He's Back!

In the current controversy about God Vs. science (notice God gets a capital letter but science does not?) what interests me most is the question of why humans believe - fiercely - that for which we have no evidence. Or at least not the sort of evidence - available to the five senses - that we in the west have agreed upon since the Enlightenment.

Why believe in God?

One explanation that gets no play in the debate is the long history of belief. How to account for the weight of tradition embedded in our past. I daresay most Americans know little to nothing about our founding, but we all pledge allegiance to the principles that drove the colonists to fight a war of independence from England. Which of us can recite the amendments to the Constitution that we all hold so dear? Or the 10 Commandments?

But the mere fact that they have been around a long time, have endured, gives them a certain credibility.

Is that because I think that if a lot of other people - some no doubt a lot smarter and more insightful than I am - have believed in God, in the Constitution, then it must be a good bet?

Yes, but that doesn't explain how those rebellious colonists or the earliest believers came to their conclusions. And, I hope, even though I place a lot of store in the wisdom of the ancients, along the way I keep my own eyes open, always looking to see if what I can observe computes with the wisdom I have received. Belief changes through the ages along with the circumstances of human life.

But belief - of all sorts - hangs on. Why?

Speaking for myself - and I have believed more things in my life than I would have thought possible - the reason is a combination of appropriate modesty and intellectual laziness. With maybe a pinch of irresponsibility thrown in.

Modesty, because I realize I am not clever enough to figure out the nature of reality on my own. Some days I can barely get myself together enough just to carry on a normal day's routine. So I read books to see what others have said. When I find something that resonates in me, I seriously consider it and often enough adopt it, at least for a while. I tend to get very excited when this happens, as if the whole scheme had been uncovered. It takes a little while for the euphoria to wear off. But it inevitably does because the new scheme is full of the inevitable holes of any human scheme.

But knowing my own limits - intellectually, in perspective - causes me to give credence to ideas and beliefs that have stood up over time.

Intellectual laziness, because trying to make sense of it all gives me a headache. I was one of thos little boys who used to lie out under the summer sky at night and try to imagine what was up with those stars. Once I got the basics about light years and that the light I was seeing often came from stars that had died centuries ago, the headaches began.

Not to mention the mysteries of my own behavior. Paul, whose letters are a precious few of the writings we have from the earliest days of what we now call Christianity, wrote, "The good that I would I do not; that which I would not I do. Woe is me! Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?"

Like most people I am filled with good intentions and resolutions. Like most people I violate them.

I wonder whether any other creature is capable of this self-defeating deceit?

But we are and it is the cause not only of incredible chaos and blood shed, but of anguish and self-hatred. Human perversity, which plagues our species, makes us willing to consider making ourselves obedient to anyone or anything that promises to deliver us from this conundrum. Irresponsible? No doubt. But most of us would sell our soul for a little peace around this vexing issue.

Thus, George Bush, the young rebellious drunk, has a conversion experience which is in fact his decision - made in the face of fear that his own peversity will be his end - to submit himself to God. To a code of conduct.

In itself a pretty useful device, since it can turn a life from wastrel to productive. I had such an experience at a younger age than Bush.

But potentially lethal because - as the opponents of belief are pointing out - it seems to usually contain an element of certainty and self-righteousness and evangelical fervor that can turn into hostile aggression against anyone who does not share the new belief.

Back to the question why humans believe. Does it have some survival benefit or is it something incidental to our survival?

To the extent that common belief acts as cement for groups of people, one can see its value. But because that same common belief often becomes the source of hostile aggressive acts against other groups with different beliefs, it would seem to work against our survival. At least our survival as a species. Is it possible that our survival drive is more parochia than species oriented?

I am unimpressed by the fervernt writings of the anti-God scientists who are on the best seller lists right now. Because they are defending a belief system with intensity equal to the most tedious evangelical. That their belief system is the scientific method - with a built in mechanism for testing its hypotheses - only describes the consensus we in the west have reached in the past 500 years. It is, nonetheless, a belief system.

I see no cause for defending God belief. It is there. Likely to remain for a long time. It will cause wars and motivate people to care for those who are weak and helpless.

Wanting to figure out why we believe may be like trying to take out our eyeballs and stare back at ourselves.

My guess is that a human being takes up belief of some sort - whether knowingly or not - the way a cat cleans itself.

As my high school class approaches our 50th reunion we have been in lots of email contact. One of the fun things about getting back in touch with these men - it was an all boys' school then - with whom I had virtually no contact until our 45th reunion, is that, despite many of them having had distinguished careers in positions of power and influence - we are all retired now and the posturing has largely given way to reflection.

So it is that we can enter into a conversation about the contentious and politically explosive matter of global climate change.

I have changed from my old habit of calling it global warming to calling it global climate change because I have been exposed to some science at Scripps Oceanographic Institute that suggests the evidence is confusing, even contradictory, about whether we may be about to lose the polar ice cap and see the sea level rise, or perhaps entering another ice age. Or it could even be that we will experience the first and it will be followed - quickly - by the second.

But that there is climate change, the class of 1959 all agree.

The disagreements among us are these: Is there clear evidence that the recent warming is systemic, not episodic? Can we say that our carbon emissions since the industrial revolution are the cause, or does growing evidence that warming and cooling of the planet is a natural recurring cycle quite apart from human causes? Even if you believe the planet is warming and there is clear danger the warming will make human habitation either tenous or even impossible, do we have the knowledge and resources to reverse that?

A couple of classmates - prone to conservative suspicion of human attempts to intervene in nature or the market place - believe this international panic, whether by principled or by cynical people - will so disrupt the economic life of the entire planet, that we should not make it a priority until and unless there is unchallenged scientific consensus.

I entered the conversation with a clear liberal position. We humans have been polluting the earth's atmosphere for 200 years and now - if you believe Al Gore - have a brief and narrow opportunity to change our ways before life here becomes untenable.

I now believe that the climate of the earth is in a period of rapid - and maybe catastrophic, for us - change. And our burning of fossil fuel has either caused or sped up the change.

A few years ago I happened into a lecture at Scripps Oceanographic at which I learned that the core drilling into the ice cap reveals that the earth over the past million years has cycled through 150,000 years of ice age, followed by 10,000 years of warming, followed again by 150,000 years of ice age and then 10,000 warming years with amazing regularity. Everyone seemed already to know that. But what surprised them was that when the change comes it comes in a jiffy. Like in a few years, less than a decade.

When you consider the dramatic changes a very few degrees of change in the climate or ocean can make, you can understand how it could be so rapid.

Because we, like every species, have a pretty significant interest in the survival of our species, it seems to me that if we are rational about this - a huge if - we would consider spending at least as much on trying to affect the climate as we do on making war on each other.

I doubt we will.

In fact, if and when the sea rises and makes refugees of millions of coastal people - like me - our response is much more likely to be more wars than more cooperation in solving the problem.

I have never thought we are a species marked for long term survival on this planet. Whether because of natural challenges - meteors and comets, climate - or those of our own making - war, competition - I'd bet our tenure will end up being shorter than that of our predecessor the dinosaur.

But I have come down in the argument among our classmates on the side of believing that we humans are a major cause of whatever is going on in the earth's climate, and it behooves us to bend our efforts to doing what we can to change.

Not because I think the evidence is clear, but because the other choice is more defeatist than even I can bear.

President Bush is accusing the Congress of meddling in the Iraq War.

His hubris knows no bounds.

Do you remember what happened to the general who suggested that we were invading Iraq with too few troops to be able to manage the occupation? He was fired - retired early is the phrase.

Has the president read the Constitution? In fairness, has any president since Franklin Roosevelt read it? He was the last president to ask the Congress to declare war, as the Constituion requires.

When the Korean conflict looked likely to go on indefinitely - or worse, widen into a war with China - with a continuing of terrible loss of lives on both sides, Congress voted to limit the fund available to carry on the war, and it began to wind down.

Now that the Democrats have found their voice - however tentatively - and begun to take their proper role in partnering with the executive branch in governing and war-making, the president is missing his old free hand.

