Our Buried Life

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go. — Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life

As an only child, raised by grandparents, I lived in a household filled with books, relative calm, and hours of solitude. There were neighbors with children my age and older, no lack of friendship and camaraderie; indeed, I was the adopted little brother of several families. But running to make it for supper on time after spending the day roaming the hills and vineyards near our home with friends, I had the calm assurance of time by myself before sleep. Time to read, to daydream, to imagine, to question, to wade into the stream of our collective memory in solitude but not alone.

I don't remember being lonely. Memory, of course, drops out the also-rans, the near misses, the close seconds, and often replays only the beginnings and endings, the most intense jolts on the emotional Richter scale. I do remember wondering who I was, where I had come from, and if I would be myself had I been born to other parents. Our household was quiet: my British and Canadian grandparents rarely raised their voices and our mealtime conversations were danced out on a metaphorical carpet of manners, not stomped out on a stage of boisterousness. But I often sat in the midst of a swirling tornado of banter, arguments, boasts, bad jokes, insults and adolescent belching contests at my friends' house, where I was not so much a guest as another sibling separated at birth. Being there was a heady mix of belonging and blame: I was always welcomed with a hug from the womenfolk but not spared in the judgement when my friend and I committed our misdemeanors. But at the end of the day, gently shooed out the door toward home, I could be glad for the friendship without envying the tumult.

So I grew, hoping to be in favor with both God and man, but wordlessly realizing I'd always be just beyond the edges of the crowd. On my bedroom wall during high school was a poster that read: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away"— the closing words of Walden by Thoreau. Whether that shaped my outlook or reflected it I can't be sure, but I know that it is more or less a faithful transcript of my life. Never the heroic type, I have often found myself, nonetheless, on a different path than those around me, not from sheer cussedness, but because I could not do otherwise and know myself. "What we have to be is who we are," says Thomas Merton. His words are to me so completely true that I hesitate to bring them up because similar sentiments have been marketed, advertised, packaged, and sold in the bazaar that is American self-indulgence since the 60s. Yet, as long as there is a context with integrity the imitations are annoying but not fatal.

How is it that an introvert like myself gravitates to the classroom? That I could find a deep satisfaction alone on a country road at night while hitchhiking to Scotland during my college years? That in the midst of a crowd, touching those I love, I can feel alone but not lonely? That there is in me the activist who is suspicious of movements, the pilgrim who resists joining the pilgrimage, the sinner who will not stand for "the call," the observer who nevertheless believes deeply in community? These contradictions pull and tug at us, they wrench us off our feet at times, fill us with vertigo and ultimately define us. It would be so much easier to simply react without reflection.

"The world is too much with us," lamented Wordsworth. "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/Little we see in Nature that is ours. . . ." Although I do not deify Nature I know that we are deeply estranged from it, even at war with it, and that our very survival on this earth demands that we learn our place. I come from a religious tradition that asks for a lifelong commitment of service to a world which could end tomorrow. Although not incompatible, those two beliefs are frequently at odds. Do we settle down and build for tomorrow, all the while believing that the Lord will come 'like a thief in the night' and that this world will end in fire? How to love the world and leave it?

I find words of wisdom in Thomas Merton's reflections on solitude. A Trappist monk devoted to contemplation, he lived on the blade-edge of activism within a Catholicism that seemed to him to sanction the mad race to nuclear arms. A man who longed for silence and solitude, he kept writing books that brought him world-wide attention. Having taken vows of obedience, he chafed under the rule of superiors who did not understand him. Struggling with ego and pride, he prayed for humility. He was, like all of us, a complicated being, yet he treasured simplicity. One who had stepped back from the world he continued to engage it, taking up the cross of love for the world though it cost him dearly.

"Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene," he advised. "Breathe God's air. Work, if you can, under His sky. But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul. If you are appalled by those things, you will keep your appetite for the healing silence of recollection. But meanwhile—keep your sense of compassion for the men who have forgotten the very concept of solitude. You, at least, know that it exists, and that it is the source of peace and joy. You can still hope for such joy. They do not even hope for it any more (Seeds, 66-67)."

Years ago, in the backwash of the Vietnam War and the bitterness of the end of the 60s, Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang, "Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on." They were right, but we can do more than just endure. Matthew Arnold, in The Buried Life, thought we might find the answer to who we are in the love of another. There was a chance, he surmised, that we could dodge "the thousand nothings of the hour," that "When our world-deafened ear/Is by the tones of a loved voice, caress'd—/A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast/And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again." It is just possible, he believes, that this harried lover can find a lull in our hot race of life. And then in calmness "he thinks he knows/The hills where his life rose/And the sea where it goes." Arnold finds a way to live in the world through love for another; Merton finds it in love for God and the world. I suspect they are both right.

Our Fathers, Ourselves . . .

Let him be whomever you wish. Like a fluttering candle
into a stormlamp, I place myself there inside him.
A glow becomes peaceful. May death
more easily find its way. — Rainier Maria Rilke

What do we know of our fathers? They seem, through a child's eyes, almost as gods, striding purposefully through the world, shouldering aside doubt and uncertainty, magical in their strength, bending down from their great heights to lift us up higher than we could reach, but less than we imagined. At times, later, we think we've outgrown them, that perhaps the large hand on the bicycle we pedaled for the first time alone, that dropped away without us noticing, is not needed anymore. And still later, when we become adults, we may see them as persons, men in their own right, with admirable qualities, homely flaws, and modest hopes.

