facebook. Or maybe they know so much intuitively because they have God on their side.

My friend, Perelandra College prof Steve Saint, grew up in an evangelical family and, after spending years as an evangelical and other years as a Catholic, decided that most of us who love Jesus Christ would be wise to, instead of attending church regularly, read the Sermon on the Mount every week.

Steve is an expert in critical thinking. You can witness his reasoning skills in action at his blog, Truthsmack.

I will try to remember to read the Sermon on the Mount once a week. Also, I may find a place where Quakers meet and worship in silence like we did at the Quaker meetings I attended for a year in Chico. I like silence, more and more, these days.

Here is Jackson Browne with a song that fits the way I'm feeling. You should listen. It's beautiful.  

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