Meddling? I hope so.

It's a phrase so familiar, we all use it and pretty much know and agree - we think - what it means.

Reminds me of Ronald Reagan resurrecting the piece of the address John Winthrop made as his ship made landfall in what we now call Massachusetts. He spoke about a light on a hill, an image taken from the Bible.

The way Reagan used it suggested that the whole world longed for a glimpse of the light of freedom that was on the high hill of the new world. (Ignoring that the freedom did not extend to those who had been in the land for some time before the people from the "old world" came.)

But the biblical passage has a different slant. In it the prophet is warning the people that God has cast a light on them so people could see if they lived up to the obligations of justice that God's blessing had placed upon them.

And that, I think, is more in keeping with the reality of what we call the American Dream.

Yes, our rhetoric has long been about freedom, justice, opportunity, no matter where you have come from or how modest your beginnings.

And, in contrast to most of the rest of the world, it has held real truth. It is no accident that immigrants - legal and illegal - have kept pouring into this country, believing they have a chance here to achieve their life dreams.

Those dreams are not complex. A shot a a job that will provide a decent living. A house, a good school, freedom to worship how you wish, or not at all, to speak your mind without fear of reprisal. A truly open economy in which one's children, if motivated, can rise to the highest places in industry, government, education. Or, if not to the highest place, to a place of respect and decent living.

So as we see the gap between fabulously rich and desperately poor grow larger, and jobs that provided solid middle-class lives disappear, the American Dream begins to lose its luster.

As an old-fashioned Democrat I would like to see labor unions regain the ability to represent working people against the power of management who want the most work for the least money. I would like to see our nation provide a safety net that really works for people who fall below some agreed upon subsistence level.

I am ambivalent about the so-called global economy. Because it looks a little as if it may be the American Dream extended to the whole world. But not, as reflexive free market people suggest, simply by letting the economy float and find its own levels. In fact we have not done that here in this country for a long time, because some of the bad bets made by the captains of our economy - the hedge funds, the auto companies, savings and loans - were deemed too integral to the well-being of our economy when they looked like they could sink. So the government combined with big business to rescue them.

I'm glad they did.

Now, how about doing the same for the bottom of the economy?

The American Dream is, of course, about opportunity, for everyone. Right now that opportunity seems drastically more out of reach to greater numbers than ever before.

Now that the Democrats have regained some traction in American politics, will we see a return of concern for those who do not fund the political parties? It will take courage, because a wrong-headed consensus among us since the Reagan years says that opportunites for big business and business leaders to make every larger profits is the key to a stronger America.

The American Dream is not about dominating the world, nor about nurturing an ever richer class of plutocrats.

But about respecting and protecting the dignity of people, especially those in the nation's lower ranks.

OK, finally.

The biggest rap on liberal clergy like me is that we don't take sin and evil seriously.

Probably the main reason is that I kept insisting that if we believe what we say about God - that God is love and that God is in charge of creation - then it follows, logically, that love rules over hate and evil.

And that means that, in the end - and the end is a sliding scale - no one and nothing is lost from God's love, no matter how profound the rebellion against God and love. Because, in the end, nothing is strong enough to stand against God's love.

I was accused of preaching license. And I think the accusation was fair. I think the Bible and the Christian religion preach license. Jesus is finally about standing against any claim that there are those outside God's kingdom.

So, what about sin? What about evil? What about the need for redemption?

The most powerful description of sin is "partial, incomplete."

Someone calls Jesus perfect. Jesus says, "No one is perfect except God."

What I take this to mean is that God is the only one that is complete. Because God is all in all. The rest of us are partial, a part of the whole.

What does this have to do with evil, sin and the need for redemption?

Whenever we try to make a claim to being All, comprehensive - which is characteristic of humans - we sponsor sin. Evil, the breakdown of reality, comes from our trying to play God.

How about a baby dying? Or a person getting murdered as they walk along the street? What about getting cancer? What about the gross unfairness of life? The super rich and the desperate poor?

What about the gross reality that we are born only to so quickly die?

I doubt we humans will ever accept our proper place in the order of things. Everyone, everything must die so others may live. Perhaps if you or I were designing this creation we would do it differently. We humans are one piece of this puzzle. Because we can think and make language we sometimes think we are different, not really a part of the rest.

Thinking and making language is cool, fascinating. But it does not exempt us from being part of the larger process.

In fact we don't really have the capacity or perspective to know good from evil. It was Justice Potter Stewart who famously said in a pornography case that came before the Supreme Court that he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So we believe about sin and evil. But just as Justice Stewart depended on his personal perception to identify pornography, we depend on how we are affected by events and each other to determine when we have been visited by sin and evil.

The notion that life can be cruel - and so can we be - is right. Pain, grief, sickness, death all feel like an assault on good and God. There is no way to counter that sense.

I know that I will die, and that I am a day closer to dying than I was yesterday. Inexorable, this march towards my end. I accept that - in fact, when I make serious thought about it, I even welcome it - but I expect to rail against it like every other creature, since I am a part of the evolutionary scheme in which living is something we are programmed to sustain as long as we can.

But I am also old and am beginning to sense that my end is not a tragedy.

And that the evil and sin I have seen - and in which I have participated - will require a backwards perspective that I cannot have. I canot know how these things will look to people - assuming there are people to look - 500 years from now.

Do I take sin and evil seriously? Yes, I experience them first hand. I find facing them much like finding myself face to face with a terrorist.

Am I in need of redemption? Probably not.

Simply finding myself in existence is enough. The sense of the need for redemption has been fostered by church and society to control behavior. An understandable and justifiable effort. But not an insight into the nature of reality.

Reality is simply what is, neither good nor bad. Our experience of it varies as our senses vary. We are a piece of this reality. Neither good nor bad. Just are.

The wonder is that, in this universe which is 99% nothing (or is it dark matter?), there is anything at all rather than nothing. And another wonder is that, against unfathomable odds, you and I are instead of aren't. We recently weren't and soon again won't be.

Cool to have been here.

My piece on sin, redemption and evil have been on hold for a few days while other matters have pressed in. Again today, I have a somewhat more personal concern, although you may well see a connection with the piece I have been putting off.

For as long as I can remember I have had periods of what the world would likely label depression, but that doesn't quite hit the target for me. It is more a matter of what we used to call SSI - shitty self-image.

And what will trigger it is a perceived failure of any sort. Could be losing a tennis match, a fight with someone I care about, a caustic review of something I have written.

What it suggests is that my image of myself is fragile and dependent on a lot of reassurance from others. My wife would confirm this.

For a large part of my adult life I have entered into various schemes and disciplines to try to change this dynamic. Psychotherapy, spiritual direction, meditation, yoga, serious diet changes, prayer, biofeedback.

As I look back I would say there are a precious few that have been effective, though - and I think this is mostly a result of living long enough to have some perspective and to experience a slowdown in testosterone-driven ambition - I have come to like myself much better in the past decade or so.

Writing is a tonic for me. Thus this piece today. I think I have always like to write because it is how I discover what is going on inside me. Feelings, thoughts that I have been unable to locate, appear on the page or screen. And perhaps writing does for me what some say dreaming does; provides an arena in which to work out conflicts and confusion.

After I fell asleep at the wheel of my truck last summer - not the first time I have fallen asleep while driving, but the first time I hit something before I woke, a tree - I went for a sleep study under the direction of a neurologist. He said his reading of the tests was that I have had mild narcolepsy my whole life. He prescribed a mild upper and suggested I fiddle with the dosage and see how it works.

I did and it seems to work well for me. He had said that if it works I would likely notice nothing except that I wouldn't get drowsy through the day as I always have. And that is what it has been like. No more nodding off over the keyboard or when reading. And the effect wears off in time for me to get reasonable sleep at night.

What's more - and my wife has mentioned this - I seem more cheerful, like myself better, worry less about the stock market and whether my writing is Pulitzer quality.

