Occupy Oakland

Today I went to Oakland to visit the site of the Occupy protests.  I went there, in part, to disprove with my own eyes Sean Hannity’s assertions that there was public defecation and sexual assaults occurring there.  Rest assured that Hannity, and not Frank Ogawa Plaza, is full of crap.

The square has been covered with straw and a tent city has been established.  Some of the more noticeable aspects of the gathering include a small library containing a hundred or more books, an area where donated food is cached and prepared for anyone who needs it, and a tent where medical services are provided.  Hand-written placards encourage people to clean up after themselves.  The demonstrators are mostly young, but they fit every demographic imaginable and their reasons for dissatisfaction are also varied. 

Cardboard signs are posted throughout the square.  Yes, they speak of the lack of economic opportunities for mainstream Americans, but they also remind us of the destruction of our environment, the prohibitive cost of education, the war in the Middle East.  Along the perimeter of the square the people have demonstrated their desire for peace in a powerful way: They’ve planted flowers. 

I caught myself hoping that the flowers, like the movement, will be allowed to grow.

One of the protest signs, in particular, caught my eye.  It simply said: Join a credit union.  In recent months the large banks have lost deposits that are now going to credit unions.  I believe this to be a positive development.  When we put cash in a credit union, we're not cutomers.  We're members and part owners of the institution.  As I've said elsewhere in this blog, giving people ownership is an important part of the solution to our economic malaise. 

This World Has Potential

My son, Aaron, was recently named the Charles Mingus Composition Award winner at Berklee College of Music in Boston.  There he had the enviable opportunity to work with Maria Schneider, who is one of his musical inspirations.   

Here is a piece he recently wrote and performed at the JazzSchool in Berkeley, California.  It's part of a four movement jazz suite and this particular movement is entitled This World Has Potential.  It's a reminder to me that despite the many things we can criticize about our circumstances, the world remains a remarkable and wonder-filled place.

I hope you enjoy the music.

The Power of Hope

A few miles from the town where I grew up, there’s a boulder—cup shaped and tilted on its side—near a place that has been turned into a campground. God must have made it for bait fishing because it’s high in the back, sloped to the river and covered with soft moss. It juts off the bank and causes the water to eddy downstream, so silver salmon rest at its foot before moving on. As a kid, I used to cast into the swirl, lie on the rock and wait for a strike. It was as cozy as a favorite chair and I suppose that I caught my share of fish from it.

The rock gets traffic from the campground these days, so I don’t think of it as mine anymore and since I fish differently these days—with a method requiring floating line and a lot of walking—I haven’t been back in a long time. Yet, I still think about the boulder and love it for the way it was.

I learned things while sitting there, things about human nature and me. One summer I pulled two grown men from the river after their canoe tipped. Once safe on the rock, they watched their camping gear float away and the first words either of them could say was: “Hell, there goes my cigarettes.” I laughed until I recognized a sad side to wanting.

Yet, that didn’t stop me from doing the same thing, too: wish for things that seemed to be drifting away. At one time or another, I wanted to be a dozen different things, including a baseball player and a writer. Those dreams seemed within my grasp, until I would step away from the rock and strike out on curve balls or flunk a spelling test. Still, I could go back to the rock and plan and hope. (That’s when I decided to step up in the batter’s box to get a crack at curve balls before they broke away). Though I was never much of an athlete, the planning seemed to raise my batting average a few points.

Since I’ve gotten older, my dreams have changed. I’m not sure if they’re any more mature than my childhood wishes. At times they haunt me, as a good chunk of my life has already passed without accomplishment. But I know this much: when our wishes are right, they make our lives worthwhile. Hope is what whispers that when life is trying, the best we can do is try. Success isn’t what makes life joyful. It’s hoping and dreaming a better world into existence.

The Intersection of Faith and Calling

The gospel seems to value free will so completely that it defines what is white and what is black, then leaves to the individual a strip of gray. If you feel uncomfortable with this idea, think of the differences between the Mosaic Law and Christ’s gospel. While Leviticus specifies a mind-boggling number of sins and their remedies, Jesus tells us: “On…two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

His reference, of course, is to our requirements to love God and to love our neighbors. Though His direction is elegant in its simplicity, it is also open to interpretation. The manner by which we must show our love is, at best, suggestive. In contrast, Moses explains our duty to the mire-bound ox with far more clarity. The implications of this are numerous, but one is worth mentioning here: For moral people life’s dilemmas can have as much to do with expediency as choices between good and evil.

Consider how complicated our lives can be. We have responsibilities to teach and nurture our families. We owe our employers honest work for honest pay. In addition, we’re asked to help meet the needs of the church and our communities—to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And though we may hold these values inviolate and wish never to compromise them, we must continually decide how much of one to sacrifice for the others.

