Love Everyone

What would Jesus do?

It's a phrase you hear often, and I admit I haven't studied the New Testament well enough to be able to extrapolate confidently and answer.

But one message I know is in there is that all human beings are equally valuable, and deserving of love.  All.

One Easter, a few years ago, I did the Stations of the Cross with a group at my church.  A parishoner had created drawings, one for each Station, and she had prepared a short lecture discussion on each one.  We walked around the perimeter of the church, and at each drawing we stopped, she read out her description of the story depicted and her artistic choices to depict it, and then the parish Priest read the prayer that went with that Station, and we read out our response.

It was only during that experience that I finally "got" what it means that Christ died for our sins.  Looking very closely at the belittlement and degradation that he experienced on his way to his crucifixion, and the crucifixion itself, it finally made sense to me what that was.  Here is how I understand it:

Imagine lowest, most despised human being you can think of.  Someone a mob would round up and torture while running out of town and then stringing up to die.  Not just a lowly downcast person - a homeless person, someone with addiction problems or mental illness.  Someone depicable, that the mob has written off, and feels fully justified in degrading - the worst criminal, the worst terrorist.  What Jesus did was take that human state and make it divine.  He went through that experience so that God went through that experience.  That experience now has not just worth but divinity.

If that lowest, most degraded, most despised human experience is now sanctified, then your life, as a human being, is definitely sanctified.  Human experience was made divine, and of supreme, ultimate, universe-ruling value.

All human lives are equally and ultimately valuable.  Even me, even you.  Equal.

But that means, even that newest version of the most despicable, lowest, worst person on earth.  Even them.

Examples I've observed recently of people falling short of this example:

I was in a class, run by the Episcopal Church and designed for lay people to go through something like the training one would get in a theological seminary.  There are four years of readings - Old Testament, New Testament, Church history, Theology.  At any given time there are students in a group that are in each of the years.  Then, for each year there is a common theme that all students read and respond to, and during my year the theme was Multiculturalism, understanding the church in a world where people of different cultures exist, and interact.  There was one student who had a lifelong disdain for this whole topic, and the point of view that one should be tolerant of other cultures.  I think the whole reason she was part of a Christian church was that she could have a reliable, absolute moral code, by which she could confidently judge other people.  She gave some very polished, moving speeches defending her point of view, but I know she was wrong.  She would cite the most horrifying, torturous practices, mainly affecting young women and babies, and would intone, "I'm sorry, but if this 'Multiculturalism' (said with a sneer) requires that I be tolerant of a culture that does these things, then I'm sorry."  The more often she grabbed the floor of the discussion and delivered these indignant speeches, the more clearly I saw it - chick, you can abhor the behavior, but your obligation is to love the individuals who behave, even more so because you abhor what they do.  Lady, you clearly need to go talk at length to someone who committed one of those acts, and really try to see the world from inside their point of view, and develop compassion and a connection and communication with them, and from there you can try to show them why you think what they did was wrong, and thereby do something about it and try to help their victims, and yourself develop some loving compassion and a deeper connection to these, who are also God's creatures, and are also beloved by God just exactly to the same degree that you are.  But I could tell she would never even entertain that option.

I eventually stopped going to this group because of these exchanges, and another participant who could not possibly be racist because she grew up in the South with household staff who were black, and then also is of a European ancestry who was brought to that area to work in one particular industry and were marginalized.  She also would intone strong speeches, and after several whole evenings I realized these people were not really here to learn, to challenge their existing ideas and grow and improve them, but just to say what they already thought, which is not why I take a class, and so I stopped going.  However, in doing so, I feel short of the ideal as well, I should have gone in and got closer and learned how to see the world from inside their point of view so that I could communicate and explain my alternative way, but I just wrote them off as a waste of time.

Second example - just last week I was at a musical event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death (murder? wrongful execution) of Joe Hill, the Labor activist and organizer and songwriter.  Four musicians presented a program of Joe Hill songs, plus their own compositions or other important songs from the Labor movement.  It was a warm, joyful gathering of like-minded folks, and we also sang "Solidarity Forever" together at the end.  But I did flinch when one of the musicians, in introducing one of his songs, referred to the "syphilitic morons" running our state government.  And in fact there was a poster available for sale with a photo of the moron in chief, with the word "Tool" printed in large red letters on it.  I flinched because I don't think it's ever a good idea to dehumanize your rivals.  Forming into tribes and demonizing the members of the other tribe is not the path to a productive reconciliation.  Lefties hate it when people on the Right do it, but Lefties do it maybe even more.  Don't you only have to just say the name of the rival leader, for people to hiss and sneer in this types of groups?  "Nixon." "Reagan." "George W. Bush."  "Scott Walker."  Can't you hear the sneering reaction in your head, just reading these names?  But they are human beings.  We might disagree with their points of view, to the core of our bone marrow, and abhor their behavior with everything that's right and true in the universe, but they are human beings, and the call is to love them, just as you love your loved ones.  Go in there and love them, not form tribes and demonize and dehumanize them and call them names.  I'm starting to develop a sensitivity to this behavior, this assumption that it's okay, even in a room full of like-minded people.  Tribalism and demonization does not help anything.