But I am still me. This weekend I did a lot of conflict, with my wife, with a friend, with my children, and mostly with myself. I began to feel myself slipping into that dark place.

And I hadn't taken a Provigil yesterday. I fell asleep reading the paper and watching basketball on TV.

A certain amount of conflict seems important to me. I used to think my wife was particularly difficult, constantly giving me advice I haven't asked for. In fact I am very hard to live with. In fact anyone who is even slightly conscious is difficult to live with. Living together is a desire put into us by our instinct for carrying on the species, but we are not - especially opposite genders - particularly well designed for living together.

And once we have birthed and launched our children, the terms have to change. So we fight our way through it. And I am so grateful that my wife is willing to do that. She doesn't like it much, and she wins way more fights that she loses - though she might tell you not - but the most important thing is that she hangs in with me.

And, more than writing, more than Provigil or the exercise to which I am addicted, her constancy is what resets my inner sense of myself when I feel worthless.

I tell myself this is a part of being human. I have no idea, of course, whether this is a part of your being human.

But in the end that doesn't much matter. What matters is - having accepted that this is a part of who I am, and no amount of discipline is going to make me someone else - that I find ways to modfy it enough to live in relationship, and to live with myself.

And so far, so good.

My self-assigned topic for this entry was sin/redemption/evil. I will get to that soon.

Today I am filled with feelings for the Edwards as they announce that Elizabeth's breast cancer has returned and spread to her bones, and perhaps - we hope not - to her lungs.

Both said John's campaign will continue.

My first reaction was that is bravado that will become pathos soon.

Second thought is that, if his running for President is the most important thing in their life, what they want to spend their energy doing more than anything else, then they are making the right choice.

I don't think he has a realistic shot at winning. But I didn't think Bill Clinton had a chance either.

But this decision isn't finally about whether he can win. Nor is it about his thinking he has been anointed by God to do this, which I hope he doesn't. He might make a fine president, but then so might a half dozen others who are running.

The issue is doing what he wants to do. More than anything.

I once took a job in a church in Washington, D.C. across Lafayette Park from the White House. Older, wiser friends warned me that the job would prove to be a bad move for me. But when I saw that my office would overlook the White House, I knew I would go. Somehow it fulfilled my dreams of being in on the big events without having to do the nasty taxing work of running for office.

Had my wife had cancer I probably would have gone ahead with the job. Nothing was more important to me then than being in the thick of the action, living in the fast lane.

The job was the low point of my career. But I learned a lot about myself, about what seduces me and can cause me to make choices that do not feed me.

I know, this isn't about me; it's about John and Elizabeth Edwards.

Who can say what is the core of a marriage? One's own or someone else's? If the Edwards have focused their life on his running for President, then dropping out because of her cancer - and likely early death - would make him resentful and her feel like a burden. Not the way to live, with cancer or not.

John Edwards is younger than I am. Maybe those testosterone-driven desires remain at the top of his list.

When I lay down my professional mantle a decade ago, I felt emasculated and afraid for a year or more. Then the realization that I was now free to explore without obligation to a community I had agreed to lead was like being let out of jail. This has become the happiest, most creative, most productive chapter of my life.

I shudder to think where I might be now had I had a shot at high office, bishop. And taken it.

I so hope the Edwards are able to look hard at whether what nourishes them now is a big arena or a chance to explore their own relationship and listen to their inner voices.

A terminal diagnosis offers an opportunity to get real, drop the oughts and shoulds, face down the ego that knows it will soon be shelved.

If that is what their decision yesterday represents, God love them. Go for it.

If in a while they have second thoughts, have them. Listen and have the courage to make another choice.

I was on schedule this morning to write about sin, redemption and evil, which I promise to do soon. No doubt you are eager to have those thorny matters resolved. Like Godot, we'll have to wait a little longer.

But this morning as I walked by a news stand I saw a headline just above the fold of the LA Times, saying "Episcopal Church Says No To Demands of the Anglican Communion." My heart leapt as it has not since Presiding Bishop John Hines in 1968 pledged the church to an effort to right the historical wrongs of the church in this country in the matter of slavery and race.

Reading further - below the fold - it turns out not to be quite the comprehensive stand I had hoped, and still hope. That would include not only reaffirming the Episcopal Church's hard won decision to ordain woman priests and bishops, gay priests and bishops, but the entire spectrum of decisions made over the past generation to come down on the side of justice for people who have traditionally been ignored or pushed aside, rather than on the side of those who want to make the church's mission focus on purity of belief and practice.

It is an ancient tension in all religion. One could argue that it is behind much of the conflict in the wider world today.

In the Islamist world there has been a move to return Islam to a time in which infidelity of any sort - whether sexual or theological - is met with swift and severe - even capital -punishment.

It is not as easy for us to see the same conflict in our own culture. But it is here and we would not be in Iraq as we are had the purity party not prevailed in the ranks of the Republican Party.

Whether the issue is sexual morality, sexual identity, economic certainty, political ideology, there are those one one side who say compromise and accomodation are necessary, even desirable, parts of the dynamic when figuring out how to proceed. While they may hold strong views about all those matters, they also understand that certainty is unavailable in real life, so making the compromises does not offend their sense of integrity.

But those who call for purity are very different. You may have heard the interview yesterday with Tom Delay, the deposed former House Whip. When asked about what has been called the "K Street Project," - the move to cleanse the ranks of the lobbyists on K Street of any Democrats (historically, while the party in power does enjoy more clout among the lobbyists, the minority party always has had its share) - Delay said, unabashedly, "Why would I do anything to help the enemy?"

Ever since Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union "The Evil Empire," the move toward unfettered free market capitalism (in theory, hardly in fact, since we use government clout to protect big business), in bed with fundamentalist, apocalyptic Christianity, has run amok.

The Episcopal Church has consistently - but hardly unanimously - moved in the opposite direction over the past 40 years. Every since throwing in its lot with the leaders of the civil rights movement, the church has allied herself with the rights of people - women, people of color, economically deprived, gay people - who struggle for a place at the table.

There has been considerable opposition. Not so long ago, The Episcopal Church was mocked as the Republican Party at prayer. No longer, but those who loved the old church as it was, (or as it portrayed itself), rich, aristocratic, clubby, have left a legacy. Interestingly, the big push against the justice movement in the church has come since the Episcopal Church became more diverse, especially economically. That is subject for another piece.

But as the more conservative, economically, and especially sexually, members of the Anglican Communion, especially in Africa, began pushing against our practices, I wondered how we would react.

I have love being a part of the world wide Anglican Communion, made up of far more people of color and from the southern hemisphere than the old Anglo-American identity with which I grew up. But the combination of the strong patriarchal character that much of Africa and Latin-America retains, and the irresistible opportunity for the people who were under the colonial thumb of the west for 200 years to exercise power over their old masters, has made the Anglican majority push back hard against our practices.

Today's move was only a limited one. It was to reject the request to have bishops from conservative places - Uganda and others - oversee conservative churches in this country that were unhappy with our practices.

No.

We have already lost a large number of people over the past generation, and this will cost us more.

So be it.

So, what about international affairs in this new age?

In some ways the whole game changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period marked by nationalism, nations competing and cooperating, trading, warring - nation against nation - while remnants remain, is no more.

The attemtps to manage that world began with the abortive League of Nations after humankind frightened itself with the unprecedented carnage of WWI, and managed, albeit tentatively, to accomplish with the formation of the United Nations at the end of WWII.

In many ways, despite Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia breaking up, the United Nations can be said to have carried out its purpose of providing a forum in which nations could stay in contact even when they had seemingly irreconcilable differences, amazingly well.

At the close of WWII, with the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan by the United States, a betting person would have put money on the likelihood of nuclear devastation ending the human experiment within a few years. We now know that we came close a couple of times, but it turned out that, no matter how angry, nations decided in the end that had too much at stake to risk it all.

Nations no longer are the only significant players on the international stage. Probably, since the Sovet annexation of much of eastern Europe, our military presence spread across the globe to protect our interests - especially our need for oil - nations as the definition that explained the world was already outdated.

