As late fall slides to winter, across the country Christians are winding up another year of living the religious life. Late fall, and across the country members of the American Academy of Religion are winding up another year of studying the religious life.
The distinction between living it and studying it may seem artificial; most Christians study scripture, as well as theology and devotional works. But the study based in faith is not like the study of religion per se. In the halls of academe, religion is just one more sociological phenomenon, to be appraised from a safe distance (after all, He may not be a tame lion). Not that all the members of the Academy are religious abstainers; there are mainliners, goddess-worshippers, Buddhists, and the odd evangelical or two. But the AAR meets in the ivory tower, not the church.
[Religion News Service, November 14, 1995]
Pick a page, any page, in your daily paper and you're likely to find one of two things. Either there's a horrific story of violence and evil, or there's a politician or pundit decrying such and telling us America is going to hell in a handbasket. All around us we hear the predictions of catastrophe. What we don't hear is what to do about it.
[World, April 15, 1995]
I had a narrow brush with the Peter Principle the other day. You may remember the book that appeared awhile back under that title; Laurence J. Peter's principle was that people tend to get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. Do a good job and you get boosted up the ladder--until you reach the point that you can't do such a good job anymore. There you sit, gumming things up for the whole organization.
The phone call I received asked if I would consider being (don't laugh) press secretary for a national political campaign. This was flattering, but akin to putting the Flying Nun in charge of the Air Force.
[Utne Reader, August 1998]
One of the best pieces of spiritual advice I ever received was one I fortunately gained early, while still in college. It was that I should give up the project of assembling my own private faith out of the greatest hits of the ages. I encountered this idea while reading Ramakrishna, the nineteenth century Hindu mystic. He taught that it was important to respect the integrity of each great path, and said that, for example, when he wanted to explore Christianity he would take down his images of the Great Mother and substitute images of Jesus and Mary.
[World, February 5, 1994]
During my college years I lived on ”Olympia Hill," a site less heavenly than its name suggests. Our southern city had once been host to a booming textile industry, and a hundred years ago a ramshackle collection of unheated wooden houses for employees had been thrown together beyond the railroad tracks. By the time I arrived, Olympia Hill had developed a mixed population:
[Christianity Today, September 7, 1998]
I flipped back the corners of the rugs, one after another. It was a clammy, rainy day, and these hand-knotted wool specimens from Iran, Pakistan, India, and China were giving off a fresh-from-the-sheep smell. I didn't know what I was doing; I'd never shopped for a rug before. But the one thing that struck me as I gazed at one gorgeous carpet after another was that they looked too perfect.
Then I peeled back one more layer and saw a rug that won my heart.
[World, January 29, 1994]
The book's title was The Power of Their Glory; its subhead described Episcopalians as “America's Ruling Class.” The Episcopal church was just one of several mainline denominations that rocketed in membership, prominence, and influence in the years after World War II. The horrors of war had been such a foretaste of hell
[Christianity Today, July 14, 1997]* Selected for Best Spiritual Writing 1998 * As I saw my children swept up into the night sky I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I held the baby in my arms, but the two older ones--Megan, 7, and David, 4--were locked behind the bar of a ferris wheel in a shopping-center carnival. They had begged and clamored until I agreed to let them board the contraption but now, as they rose into the night, they panicked and began to scream. David's little legs were kicking as he skidded sideways on the slick metal seat. I saw how easily he could slip beneath the narrow bar and fall to the asphalt below.
[The NOEL News, Spring 1991]
Did you ever study for the wrong exam? There you were with freshly sharpened pencils and a head full of trigonometry--and you were handed a blue book and a list of essay questions about the Spanish-American War. Oh no!
There are times that I wonder whether the pro-life movement is confused about which test we're taking.
[NPR, “All Things Considered,” October 6, 1997]
I was thumbing through a high-brow magazine the other day and came across an interesting essay on the virtue of Hope. But before I'd finished the first page I caught them in an embarassing blooper. The author stated that hope is ranked alongside faith and love in the 23rd psalm.
In case you didn't catch the faux pas, run through the 23rd psalm in your mind--you probably memorized it in kindergarten. Yes, “the Lord is my shepherd is there,” and the part about the valley of the shadow of death, but there's no mention of faith, hope, and love. For that, you have to flip to the other end of the Bible, to St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In his famous meditation on love in chapter 13, he writes, “So faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” --Now, does it ring a bell?