Adam and Eve understood this tension. Their most notable choice was between two proper, but mutually exclusive options: obedience to a specific commandment versus the advancement of humankind. We speak of our first parents as having experienced problems different than our own, but isn’t it possible that their dilemma was an archetype, one we live too, albeit less obviously? Divine inspiration, therefore, must guide us through the gray.

At times, however, we fail in this regard. Thoreau once wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” (From Civil Disobedience) I believe this happens when God extends sacred, specific callings that we lack the courage to accept. To me it’s no coincidence that some men suffer a midlife crisis at precisely the time they could be of most use to God. Perhaps the reason for this is summarized by Allan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind:

Man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection.... As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But...they no longer have any image of a perfect soul and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

Many of life’s problems could be avoided through the kind of self-introspection and prayer that leads to acceptance of God’s quiet callings. Emerson once said in a way that resonates with Plato’s concept of eudaemonism:

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you…. Great men have always done so…betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being…. That which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. (From Self Reliance)

I can only hope that my eyes, too, will someday open to life’s possibilities, but the fact is I’ve spent most of my adulthood ignoring the place divine providence found for me. God has told me at various times and by various means, that He’s unhappy with me. I’m certain, for example, that He never liked my previous choice of occupation. How else do you explain my career, which includes employment at several institutions that no longer even exist?

This is true: I was at Drexel when it went belly-up, Salomon when its involvement in a scandal left it a shell of itself, and UBS when it lost a billion dollars in speculative trades and became the target of a hostile takeover. Knowing my track record, a friend recently revealed to me his investment strategy. What he does, apparently, is short the stock of any company that invites me in to interview.

Although I’ve been involved in more corporate restructurings and strategic realignments than you can shake a stick at, the greater evidence of misdirection in my life is the subtle manner in which God has sometimes told me in prayer: “Alan, this isn’t you.”

I admit that I’ve replied with my share of fist shaking. At times I’ve demanded to know: “So what do You want me to do—flip burgers for a living?” Then seeing a chance to turn lemons into lemonade—to mine from the silver lining hidden behind dark clouds—I compose myself and suggest a way He might be of help.

“I’d really be good,” I say, “as the host of my own TV fishing show.”

The result of this communion is a lesson learned. You won’t see Angler Al on the tube any day soon. Pleading with God to bless this and bless that is tantamount to kicking the ball into His court. More importantly, He can’t give me a Saturday morning slot on ESPN without taking it away from one of His other children (a good ‘ole bubba, too, who can tell a good crankbait when he sees one and yells, “yeehaw” with enthusiasm). So my prayers have gained effectiveness only after I learned to ask that greatest of all queries: What manner of man ought I be?

Yet the task of hearing and following the Lord’s instruction isn’t easy. Recently, after years of ignoring my own soul’s code, I decided it was time for a simpler life and a leap of faith. I quit my job and began to write full time, confident that a way would be prepared for me to make a living at it. Unfortunately I’m the only person in the world who recognizes genius in the effort. So today I’m still unsure of heaven’s purpose for me, but what can I do? Our most difficult life choices occur at the intersection where faith and a sense of calling come together.

Faith and Dreams

My son, Aaron, wants to be a musician. Notions of rhythm and harmony, lyric and tempo invade his every thought. Knowing something about the lives of most musicians, I find myself hoping that he’ll enjoy his future poverty. Yet, even as I consider his long-term prospects, I'm awed by his desire and dedication. The upshot is this: While children invest in dreams, most adults have already spent theirs.

Dreams, by the way, are closely akin to faith. I’m not referring to our day-time musings or even our night-time fantasies. I’m talking about our sense for who we can become. This sense is important, because the alternatives to righteous dreams are horrific. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anything as frightening as a human being with evil intent—unless it’s the mass of humanity with no intent at all.

We often think of good and evil as being various points on the same continuum—that the less evil we commit, the more good we are—but this is a subtle deception. Good and evil are wholly separate and only by making a conscious choice for good do we place ourselves on its continuum. People who refuse to take any stance at all fall into a state of spiritual limbo. The Lord calls them lukewarm and “spews them out of his mouth.”

People without dreams are slaves to popular opinion and as shifting as the tide. Some of the greatest atrocities of this world were aided and abetted—in fact, rendered possible—by individuals whose greatest sin was arguably their resistance to ponder the morality of their acts. Think of Pontius Pilate, who could see no reason to condemn our Savior, but allowed him to be crucified anyway.

So we must be on constant vigil to ensure our dreams don’t go stale, that we retain our childhood craving for growth and rise above the plateaus we reach as adults. Occasionally, we discover that a past dream had been wrong. We may have started out searching for objects of value, but gained only money and position instead. So we must backtrack, take inventory of ourselves and begin a new journey over uncertain paths.