When we supported the Afghans after the Soviets invaded, we might have seen - had not our vision been limited by the past - that we were getting into a new arena in which old tribal and ethnic groups, more loyal to those identities than to any nation, would require new ways of thinking and acting.

The rise of Islam - or perhaps the rise of our awareness of Islam - has seemed to throw everything about our posture in the world into a cocked hat.

We shook around in the 70s and 80s as we watched the Japanese - who seemed more disciplined and hard working than we - take a bigger palce in the world economy. As Hondas and Toyotas flooded our roads, we wondered if we were going to be eclipsed by that relatively small island nation.

When the Japanese economy slumped, and then the Soviet Union collpased under the weight of its own inner contradictions, it looked as if we were set for a long free reign in the world. Coincidentally, conservative Republicans, pushing back against the excesses of the 60s and the national shame of losing a war against a tiny backward Asian people, came to power. And they believed that history fell our way because free market captialism, which became, along with a weird resurgence of American fundamentalist religion in one of our cyclical Great Awakenings, our national creed.

We set out to export all this to the rest of the world, certain that we had a mandate - another American peculiar, this sense of missionary to the world - to mold the world in this image while we had the power to do that.

Enter Islamist terrorists - whom we empowered when we armed them against the Soviets - and their use of technology, and you have the events of September 11, 2001.

What no one has dared suggest is that those who planned and carried out those attacks that day were a small tribal group who could never, in their wildest dreams, have imagined that they would succeed as sensationally as they did. The combination of our inability to conceive of such a thing - despite intelligence that all but spelled it out - and their having nothing to lose, along with a pile of good luck for them and bad luck for us, explains that day.

The reason they could dare such a thing is that they represented no nation.

In our understandable rage, we retaliated the only way we knew how. We attacked another nation. First Afghanistan where it seems possible to make the case that was appropriate, because the training and support for the terrorists had taken place in that nation. And Al Quaida - the closest we could come to a label for the terrorists - had taken over what passed for a government there.

And we might have succeeded in at least diminishing thier ability to make mischief around the world had we remained focused in Afghanistan. No doubt, since terrorists, by definition, melt back into the background when faced with superior power, we would not have totally eliminated the threat. But we apparently did make headway into crippling their organization.

When we took the fight to Iraq - for reasons we may never fully understand - we took a serious wrong turn. And now we are bogged down in the same quagmire from which the British fled early in the last century after an experience much like ours, and the Soviets the same from Afghanistan, and the Russians presently are in a similar mess in Chechnya.

How much of this is pure Islam and how much the kind of chaotic breakdown of nations formed by the Great Powers after the two world wars, is not yet clear. The sobering events in the Balkans, where the death of Tito - much like the deposing of Hussein in Iraq - gave vent to the tribal and ethnic animosities that were kept at bay by despotic rule, make one look at Iraq with some despair.

Who knows whether the defeat of Islam by the Christian west 500 years ago is a chicken coming home to roost now?

Who knows whether an Enlightenment, which we in the west have regarded as the underpinning of our progress and success in the world, may also infect the Islamist world once they feel they have achieved a place of legitimacy and honor in the world community? Religious fanatacism requires an ongoing sense of being persecuted, disrespected.

And perhaps you have noticed that, as the Islamist challenge to us has grown, so has the retreat among us of what one might call pre-enlightenment sentiments. Fundamentalist religion and economics, harsher attitudes toward social and sexual differences. A greater proportion of our population in prison than any other western nation. The only western nation to still have the death penalty. A growing gap between rich and poor.

Will our response to the challenge of the Islamist world be to become more like them? If so - especially since nuclear weapons are now in the hands of many nations and will eventually be in terrorist hands - we are lost.

If we take a step back - which will require courage uncharacteristic of American political life - and see that it is precisely our identity as an immigrant nation, welcoming people of incredibly diverse racial, ethnic origin, in a world in which all interests - even those of small groups within nations - are due respect for their dignity, we have a chance.

How the world's greatest military and economic power comes to see that it's might is useless against these small tribal groups, is a huge challenge. Most of my friends still believe we ought to move with all our might against any who challenge or threaten our interests, anywhere in the world.

If that attitude prevails - and George Bush has been president of that view - I would say we are headed into the worst - and perhaps the final - period in human history.

It is tempting to say that terrorism is a recent phenomenon to which we have not yet adapted.

Our leaders speak of terrorism as if it were an ideology, the way we used to speak of Communism or fascism or even nihilism. Threats to the orderly ways of decent people and civilization.

In fact terrorism is as old as we are. The stories in the Genesis Bible accounts of the Hebrews seeking to escape their Egyptian captivity are filled with terrorism. Plagues of frogs, hemorrhoids, killing of first born sons. The perpetrator of those terrorist acts was God.

Terrorism is the tactic of the weak against the strong.

The colonial militia in what we now call our War of Independence used tactics that the British considered terrorist. Instead of marching in straight, disciplined lines across open terrain, our forebearers hid behind trees and walls and fired at the British.

Shortly after the shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, I was talking with two others about the events. One of the men, who was British, asked us how long we thought it would take for Americans to get over the shock. Without hesitation, my American friend said, "We will never get over it; we will never be the same people again."

Even allowing for the habitual short memory of we Americans - after all, it had only been 60 years since Pearl Harbor - the passionate intensity of his response was startling.

Our British friend had an interesting take. "I went through the blitz of London, and I was on the escalator at Harrods when the IRA blew it up. We finally figured that terrorism was a nasty part of the way things are and we had better get used to it if we were to have a life. We feel badly that you Yanks have had to go through this, but the rest of the world has been at it for a long time. I'd guess you'll figure out how to live with it, too."

As a boy I went to cowboy and indian movies in which the indians were the terrorists. In those days I assumed - as George Bush and Dick Cheney seem to today - that was because they were treacherous. Bad people fighting against the good people - us. It never occured to me to consider that Native Americans - outnumbered and outgunned - chose the only tactic that holds promise for people who face such odds.

We have been one of the world's two most powerful nations since the end of WWII. And we have been the only super power since the collapse of the Soviet Union. We watched the Soviets get bogged down, first in Afghanistan, then Chechnya, by terrorist tactics. We even armed and financed the terrorists they faced in Afghanistan, which is why those same people who are now fighting us, are so well trained and armed.

But, perhaps because of our unique geographical location - two vast oceans separating us from Europe and Asia - we never considered that being the most powerful nation would subject us to terrorism. Our naivte likely cost us the horror and humiliation of 9/11.

But is it a war, this struggle against terrorism?

I think not. And I think it is our effort to deal with it as a nation would a war that is the chief reason we are failing. So long as we try to defeat terrorism by attacking nations, Afghanistan, Iraq - God help us, Iran - we will become bogged down in the same kind of morass we face today in Iraq.

So long as here are nations, we have a common interest with all nations in curbing terrorism. Terrorism is as big a threat to Iran as it is to us. Arguably - since most of the world's terrorists come from their region - greater. Some of those nations have made common currency - as we did with Bib Laden when he fought the Soviets - because for the moment they see us as a greater threat.

But if we can ever grow out of our love of considering ourselves the good nation and identifying our rivals - whether for oil or trade or political system - as evil, we can begin to see that cooperation with other nations is the way to combat terrorism.

This Manichean picture of the world - good against evil - has strong roots in American history. Perhaps it served us well in fighting nasty, expensive wars against Japan and Germany. It is no longer serving us.

Terrorists are people with a purpose. To speak of senseless terrorism or to call terrorists who kill civilians cowards, may win votes among Americans who still love John Wayne movies, but it obscures the reality we must face if we are to make any headway in battling this debilitating problem.

Terrorists mean to demoralize more powerful nations whom they oppose. They succeeded in Viet Nam and they are succeeding in Iraq. No amount of military superiority - short of total annihilation - will succeed against terrorism.

One can only hope we can somehow stagger along until this administration leaves power. And that we Americans have not become so conditioned to the counter-productive swagger the Bush administration has called foreign policy, that we elect yet another such president.

