What Occupies My Heart

Laurie:  Thanks in part to my Los Angeles upbringing, my mother's determined stance against racism, the wonders of the internet age, and my Christian faith, I have had the pleasure of developing warm relationships with people of various races, nationalities, professions, education levels, socioeconomic levels, religions (or lack thereof), sexual orientations, lifestyles, and political persuasions. So I speak from my own experience when I say that there are challenges to be faced and rich benefits to be gained in maintaining relationships with lots of different kinds of people.... 

I wrote the paragraph above some weeks ago, with the intention of entering into a discussion with Paul about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.  As it so often happens, Paul had his own take on it and was ready to publish long before I was able to gather my own thoughts.  I was initially reacting to a graphic posted by more than one of my politically conservative Christian friends on Facebook mocking the Occupy Wall Street protestors, pointing out the supposed irony of people crying out against corporations when these same people rely upon and make use of the products these corporations produce.

It had brought to mind immediately a graphic and article I'd seen some months before, posted by some of my more progressive leaning friends pointing out ironies they see in the complaints of protesting Tea Partiers, who rely upon and benefit from the very services of the government they don't want to pay taxes to.

Though I am decidedly more sympathetic to one of these movements than the other, I'm not involved in either, and as one standing on the outside  I see them as similar in many ways:  the Tea Party, simplistically speaking, is afraid America is falling apart because of various liberal government policies, and because a Democrat president was elected into office for the first time in eight years, leaving them with the terrifying feeling that the nation's liberals would now have free rein. Because of what they see as bad government, they are reacting by raging against government.  The Tea Party doesn't want government having control over their lives.

The Occupy movement, on the other hand, in so far as I've seen it represented, sees America falling apart as the result of the unfettered greed and political influence of many corporations, particularly banks and financial institutions, who have run roughshod over the economy and been given greater influence over elections via the recent Supreme Court ruling on election funding. These are concerns I can certainly sympathize with, especially after my husband lost his job weeks into the crash of '08 and could not find work for a full 19 months after.  I find it hard to be to hostile to my government when it's policies, namely unemployment insurance, were among the means God used to keep us in our home and out of foreclosure during those months.  We are truly thankful.  

Another Great Depression was averted, thanks in great measure to our admittedly imperfect government,  thanks to governmental safety nets put in place after the Great Depression: unemployment benefits to tide people over and keep them housed and fed while looking for new work, federal deposit insurance to prevent panicked runs on banks, social security helping the elderly and disabled stay afloat when other supports crumbled, to name the first that come to mind.  A lot of people lost a lot, to be sure.  Paul and I are still catching up from what we lost, and from the investments we would not have made had we known the housing market would crash.  But it was not another Great Depression.

As I said, I started this post weeks ago with an agenda I no longer feel is worth pursuing.  Since that time the Occupy Movement has expanded and finally gotten the attention of the mainstream news media.  As a result, I have had even more time to watch the reactions and read the rhetoric of both sides, frequently through the lens of my diverse group of friends on Facebook. Some people are frightened,  some frustrated, some angry, some even hateful.  So many people are struggling. Unfortunately, however, we have chosen not to be concerned for one another, to listen, to work together.  Instead we've taken adversarial positions of blame, finger-pointing, sarcasm, scorn, and mocking.  In my daydreams people pull together in the face of adversity, but the sad reality  is that these hard times are not uniting us but dividing us. 

The situation is deteriorating...America is disintegrating, and my points in the end, keep seeming pointless.

There are so many things I could say, but are they worth saying?  Will they make any difference?  Will they help even one person know what to do or how to survive times like these?  Will they add a single drop of peace into the ocean of turmoil America is becoming?

Paul, I meant to write this post on my own, a response of sorts to yours, but I'm at loose ends.  Perhaps you can help find my way to what matters most?

Paul:  I may be of some assistance here.  I shan't waste anymore time expressing my own feelings on the subject, although, possibly steering the conversation in the right direction, I find myself thinking of what Mr. Daniel Handler (under his well known nom de plume Lemony Snickett) recently observed about the unfolding, and I think all sides can agree on the employment of the adjective "unfortunate" events,

"Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending."

What, then, would be the wisdom I would give to an audience with the parties involved?  What would I wish to express to the angry person on the street, the corrupt capitalist, and the arguably even more corrupt politician who has systematically removed all fetters from the corrupt capitalist over the past 20ish years?

There is this wonderful recorded speech from antiquity, perhaps you've heard of it, called The Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus Christ got up before a group of people and gave them a fairly succinct outline on how one ought to live, a pragmatic philosophy for those who would follow His worldview.  It is full of phrases like "Give us this day our daily bread" and "Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors" and "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven" and "Look to the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them" and "whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them."

la Liberté guidant le peuple - Delacroix, image via Wikipedia

I think that a shift in consciousness is occurring in this country, but I fear that it is not shifting in the direction that would be most beneficial to all.  I think that in order to achieve a world in which each give according to their abilities to meet each according to their needs, there must a shift toward focusing on service.  I fear that the bully will not give the people their lunch money back and la Liberté guidant le peuple will have the blood of the martyrs watering the flowers of Central Park.  The fat will grow fatter on the backs of the lean.  The great rigged game will continue.  The poor we will always have with us.  We seem to be in one such cycle where the rich get particularly greedy, the poor get particularly angry, the middle class get even angrier than anyone else because the rich getting particularly greedy has now made them among the poor, the rich make themselves scarce when the heads start rolling, and then the insurgents behave just as badly, if not worse, than the rulers they ousted.  Being a global community, it is happening all over the world right now.  The birds and lilies don't seem to notice.

