Of Logs, Splinters and Jumping off Cliffs

When I was a kid, 12 or 13 years of age, my city would host Friday night teen dance sessions at a park which we, for obvious reasons, called the band shell. They would play that decadent music called rock and roll, and boys and girls would learn to think of each other as something more than schoolmates. My mother would never let me go. She saw Friday night at the band shell as the very cradle of corruption.

By the time I was old enough to ignore my mother, they had either discontinued dance night or I had found my own form of corruption. I don’t remember. I do recall that I would be furious at my mom and would whine to her that my friend Ricky’s parents let him go! My mother’s response -- this may sound familiar -- was “if Ricky’s parents told him he could jump off a cliff, would you want to jump off too?”

My mother figured that church youth group was a better place for me to meet my friends. Soon after those days, certain that our neighborhood was a breeding ground for juvenile delinquents and their molls, mom sent me off to Christian High School at Detroit Lutheran West. And she was right. The guys I met there were more thoughtful than those in my neighborhood, and the girls not as free with their favors.

My own children went to public high school but I also immersed them in church life and encouraged them to choose a certain kind of friend. As much as I hate to admit it, my mother’s wisdom, if not her paranoia, wore off on me. And her strategy of finding a world apart, a healthier soil if you will, in which to raise her crop of children, turned out to be a good one. Bringing up kids in our culture is no rose garden. You need to look for an edge.

Maybe it was because she always saw herself on the defensive, but my mother did what she did without ever teaching us to think ourselves morally superior to anyone else, or the others morally inferior to us. Assigning white hats and blacks hats was never the game. It was always just a matter of carving out our own space where we could have freedom do the right thing. To paraphrase her “jumping off a cliff” metaphor, she was saying “we’re not talking about them; we’re talking about us.”

Jesus has an oft-quoted though infrequently followed parable along those same lines which suggests we focus more on removing “the log” from your own eye and less on taking splinters from the eyes of our neighbors. I don’t know if it was my mother, Jesus, or a Christian upbringing heavy on the idea that we’re sinners in need of God’s grace that makes me distrustful of people and nations who claim the moral high ground. I can generally see enough logs in their eyes to keep them busy. But while I’m working on my own logs, they are jumping ahead to their neighbor’s splinters without first clearing up their own vision.

I was reminded of all this by an obscure story I read earlier this week, in which the question of logs vs. splinters was implicit. Our president dined with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and among the guests was British historian Simon Schama, who long before our current Middle Eastern intervention observed that Europe regards the moral rhetoric of America as a cover for self-interest. Apparently, everyone behaved themselves at the dinner because that part of the story never made the cable newscasts. One wonders whether our news people have the nuanced power of perception that would allow them to comprehend such a question.

But even if they don’t, it doesn’t absolve us as Christians from seeing a better way to a better world. We lead, if we are to lead at all, by example. We lead by being honest with ourselves, and not by trying to fix the game so we look good winning. We lead by sincere devotion to our own standards, by dedication to our own gardens. We lead, as my mother did, not by condemning the neighbors for letting their kids go wherever they wanted, but by simply saying “in our house, this is how we do it.”

Show Me the Door that Leads Beyond Myself

A few years ago I first picked up a book called The World’s Religions, written by Huston Smith. The book is recommended by Bill Moyers as a primer for understanding what Smith calls the world’s “enduring religions.”

Many Christians are eager to know how other faiths envision spiritual dimension, especially in comparison to our own faith. Often, Americans who set out on this quest journey toward the east, drawn perhaps by spiritual conceptions fundamentally different from the way Christianity is understood, although perhaps not so different from the way Jesus understood spirit.

Others are intrigued by Islam and Judaism, which, with Christianity, are often called the Semitic religions. With growing Muslim populations here and the conflict in the Middle East, many people are asking themselves, “what do they really believe?” A friend recently told me of a class she’s taking called Meeting Judaism on a Voluntary Basis. She has a personal motivation. There are many reasons for interest.

Whatever spiritual traditions we may investigate, it’s usually not about converting. That in fact would be self-defeating because it would lead back into the practice of religion. We investigate because we are seeking something more -- more freedom, more inner peace, more sense of real spiritual power and presence in our lives. One of the principle problems with Christian practice as we know it is that it has devolved into a set of belief statements. Those statements put a cap on our faith system and make it finite. Yet we know instinctively and intuitively that believing is all about finding a way beyond the finite into the infinite, into the realm of the more.

Reading Mr. Smith’s book, I discovered that while practices among the world’s faith traditions vary wildly, they all seem to be driven by a similar wish: to elevate the essence of life by folding the limited self into the expansive dimension of the more. Or conversely, to enlighten the lesser world of self and form a new creature by welcoming in the more. It is almost magical the way a study of other faiths, even the supposedly foreign faiths of Asia, increases understanding of Christianity and the Bible. I could provide some comparison passages here, but I’ll just say it’s no coincidence that the word “Tao,” which means “the Way,” is the exact same word by which our faith was known in the early going.

For some of us, indoctrinated from youth with precepts and dogma, it is hard to imagine a new form of belief that preserves the old but understands it in a new way. We are very comfortable with the formulas we have learned. If they work for you I would never dream of saying they are not legitimate. But the biggest challenge we all face is how to give potency to our spirituality, how to make it something more than a pleasant attachment, like a weekend golf game, to a life essentially material and locked up by our objects.

How can we reach the realm of the more? How do we get there? Show me the way. Whatever hemisphere we live in -- east, west, north or south -- this is what we truly want from true religion: show me the way. Show me the door that leads beyond myself.