In my next blog I will try to address the thorny question of how radical Islam may have changed the equation of international affairs.

When I was accepted to begin my Masters of Divinity at seminary, in 1963, I received, along with all the other documents, one explaining that the seminary operated on the old German system. That is, to undertake a course of study at the graduate level, you must already be conversant with the body of material that makes up that discipline's field of study.

In the case of seminary it was the Bible. They assumed that you already knew pretty much what was in the Bible.

Well, they didn't exactly assume it; they would probe us to make sure we did. Before we could matriculate, begin classes, we needed to pass an exam on the content of the Bible.

I took a terrible fright. What I knew of the Bible you could fit into the navel of a gnat.

I had been to Sunday School as a boy and to church quite a bit growing up. I sort of knew what readings from the Bible sounded like. But I had no idea what was in it, what it was about, or why it mattered.

So that summer - I was teaching Summer School at a boarding school - I got hold of the Oxford Shorter Bible, The College Outline Series, and began making lists, outlines and memorizing.

My first surprise was how much of the stories and how many of the names were familiar. I knew of them the way I knew some of the Uncle Remus stories and Grimm's Fairy Tales. I had heard them - many times in some cases - and they felt like stories from my own family, but I didn't know why they had been saved and told or in what context.

The Bible has become a source of contention in the culture and political wars.

For some it contains the Word of God, quite literally. They believe that God dictated the words of the Bible to faithful scribes. So every word is not only true - a confusing claim since the Bible contains so many internal contradictions - but sacred in much the way the Constitution is sacred for some Americans. It is an iviolable blueprint for life.

For others the Bible is an important literary document that scholars can use to trace a current of history that has made a major impact on the formation of western culture. Those who hold this view may be either agnostic or entirely skeptical about whether the words are in any way different from or more sacred than the writings of any other document.

The Episcopal Church - which is famous for fudging issues that tear other churches apart - says the Bible contains all things necessary for salvation.

The first major paper assinged to first year seminary students a half century ago was on the sources of the Pentatuech. In layman's language this meant we were to go to the library and begin to investigate what was known about who wrote the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, sometimes called the Books of Moses.

And there we were faced with scholarship that has divided Christendom - and maybe the whole world in various forms. German scholars in the 19th century applied the then new tools of literary criticism - language, grammar, style - to the Bible and discovered there are several layers of writing from different eras and different cultures that were later woven together into a single document.

It says volumes about my age and generation that I still prefer most of the King James language to the many more recent - and arguably more faithful to the original languages - translations. Not because they are more accurate or even easier to understand, but because their cadence and rhythm are so familiar to me, like an old song I have heard all my life.

The Bible? I find the Bible a rich record of how our forebears - those would be the forebears of the Judeo-Christian world - understood and tried to tell and preserve what they understood to be the treasures of their tribes.

Is it a sacred book? Yes. Is the Koran? Yes.

Is it a guide for living? By and large, no. Only in the general sense, in its insistence that human history is infused with sacred meaning. Not in suggesting what is the right way to live. Slavery and patriarchy are sanctioned by the Bible. Charging interest for loans is forbidden. Divorce and adultery are forbidden, at least for women. A man can divorce his wife simply by decalring three times that he is divorcing her.

I am grateful to have been pushed by the requirements of seminary to become conversant with the Bible.

In the cyber world I doubt more than a handful of people will ever again immerse themselves in it the way we seminarians did. But many of the stories will survive. Because they resonate with human beings wrestling with the messy conundrum of existence the way Jacob wrestled with the angel - who turned out to be God - all night, and who gave him a mortal wounding in his private parts before he left Jacob, exhausted, at dawn.

I think I understand the impulse to make of the Bible a literal handbook. And I devoutly believe that is an impulse we humans must resist. It tempts us to believe there may be some power outside of ourselves that will resolve the quandries that life here present. There is no such power.

The Bible sheds light on that hard reality.

It dawned on me some years ago that perhaps the most brilliant insight into the basic nature of reality was the ancient Hebrew Shema - Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Why brilliant?

Because what it is claiming is that reality is indivisible, one.

The western world has been in retreat from this insight since the Enlightenment. Necessarily so, since it was unthinkable to challenge God's supremacy even as Copernicus and his heirs began to make pragmatic observations that seemed to challenge the claims religion had long made.

Rene Descartes is the one we usually point the finger at for the split of reality that we have been trying to heal for 500 years. Descartes gave permission for us to use one sort of evidence for what we can discern with our five senses, and another for what we believe but cannot discern through our senses.

Mind/body. Spirit/material. Body/soul. We all know this method well.

Now the inquiry is shifting. The world of advanced physics - quantum mechanics, string theory - has raised profound questions about whether the consensus about the nature of material reality is as straightforward as we have long believed. It may be that, just for instance, a particle can be in two places at once. And Einstein - who was disturbed by his own findings because they seemed to him to challenge common sense - showed that time is a dimension that changes as one approaches the speed of light.

Not surprisingly, most God people are not fluent in advanced physics. And many of the most sophisticated scientists turn out to have what I consider a surprisingly simplistic understanding of religion and its claims.

When I was in seminary in Cambridge, Masachusetts in the early 60s, we heard there were some Episcopalian biblical literalists and fundamnetalists who met nearby. Such a thing was unimaginable to us. We assumed all Episcopalians were like us, liberals who understood the metaphorical nature of religious language. So we were curious to meet these people.

After several inquiries we were led to a Bible study group at MIT, the center of scientific inquiry. In the ultra-modern chapel (designed by Ero Saarinen) at that citadel of science, we sat in astonishment as these brilliant young scientists pledged their allegiance to the literal truth of the Bible. We could have perhaps imagined such a thing among cola miners in West Virginia (oh, our prejudices were endless), but among these brilliant young minds?

And now we are in the midst of wars led by British and American scientists against all religious claims. Their beef is with the terrible harm done to human well being by religious intransigence. By the ignornace and stiff-neckedness about the lack of evidence for even the most basic issue - a belief in God. And by the human slaughter triggered by religious zealots.

Like radical Islamists and the Bush/Cheney administration.

Who could quarrel?

Long ago I began to feel uneasy as I admitted to myself that I did not understand the Christian religion in the same way as most of those who sat in the pews while I presided at worship.

I have never believe there is a god. Paul Tillich, the existentialist theologian was the first to point out that belief in God is idolatry. Because it claims one's intellect can capture what the Hebrews always understood to be ineffable. Which is why - among other reasons - it was, and still is, forbidden for Jews to speak the divine name.

So what are we to make of religion as science has showed that the earth is not the center of even our solar system, and we humans are not the crown of creation?

On the most pragmatic level the issue is God or me. If God is God then I am not. If no God, that leaves me with a burden that I had best work out the fate of the whole enterprise. Pretty primitive, no doubt, but always seemed a practical view to me.

But in the end I suspect the matter will come down to personalities more than to evidence. The world is one, indivisible. But different types will see that one world very differently, and will choose vastly different stances towards it.

I will, within the hour, say Mass at the neighboring church. What do I think I am doing? I am taking part in symbols that point to and, perhaps, in some way participate in and feed the deepest mysteries of our finding ourselves here.

None of us knows quite how we ended up here, or how our stay will end. But it doesn't take a mathematician to imagine the odds against our having found ourselves in existence. The universe is 96% nothing - or what is being called dark matter - and you and I have been given a shot at the tiny 4%.

Worthy of worship and acknowledging the mystery and my dependence on some process beyond my understanding or control?

To me it is.

When I was a boy in school 60 years ago the worst thing one could call a boy was "sissy."

Somehow calling a girl a "tomboy" was not an insult.

But both suggested that the person had gone across whatever line existed that distinguishes a male from a female.

As i grew into adolescence, the insult grew more malevolent - "fag." Perhaps "Butch" came into the language then, although I suspect it was later. But since we were now morphing into full sexual beings, the insults focused on not fitting some template of fully male or female.