If you would be perfect, sell what you possess and give to the poor.  Waste no time arguing what a good man should be, be one.


Laurie:  And I think you lead me exactly to my point.  How can any man, or any nation of men, be truly good? People have been trying since people have been people.  We've tried it through government and law, experimenting for as long as we've been in existence with various forms, with varying degrees of success for various periods of time. Yet none has stood the test of time, because not one has ultimately managed to govern the human heart. Human nature itself is the force that both drives and destroys human government.

Paul:  If I may interject again and reiterate something I said at lunch today.  History is full of the hairy- chinned manifesto author with a thousand faces who sit in a café and thinks about the problems of the modern world, where they come from, how to solve them.  They scribble on napkins and publish leaflets, manifestos, poems, songs.  People follow them, revolutions happen, then the people who replace the people in power are as bad as or worse than the people they deposed.

Aside from raging sociopaths, we all know what being good looks like.  The Neo-Atheist movement beats this drum all of the time.  They are good and moral.  They give blood, call their mothers, and donate liberally.  We know that good generally revolves around loving one another and focusing outward instead of focusing on one's self.  We all know that if there are six people in the room and six slices of cake, it's bad form to eat more than one slice.  But history will also back me up in the fact that we, humans, don't do what we ought to.

Laurie:  Oops....it never occurred to me to count the people in the room and compare it the the number of slices.  My apologies to everyone whose piece of cake I mindlessly devoured.  I will certainly try to pay attention to this in the future.

Interestingly, the two strongest idealistic threads I've seen running through conservative Christian politics recently happen to be diametrically opposed to one another.  The first is the belief that in order to save America we must subject her, as nearly as possible, to the Law of God as spelled out in the Old Testament. This notion is preached with all the confidence of people who are convinced that they will have no problem keeping this law.

As you know, Paul, last week, I ran into a former neighbor of ours who insisted that subjecting America to the Law of Moses would restore God's blessing to her.  This man, like the Jews, had missed the lesson of the Law entirely.  No man, apart from Jesus Christ, God's own Son, has ever obeyed the Law of Moses perfectly.  The point of the Law, and the necessity of the sacrifices it required day after day and year after year was to teach men that they are sinners and that sacrifice was necessary to atone for sin. (This was meant to point the way to the ultimate sacrifice, that of Jesus Christ Himself.) As the Apostle Paul put it:  "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin." (Rom. 3:10)  God wanted the people to recognize and be honest with themselves about the condition of their hearts and to look to Him for the mercy that only His perfect sacrifice  could provide. What was never intended was for people to use His laws as ways to curry His favor, as if by their own efforts they could be good enough, or to promote a political agenda for the United States of America.

The second of these threads is exactly opposite.  It is the cry from which America was born, the cry for freedom.  Here we are, in the "Land of the Free", but it will never be free enough for some, and, for those being trampled by the freedoms of those more powerful than themselves it may feel far too free. In truth, our hearts cry for freedom, yet our hearts cannot be trusted with it, because our hearts are sinful.

In truth, we all want government, we just don't think we are the ones who need it.  Law is for the ones who do, the other guy.

Paul:  Funny you should mention that because you also ran into another bedlamite this past week who was trying to convince you of his own sinless perfection.  It's an aberrant doctrine which I've heard a few dozen times over the past few years which, like George MacDonald upon learning of predestination, almost makes me want to burst into tears.  Sin is the first thing that ever made sense to me in theology.  My own imperfection and the imperfection of everyone else was my ingress to Christianity.  It made sense of observable reality on micro (self) and macro (everyone else in the world) levels.  Try as I may, I've never been able to shake that essential truth.  And the only hope is of a benevolent and perfect God providing atonement for said sinfulness.  To me, the suggestion of sinless perfection in this lifetime is about as abhorrent a suggestion as a human can suggest.

I notice a common thread in the two awful ideologies presented to you over this past week.  Both are focused on self-righteousness.  Both are focused on you being, as I say, the King of Right Mountain.  It's a subtle shift which happens too often in ideology which leads down the road to brutality.  It's the shift from being focused on Truth to being focused on Being Right. 

 Laurie:  Yes. I think you are right (wink). We set up our camps;, we dig in our heels; we solidify our hearts against our rivals.  We forget the words of Christ when He said, "Love your neighbor as yourself,"and "Love your enemies. Do good to those who mistreat you," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."  

We forget what we Christians have no right to ever forget: no matter who we are talking to, no matter  their political party, no matter their race or religion, no matter their educational level, profession, or sexual orientation, the sinful human heart cannot be managed from the outside.  The hope God offers to mankind does not come through law or government, it comes through faith in Jesus Christ, in his teachings, in His sacrifice for sin, and in His victory over death. Only in and through Him are lasting peace, unity, freedom, and love to be found.

So my hope is that we Christians, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum (yes, I know of a certainty there true Christians on both sides) will turn our hope away from politics, that we will stop mocking and insulting those we see as our enemies and start doing them good. My prayer is that we will return our focus and energies to Christ and His gospel, to making disciples, to seeing people set free in the way that matters most: free from the death clutch sin has on their lives.