Third example - there was a shooting in our community, three completely innocent bystanders died when a troubled young man took some guns to a public place and started shooting.  One of the people killed was a husband and father.  His wife was shot but survived, and in the day following the event, around the internet went a story that his last words to her before he passed was, "Forgive the shooter."  This is an example of the lowest, most despicable person who has committed the very lowest, most despicable act.  Sadly, there are too many examples of exactly the same.  One was just sentenced to death in Boston, only yesterday.  The call is to recognize the divine valuable humanity inside even these people.  Christ died to redeem them, especially them.  The husband and father knew what it meant.  Can we be the same?  Can we do it?

To me, that's really what the question at the top means.

Human Experience as the grounds

These thoughts come from a walk through desert paths outside of Las Vegas this morning, with my philosopher friend Todd (we were in Philosophy grad school together, we worked out it was 26 years ago, and have been conducting these parapatetic conversations, in some form or other, on and off, for all those years).

When I said that I thought living on forever could take the form of human memories, and that therefore there's a lot of pressure to get my stories down, although I'm starting to forget some of them (because I know that he remembers everything, in detail, because of a special way that his memory works), he countered by asking me whether I could move to an acceptance.  If I can accept my mortality, because although I die my stories will live on, isn't it a short move to accept that I will die and my stories will die with me, and that's okay?

No, it was not okay.  I felt a seismic emotion when he asked this, and didn't pursue the feeling too strongly because I didn't want to turn our nice walk into a bout of uncontrollable weeping.  But no, this idea was not acceptable at all.

Oh, he said, I hadn't got over the idea of immortality of my soul after death, I had created a substitute?

Yes.  And it's a strongly bound to the idea of the purpose of my life as the prospect of ending up forever in Heaven would be for someone who believed in that.

He suggested the other point of view is to view oneself as here to have experiences while one is here (and we were having some tremendous ones, walking around the gorgeous and endlessly varied desert landscape under a blue sky with white puffy clouds).

I can't accept that as the only thing.  For me, it's essential that I can believe that I will live on.  Getting meaning from that inward directional idea of the world providing me with experiences, the idea that the world is here to entertain me, is insufficient.  It's important to me to leave some mark that will persist after I die.  (You know, it's not that important that it actually leave a mark.  If I die and all my stories get thrown away or burned or something, or the planet gets blown up and no one ever comes by this corner of the universe to sift through the wreckage, oh well, shit happens, that can't be controlled and is not up to me because I'll be gone, but I do feel that it's important to do everything I can, to do my part to ensure as much as possible that something will be left, some mark on the world will be made.)

However, now some hours later in my hotel room, I recall that the grounds of my moral philosophy is human experience.  Human experience is the fundamental good at the bottom of all my beliefs about what's right and wrong to do.  Anything that prematurely takes away human experience is bad - so, basically, murder.  Abortion and not having all possible children are not necessarily bad because they are not taking away the experience of an existing human.  My relatives with memory loss are still whole people and just as valuable people because they are still having moment to moment experiences of the world (and somehow their personalities, which appears to us as their "selves", are still completely intact).  Their lives are no less valuable - they are still having experiences.

I realized the contradiction.  Having experiences in the moment is enough to provide 100% meaning of their lives.  Why is it not enough to provide meaning for my life, for me?

Substitute for Immortality

So, if you don't believe that we have souls that are separate from our bodies, and if you don't believe in heaven, you have the problem of explaining what happens to us after we die.

What I've been working on lately, especially around Easter time this past year as Easter always includes many themes of death (but also of rebirth and eternal life), is that what happens to us when we no longer live within our earthly bodies is that memories of us continue, in the bodies of others, in their memories which are their brains which are physical things here on earth.

If people remember you, and/or if people continue to share your stories, then you live on, although not in your previous form, but still in a real and physical way, as part of other people's bodies.

You can see this working in the Eucharist, which is also much featured at Easter.  Everyone gather once a week, eat bread together and drink wine, "Do this for the remembrance of Me."  As these behaviors continue and get passed down, the memory continues.  You could do a Materialist reductionist interpretation of the resurrection by reading it this way.  Christ lives forever, the Church congregation is the Body of Christ, they already talk this way, but his immortal life doesn't have to be in some other extra-dimensional place.  He lives on because we do this and remember him.

So, if I want this to be true of me, it puts a lot of pressure on getting all the stories written down, in a form in which they will persist.

So, hello, new blog :-)