Oddly, having gone to boys' boarding schools for five years, four years of college, three years of seminary, my first open encounter with a homosexual was when I was nearly thirty years old. A colleague whom I admired made a sexual pass at me at a clergy gathering when he was quite drunk.

The next morning, in his embarrassment, he began to list all the clergy whom he knew to be gay. Many of them were the most respected and effective leaders of the church. I was shocked and distressed. I wondered if ordination was a secret hideout for homosexual men. I was not sufficiently self-aware then to wonder why it felt so threatening to me.

As I look back thirty years to that incident, I can see so many things having to do with gender that I had never considered. The most important is a combination of self-awareness, courage, and subtlety. And dignity.

During a four month sabbatical in Charleston, S.C. in 1995, I saw an article in the paper about Dawn, a woman who was going to sign her books at a bookstore downtown. She had been born a hermaphrodite - a person with the genitals of both genders - in England where such a person was considered legally male. She was raised as a boy but she said she always knew her inner identity was female. Her family moved to Charleston where they were a part of the shabby aristocracy of that old southern city.

Dawn read about the gender clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore where they were doing surgery to complete the sex organs of people like Dawn to give them the life they wanted. They examined her, confirmed that she was a good candidate and, after several years of rigorous, often painful surgery, hormone injections and therapy, she emerged a woman.

She moved back to Charleston, married her family's former - black - chauffer, and, incredibly, conceived and bore a daughter. One can only imagine how genteel Charleston - still emotionally battling the issues of the Civil War and the break up of plantation life - received Dawn.

She got the ultimate revenge; she wrote a book about her experiences.

When I saw she was going to be speaking about her book and signing copies, I had to go. I watched her from behind a bookcase for a while before she spoke. She was aging, wrinkled, bent over with osteoporsis, moving very slowly. But when she began to speak she carried an aura of dignity and sense of herself that was quite moving. Her mocha-skinned, breathtakingly beautiful daughter stood beside her.

When I got to the front of the line to have her sign her book for me, I said, "What a brave woman you are! Daring to claim your identity against such overwhelming odds is so impressive."

She looked up at me with a sunny smile. "I only hope your life might be half as exciting as mine has been," she said.

I was struck mute.

A gay music director in one of the churches I worked in told me I was the most flaming heterosexual he had ever known. Others have told me I have a well developed feminine side. Occasionaly a gay man has assumed I was gay.

That's all to the point. Gender identity - quite apart from the type of genital apparatus - is as mysterious as the nature of consciousness. It is something so close and so compelling - we are, after all, an animal programmed to keep the species going - that not only is it impossible to measure one's self on the scale of masculine/feminine, but until and unless one becomes comfortable with one's sexual self, it can be a terrifying issue.

The Episcopal Church has struggled quite openly and contentiously with this issue for the past twenty or more years. We now ordain openly gay men and women, and most recently have upset our colleagues in the African church by ordaining a bishop who is in an openly gay relationship. Many of us bless gay relationships in near marriage ceremony.

Knowing my own odyssey with this issue, I can understand the uneasiness. Having lived in Africa, I think there is some hypocrisy their fierce opposition. But then, we in the American church refused to discuss or face the issue for generations even though it was well known that a disproportionate number of the clergy were closeted homosexuals.

But we have faced it and it has been a transforming event for the American church. If we are to be the church we can never turn our backs on the hard won new attitudes toward gender.

A friend once siad he thinks ten percent or so of people are clearly homosexual, and ten percent of people are clearly heterosexual, and all the rest of us are somewhere along a continum that runs between the two extremes, and we move back and forth along that continum at various points in our lives.

The point is that our gender and sexuality is an expression of our identity, of our integrity, akin to our voice and manner of walking and shaking hands. By and large it is a private matter, inappropriate for public display. But there are moments in which we celebrate in public ways those private matters - marriage being perhaps clearest.

There are not right and wrong sexual identities any more than being right or left handed is right or wrong. Affirming people's core identity is an obligation of God-people.

In the end one only experiences oneself.
- Friedrich Nietzsche


My mother, who died 24 years ago, was post-modern. Though she would never own up to it, she believed anything she saw or experienced could be made much more interesting in the recounting – written or spoken – if she did not feel bound to the hard facts.

My family would likely tell you I am her heir in that.

In the recent debates between scientists and God-people, climate-change mongers and angry skeptics, string-theory mystics and rationalist physicists, the question of what we really know – and how we know it – has retaken center stage.

When I first encountered Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – that says we can never be certain we have observed or measured something with absolute accuracy because the mere observation of it changes it – I felt my mother and I had been somewhat vindicated.

I do rely primarily on my five senses for navigating most days. I don’t step in front of moving vehicles and carry an umbrella when it looks threatening.

But a whole other realm surrounds us that challenges the rationalist consensus we have constructed in the west since the Enlightenment.

Here is a quote from “The Denialists,” an article in last week’s New Yorker by Michael Specter in which you can feel the author’s frustration. He is quoting Herbert Vilakazi, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town, who spent his adolescence in Hartford and did his undergraduate degree at Columbia, and who, among many other S. African leaders, challenges western medicine’s consensus about the cause and treatment of AIDS:

“The West simply took it for granted that the mind of humanity was full of nothing but error, rubbish, nonsense, and superstition until Whites appeared with a superior mind…The West then proceeded, with amazing folly, to start accumulating modern scientific thought, using the famous ‘scientific method’…without paying the least respect to, without building upon, the knowledge accumulated by Africans, Asians, and Native Americans.”

One western scientist is quoted in the article as saying this attitude towards AIDS treatment is tantamount to murder.

How can we know?

Despite having spent my entire adult life in the God business, I do not believe there is a shred of evidence the senses can provide for God. Or for that matter, for consciousness.

Though we humans have built civilizations around them, we do not understand or agree what we mean when we speak of God or consciousness.

Perhaps you saw the article in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, “Out There,” by Richard Panek. The teaser line reads, “Dark energy, an invisible, undetectable force that seems to break all the rules of physics, may be about to redefine the universe.”

The money quote: “Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be – the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest – 96 percent of the universe – is…who knows?”

Mom and I knew it! We and all this stuff aren’t much, and so far we don’t know much. As a western Christian, things look a certain way to me, and likely, if I had AIDS, I would take antiretroviral drugs.

Dark matter and dark energy are the seemingly pedestrian names given to the 96 percent of the universe we can’t see or measure . They call it dark, not because it is invisible or distant but because it is unknown for now. And it may be that the human intellect (consciousness?) hasn’t sufficient horsepower to ever unpack it.

Unbalancing as it is, our dearest beliefs about what is true are not necessarily supported by the structures of the universe. About God and viruses and free market economies. Or consciousness.

Acting on what seems our best information is what we all must do. But with more humility than we are accustomed to.

And Mom and I may feel free to tell our stories.

But first a nod to the amazing feat of Canas, the Argentine who defeated Roger Federer in the first round of the Masters event at Indian Wells yesterday. I watched the match for about half the first set, assumed, even though Canas was holding his own against the seemingly invincible world number one, that Federer would take charge and finish him off without fanfare. So when I saw this morning that Canas had beaten him in straight sets - 6-2 in the second - I thought it had to be marked here.

Hats off to Canas who is just back from a suspension for having been tested positive for performance enhancing drugs.

Perhaps a good way to begin this piece on war and peace. I love watching sporting events. I am a fair weather fan, not really getting into the full season mode but waiting until the results become critical - playoff time - and then tune in.

I almost always cheer for the home team. And since I migrate between Vermont and California, my home team changes. So I am a chamelian fan. I cheer for the New England Patriots when I am in Vermont and for the San Diego Chargers which I am in California.

Surely this is a hangover from when gladiators of warring cities dueled to decide which city is in ascendancy.

War seems to be in the blood or gray matter of the human species. We compete and the competition often - when one side becomes frustrated or sees itself falling behind - turns to violence.

For about the same period of time I was a vegetarian - 10 years - I tried to discipline myself to be a pacifist. I am an admirer of Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Passive resistance, non-violent resistance seem to me not only the most heroic of human stances towards injustice, but the only way that results in a real change rather than simply a shift in who wields the power.