This is clearly within our grasp. As William Faulkner said when he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature:

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure, that when the last ding dong of doom has clanged and sounded on the last worthless rock hanging tide-less in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking. But I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not simply endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul: a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Child-like Faith

To me there are at least two contrasting claims to faith. None of us fall neatly into one camp or the other, but the contrast is illuminating. One of these I’ll call Old Testament Faith—the kind that the children of Israel had. Their convictions were marked by fear and trembling, because they saw our judge as vengeful and jealous, as a being who would have us preoccupied with hell and the devil. Because they were afraid of making offense, they fabricated complex consistencies—the kind that Emerson once referred to as the “hobgoblin of a tiny mind.” To them, anything that wasn’t explicitly right was wrong and so they locked their hearts to things they didn’t understand.

In contrast to this there is also Child-Like Faith. We might assume that, since children believe everything their parents say, child-like faith may infer an obligation to believe. However, I’d like to think there’s more to it than that.

For example, do you remember that as children we began life without fear? We thought we were immortal and that death was of no consequence. We’d slip on our PF Flyers, jump from stumps and fence posts, run like the wind and feel like masters of the universe. We didn’t pretend so much as be the kind-hearted heroes we watched on television. But over time, we learned about falls, scoldings, embarrassment, and other discomforting things. And that’s when we began to fear.

Similarly, children are not frightened by God. Not until our talk about hell and damnation begins to foment in their minds do they fear Christ’s judgment. Until that time they are motivated primarily out of love. Perhaps they know our Savior as He truly is: the judge of all mankind who asked forgiveness even for the men who nailed Him to a cross. While the Pharisee within us shudders to think of a final judgment, how much goodness could we create if we were more fully motivated by Christ’s love?

Another aspect of a child’s faith is complete honesty. When my youngest boy, Aaron, was small, his intellectual honesty extended even to his prayers. He’d tell God about his day—ramble on and on about his likes and dislikes, his weaknesses and strengths—until one of us would whisper, “You can stop, now.” When Aaron prayed, I was often tempted to open my eyes. God seemed so close, I was sure He was sitting on our sofa.

In much the same way, children do not rationalize sin away. Even when they stray, they don’t make excuses. Have you ever listened to a child try to convince a parent to buy sweets? They don’t say, “Ten out of twelve dentists claim this is good for your teeth.” It takes them a while before they justify, cajole and haggle like an adult. All they say is, “But I want it.” Their honesty reminds me of Huckleberry Finn who, after attempting to pray, said:

I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing ... but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.

Although we know that honesty is important, sometimes an adult’s most impressive rationalizations are invented during prayer. These are conversations that begin with, “If you’ll only do this once for me,” or “I can’t help how I feel,” or “If I don’t do it, someone else will.” Sometimes we attempt to make deals with God over sacred things. We’re like the Israelites, who occasionally avoided spiritual obligations by obedience to man-made protocol. Christ said of them: “They draweth nigh...with their mouth and honoureth...with their lips; but their heart is far from me.” He would rather our communication be like a child’s: “yea, yea; nea, nea.” For there is nothing more difficult to cleanse than the heart of a dishonest human being.

Finally there’s that aspect of childhood faith of which I'm continually amazed: a child’s curiosity. Despite their natural tendency to believe our every utterance, children still ask, “But why?” This isn’t because they doubt us, but because they crave greater understanding. As dutiful parents, we try not to let the incessant questions bother us. We realize that children have an instinct—a necessary and even divine instinct—to grow and learn, but we can’t always answer their questions. Sometimes they don’t make sense.

Other times, the problem is more complex. We might know the answer to an inquiry, but we can’t explain it in a way a child can understand. If a five-year old asks why the sky is blue, we might relate a few facts about the wave-particle duality of light and how each wavelength corresponds to a different perception of color, but that would only confuse a child. So we reply with something like this: God created all kinds of things for our joy and pleasure. While this is a fine—even truthful—answer, we hope the child will have progressed beyond it by the time he or she is taking a physics final in high school.

Is there a corollary here regarding our relationship with God? I believe so. In short, child-like faith requires trust, openness, complete honesty and an insatiable—almost fearless—hunger for truth. It’s the kind of faith that admits there is much we don’t understand and draws us into a loving, nurturing relationship with God. Nevertheless, while searching for truth, we shouldn’t always expect immediate answers. Sometimes our questions don’t make sense. At other times, God will say in no uncertain terms, that we'll have to dig further and mature a bit before we’re ready for an explanation. Yet, if we persist, the answers come. As Christ said, “Ask, and it shall be given you.” And notice this: He never once told us to be content with the status quo.

Consistent with this notion children are passionate about growth. In part, this passion is due to the realization that there is much they don’t know, an admission more powerful than any one individual's collected wisdom. That simple acknowledgement is the beginning of true learning and prevents the honest from being deceived by broadly-held, but incorrect, assumptions about the world.