Walter Wink, a theologian, has written about what he thinks Jesus was really up to. He calls it Jesus' refusal to take part in the domination system.

Whether because I had a dominating father or because of five distasteful adolescent years in the oppressive world of boys' boarding school modeled on the old British system, I have a knee-jerk fierce response to any situation in which I feel coerced. Or maybe even given too strong a suggestion.

Ask my wife.

Domination by one person of another - however subtle - seems to me not merely distasteful, but the trigger for what may make our species' long term survival problematic. When one nation dominates another - as western colonial powers did for two centuries in much of the world - it squashes the creativity of the dominated and poisons the conscience of the dominator. And, eventually, results in an outbreak of violence.

Now I recognize that all I have done so far is to describe how things are. We humans seek to dominate each other and we make war on each other. Since we now have weapons that will consume us in a fireball, the question becomes whether we can change anything about this, or are we watching the unfolding of our extinction?

Beginning from the micro - myself - I gave up vegetarianism when I lived in Africa because we were in an arid tropical region where the only way to get adequate protein was by eating meat. And we were often entertained by African hosts who placed game they had killed before us and watched while we ate. I discovered I really love - maybe even crave - meat, and have eaten it ever since.

I also gave up pacifism. Or rather I admitted to myself that I had never been and never could be a pacifist. I haven't the inner discipline. My most strenuous efforts are exercised to keep my prejudices toward and fears of other people in check so I don't act on them. Whether I could have persuaded the government that I was a conscientious objector had I not had a deferment, I don't know. Because had I been asked if I would never, under any circumstance, kill someone, my honest answer would have been no. I can envision circumstances under which I would kill. I am not a pacifist. And I eat the meat of other creatures.

How about the macro, the world and war?

I have been amazed that no one has used a nuclear weapon since we dropped one on Nagasaki. It hasn't stopped us from making endless war on each other, but even when the stakes were frighteningly high - as in the Berlin blockade, the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis - somehow world leaders sobered up and restrained themselves from using these weapons that must have been sorely tempting.

But now there are multiple nations with nuclear weapons. And maybe soon, non-state terrorists who will have them.

If we annihilate ourselves, it will be marked - by whom or whatever may one day mark these things - as the sign that our species was ill-adapted to its environment. We once, before we developed the theory about the meteor most now think did in the dinosaur, regarded the dinosaur as having grown too large to be able to sustain itself in its environment.

Hard as it is - like trying to take out one's eyeballs and examine one's self - to have perspective on one's self when survival is the issue, we can know that nothing, including us, is forever. There was a time when we were not and there will be again. Both personally and corporately.

I would love to think the lesson of the great powers and nuclear restraint over the past 60 years will guide the next 60 or more. Peace is a dream, a fairy tale, we humans talk about but have no interest in. Because what seems a fatal flaw - our inability to believe that prosperity can be mutual rather than at the cost to the loser, the lesser - is deeply etched into our DNA.

In the meantime, those of us who have struggled to become vegetarians and pacifists, and who have, cynical or realistically, come to see it is beyond the ken of our species to live cooperatively, can use our remaining energy to seek some peace by embracing the stranger.

Yesterday morning I heard a startling statistic from an NPR reporter. It's a little arcane, but stick with it because it says volumes about the issue of race in our country.

Among black American males who have not completed high school, more are in jail than are employed.

The unemployment rate among black American males who have not graduated from high school is 80%.

The unemployment rate among white American males who have not graduated from high school is 30%.

A friend and I were having a conversation - an argument really - about gay marriage. I tried to compare it to the issue of race. He disagreed, saying he didn't know anyone who didn't believe black Americans ought to have an equal shot at a decent life. He doubts that ever - at least in our lifetime - there will be such broad agreement about the issue of gay marriage. (The subject of a later blog entry)

If it is true that there is now broad agreement about the matter of racial justice, of the right of a black American to have equal access to the American Dream, (The subject of a later blog entry) then the question gets shifted to the issue of whether that is now a reality and, if not, what, if anything, we ought to do to make it so.

I grew up in North Carolina in the 1940s. Segregation was the law. Though I think it puzzled me even then, I took for granted the separate waiting rooms at the train station, separate water fountains and bathrooms. It would have seemed peculiar and maybe frightening had a negro showed up in my clasroom of Eastover School. (A few years ago I drove my wife by the school to show her where I had spent those years. It was recess, the schoolyard was full of children. Not a white face among them.)

My sense was that we didn't hate black people. We just thought they were different. And inferior in some ways. My father told me that our family doctor - a genteel and revered man in our family - explained to him that the reason so many boxers were black was because they had thicker skulls (and thus, smaller brain cavities) and could withstand more punishment to the head than white men could.

Looking back, that seems longer ago than the 60 years it in fact is. When I tell my children stories of those days they think I am exaggerating. It seems unthinkable, not only that such attitudes could ever have been part of American culture, but that their liberal, enlightened father could have held them.

One of the goals I believe this nation should undertake is examining the causes of black poverty and setting a goal of black middle class Americans reaching some agreed upon economic goal by some date - mid 21st Century perhaps.

Probably because of black Americans having come to this country in chains, for precisely the opposite reasons all other immigrants came, their experience and history has been different. We think that is long in the past and has no relevance today, after Martin Luther King and Al Sharpton, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice and Tiger Woods.

And there is no doubt that things are radically changed from those days of my childhood. But statistics like those I cited at the top of this piece make clear something fundamental and structural remains amiss. Unless one believes that people of color are different - dumber, less motivated - one bumps hard against the reality that being black remains a major impediment to succeeding in this country.

We can cite all the things about the fatherless black families, welfare cheats and drug dealing, but they only reinforce the shame of American racism.

Perhaps racial preference in college admissions and job applications is not the answer. Clarence Thomas gets vitriolic describing the dilemma of the black man who makes it to the top, as he has, wondering whether he is there because he has earned it or because standards were lowered to give him a better chance.

We need a Marshall Plan for racial and economic justice. A presidential administration that will make it a priority to redress the unjust racial imbalance that has its origins in the slave trade. It has begun in a small way with a few institutions - like Brown University in Rhode Island acknowledging its role in the slave trade.

I believe this issue haunts the conscience of America.

I am as intimidated by the esoteric language of economics as many are by the arcane language of theology. But just as every ordinary person has an experience of reality that gives them the right to wade in on the questions that theology addresses, so every one of us needs money to live, needs a job to have money, and has opinions about how all that should and does work.

I am a Democrat because, historically, Democrats have focused their efforts on those at the bottom of the food chain more than on those at the top. Yes, a huge generality with many holes, but still, I think, generally true.

I am not against those with money - by the world's and I suppose even the standards of this country, I am well up in the top half - but I think those at the top, simply by definition, are going to fare well no matter what the government does. So, whatever regulation the government sets will annoy entreprenuers but it will not prevent them from doing well.

It is unnerving to me to live in a country as wealthy as ours and still pass that guy in his wheelchair with the cup in his hand asking for handouts, as I do every morning.

In the past generation, since Reagan's presidency, the political and economic orthodxy in our nation has been what we like to call economic Darwinism. Borrowing - innaccurately, I believe - from Darwin's observation that the strongest and cleverest forms gain an advantage over the less able and have more progeny, we have decided that the most good comes from letting the so-called market place regulate itself so the same dynamic that results in the best biological forms to survive rather than the weaker, so the most useful and able products and corporations will survive and the entire economy will be stregthened.

It's a theory beloved by the successful because it suggests they are the best, smartest, strongest.

But in reality - as we have learned from the Chrysler and the savings and loan bail outs - as the world becomes increasingly complex the issue becomes who the regulations favor rather than dropping all regulation.

And, as we have seen in this country over the past decades, the dice have been loaded in favor of those at the top. The difference between the average salary of middle managers and CEOs has grown exponentially so now we have these silly numbers - hundreds of millions - going to individuals while the take home pay of middle class Americans, when measured in constant dollars, has either remained stagnant or actually fallen.

Economic policy should focus on the middle class, since that is where a nation's strength or weakness will finally fall. And there needs to be a safety net as nearly fail-safe as possible, through which almost no citizen is allowed to fall.

This morning I heard one of those statistics that raises the hair on one's neck. Among black Americans who failed to finish high school there are more in jail than employed. 80% of that group is unemployed. 70% of white Americans who never finished high school are employed.

Racism, of course. But since racism still reamains a conundrum we seem unable to quite face, how about taking it on as an economic issue? What does it cost to keep one of these people in jail for a year? Maybe $50,000? If that person was working at a job that paid, say, $40,000 a year, that is a net gain of $90,000 a year.

Simplistic? Sure. But if we focused economic policy on those at the bottom rather than solely on how to make life better for a few billionairs, it would begin to matter. And we would surely begin to like ourselves better.

If ever there was an issue that explains itself it is this one.

Why would we do nuclear disarmament?

Because the survival of ourf species depends on it. It is by luck and a modicum of self-preservation that we haven't blown ourselves up before now.

Every clear-headed statesman in the past fifty years has understood that nuclear disarmament is a necessity. Whether, by draggin our feet on the matter, we have now put ourselves beyond the point at which it can be accomplished, remains to be seen.

Several decades ago the United States and the Soviet Union - under Reagan's leadership - signed a disarmament treaty under which the two great nuclear powers agreed to begin dismantling their nuclear stockpiles immediately and, over a longer and , unfortunately unspecified period, to move toward destruction of their entire nuclear arsenal. After that, the oversight of all matters nuclear, power generation and the potential for nations developing weapons, was to be put under the oversight of the international community.

It began. We and the Soviets did destroy many of our older weapons.

But, for multiple reasons, the effort stalled. When the Soviet Union collapsed, perhaps we thought, as the sole remaining super power, we need no longer cooperate in the effort. Or perhaps it was that lethal temptation to think that retaining our vast and unchallenged nuclear capability, we could remain the unchallenged super power indefinitely.

It was a wrong-headed decision.

Not only did the chaos in the breakup of the Soviet Union mean that their nuclear weapons - many of which were stored in states that now broke away - were no longer under any clear or unified command, but they could be stolen or worse, sold to rougue nations or even terrorists from no state.

Now we have multiple nations either already with weapons - N. Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, China, Britain - or hard at work to gain them. Hard to imagine how, once many nations and non-state groups have them, we can hope they will not be used.

So what can we do now?

When the provocative President of Iran was pushed to give up enriching uranium, he, very cleverly, said Iran would stop if the western nations would also stop.

We responded by awarding a contract to a company to begin work on a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.

Likely the only - and very risky - option left open to us, is to tell the world we will cancel that new contract and begin honoring the terms of that treaty we originally signed. And, while the world watches, begin detroying our nuclear arsenal with an eye toward eliminating them completely.

Yes, it makes us vulnerable in a new way.

And it signals the world that we are no longer going to try to dominate rather than cooperate with the international community.

Bush could begin this before he leaves office. It would be the equivalent of Nixon going to China.

And it might offer we humans a chance to dodge this bullet we have aimed at our heart.

The man at the cofee shop asked me this morning what I was going to do today.

"The usual," I said.

"What's that?"

"Writing, head down at the keyboard; what I've done ever since I quit my day job 10 years ago."

"What was that?" he persisted.

"Episcopal parish priest."

"Oh yeah? What do you write about?"

"All the things I thought about those 40 years as a parish priest that I thought I ought to keep to myself."

So now, this being Lent, I think I'll have a run at writing something about those matters in some sort of orderly way. My guess is that you'll see why I was eager to lay down my mantle, and why many were even more eager for me to do that.

I was visited by a delegation of men in my last parish who were concerned that my beliefs were not orthodox and that I was misleading people into perdition. Although it wasn't the first thing they brought up, I had long known that what concerned them most was what is called Cheap Grace.

It seems beyond debate to me that if there is anything at all to this God business, and if God even resembles what the Bible and several thousand years and layers of cultic practice have claimed, then God, who is love and the author of all that is, loves creation - all of it - and none of it will finally be lost or let go.

In other words, everyone is ultimately redeemed, no matter what. Put even more plainly, everyone goes to heaven.

A friend, Dean of a cathedral in a major American city, when he heard me on this, said, "I think, to call yourself an orthodox Episcopalian you must believe in hell. But I don't think you have to believe anyone spends eternity there."

That is an aside to which I plan to return in a later entry.

The men in the delegation asked me if I believed in the literal, physical, cell by cell resurrection of Jesus' pre-death body in his body in which he rose from the dead, as it says in the Bible.

I said that, first of all, I don't believe that's what it says in the Bible.

One of them held up his hand. "Stop right there he said. I just knew that's what you were going to say. We don't need to go any farther. We think you are a nice man and that you have done a lot of good for a lot of people, but we think you are in the wrong line of work. We are afraid that you are dangerously misleading people, letting them think God will love them no matter what they do. You preach license."

I held my ground in the conversation, wanting to be clear I was not going to be run out by a lynch mob, no matter how polite. But I was sobered and thought perhaps they were right. Maybe it was time for me to quit my day job and consider other forums in which to say what I have come to think about a lot of these things.

So, two books, thousands of Zone Notes and hundreds of blogs later, I have been doing that.

But now, in this forum, I am going to do this in a more orderly way. writing about several controversial matters I would have felt I was imposing had I done this as a parish priest and preacher.

Nuclear disarmament. Economic justice. Racial justice. War and peace. Gender issues, gay marriage and ordination. God and science. The Bible. Terrorism and international affairs. Ecology and mother earth. The place of our species in the order of things. Sin, redemption and evil.

Pondering all these has been my day job of choice for more than a decade. Unlike parishioners, you have a delete button and a mechanism for responding.

Stay tuned.

Today's NY Times reports that the Bush administration, after years of stubbornly refusing to talk to those it considers evil doers - N. Korea, Iran, Syria - seems suddenly to be undergoing a change of heart.

Tony Snow, the former Fox News guy who has become the latest to try to fend off reality on behalf of the administration, says it is absolutely not a change in policy. Condaeelza Rice says so too.

The NY Times recognizes it is.

But let's not quibble. If they are willing to talk and not bomb, we have made progress.

But why would they? Because, says the TImes, they recognize that by not talking in the past they have now so thoroughly boxed themselves in that they have no choice.

In a wide ranging and brilliant interview in Salon, Noam Chomsky casts a much wider net in explaining why we now have no choice but to begin talking. To everyone.

Although no one, in or out of the administration, has dared say so openly, our middle east policy - including our Iraq adventure - is about oil. To sustain our primacy in the world we must keep growing. To keep growing we must have adequate energy sources. We haven't enough oil in our own country, and we are still far from developing alternative sources, to even stay at our present levels of production, let alone grow.

For the past 100 years we and Britain have had a lock on the oil in the middle east. Russia, Mexico, Indonesia all have significant reserves and, with the exception of Russia, we have had no rivals for access to the big middle eastern reserves.

China has become the new 800 lb gorilla who unbalances the equation. China, whose economy is growing at more than twice the rate of ours, already has and will soon have far greater appetite for oil. In fact China controls most of the oil fields in Iran. We likely will not attack Iran's nuclear facilities, not only because of the chaos that would ensure, or because we haven't the capacity or intelligence to succeed, but because China is exercising her control over Iran to keep her from creating a crisis that would interrupt China's ability to continue receiving her flow of Iranian oil.

So now, with China as our previously unlikely partner and rival, the entire equation has shifted.

If China and Korea and Japan, Asia, were to form an alliance with the middle east - notably Iran - we would suddenly become a second rate power.

What has wakened the Bush people to this reality now is unknown. But we are in a new ballgame. If they don't freak out about having lost out on their bid to control the world without challenge - a danger that chills the blood - this could be good news for the beleaguered world.