My father and I were different expressions of the same English-Canadian stock. In fact, we were raised by the same people, his parents, my grandparents. For reasons which do not need explanation for this story, I was taken in by my grandparents three years after my birth and after moving between families and countries and loving intentions until at last I arrived on their doorstep, bewildered but grateful, embraced and welcomed as a second son. I remained—with times away in England—until I graduated from college and left their home in Northern California.

My father left home early, at 18 or maybe 19, as near as I have understood, hitchhiking out of a small college town in Alberta where both his parents were teachers and he was a campus kid. Perhaps the vice-like grip of loving concern in a church community grew unbearable—there were hints of a mistake on his part and harsh judgments rendered—but in any case he lit out for the world. It broke my grandmother's heart and brought a sadness to my grandfather's eyes.

He left, I stayed. He left the church, I am still in it. He became an engineer, thinking through his hands, whip-smart, a man of few words. I became a teacher, given to many words, uneasy around math and at home in the humanities. He was twenty when I was born; I was thirty-five when my son was born. He found his way through the world without a college diploma but helped to develop some of the most intricate technology of the computer age. I couldn't get enough of studying and resolutely worked my way through several degrees. He worked for IBM for many years; my first real computer was a Mac and I have never departed from the Apple orchard.

Thus, when he passed away this week, after a long struggle with brain cancer, I was at a loss to know what to do. I cannot think of another way to put it except to say that my emotions were waiting at the door for permission from my rational nature to enter and be at home. It is typical to feel numb after such a loss and yet, on the contrary, I felt as if my senses were sharpened and enlivened. I saw myself, a man who had lost his father, and I wondered what made that man different from the one who had received the news hours before. The voice of a friend, tender with concern, moved me to tears; as I put down the cell phone it occurred to me that I had not wept until then. Was I moved to tears because another shared my grief? Or was it rather that his care for me called the leviathan Sorrow up from the depths? Was it self-pity I was feeling—see the poor fellow with the tears welling up in his eyes—or pity for my father who suffered in ways that all humans dread but must endure to the end?

Perhaps because I did not live with him as a child and had infrequent but vivid encounters with him as an adult, I lacked the emotional notation for that musical score—I would have to improvise. I was to begin teaching a course that evening at a nearby university, but I canceled. I was wary, not at all sure I wouldn't be koshed from behind by a furtive emotion. This will be a process, so people assured me, and I will emerge from this experience a changed man. That's a fairly safe assumption since most of what we experience in life changes us.

The best counsel came from my sister, a person wise beyond her years and the one who guided her mother through the dark wood of my father's approaching night. She called this experience a 'sacred moment,' a 'luminous experience,' one to be opened by and lived through with all senses alert. I was reminded of Pascal's comment, "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of," and realized that I had been granted a rare privilege: to view my father first, as a man whom I loved and admired, and secondly, as my father. Whatever our fathers are to us they are always and simply themselves, a glory as mystifying as it is obvious. Tonight, walking home with a wisp of summer breeze, I saw the evening star: brilliant, benevolent, constant—and I was glad.

Good Work or Good Money?

When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than mere diversion. . . . I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

A report published in the Washington Post recently, confirmed that engineering graduates stand to earn the most over the course of a lifetime, and those in education, psychology, and social work will earn the least. Just in time for graduation, the article in the Post cannot be reassuring to those parents whose children find themselves, through temperament and proclivity, drawn to the social sciences and humanities, where, the study tells us, they will flounder in the shallow end of the monetary pool while their smarter and more ambitious colleagues frolic in the deep waters of financial gain.  This is not news, since full professors in the humanities on many research campuses make thousands of dollars less than engineering professors of a lower rank.

What may be of more interest to some is the underlying assumption, rarely questioned, that the sole value of an education is the "return on investment," as one financial advisor to students puts it. Others state the case even more bluntly. The Post article quotes a poet and professor at Florida International University, Campbell McGrath, as saying "You are making a really weird decision if you decide to send your kids off to study philosophy. It would be a better world if we all studied the humanities. But it's not a good dollars-and-cents decision." The article quotes Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org, who says, "Even in 17-year-olds, we're seeing emphasis on maximizing returns on investment—that is, getting trained in areas that pay better."

In a recent public speaking course that I taught, the final project was a group panel discussion. One group chose to present their individual majors and why a college education was the best way to assure achieving one's goals. Each one related with enthusiasm why they had chosen that profession—the reasons invariably began with the salary range possible—until the last student spoke. He was going into elementary education, he said, and mentioned as an aside that it wasn't for the money. He had worked as a teaching aide in his mother's 6th grade classroom for two years and he knew where his talents and interests lay. He could recall an influential teacher who had changed his life and he wanted to be that kind of teacher for other children. The others on the panel and those in the audience responded to the passion in his presentation much as dinner guests at a formal party would to someone who wondered what to do with all the cutlery at his place setting.

As someone who chose two fields of study—philosophy and communications—that apparently consign me to penury all the days of my life, I remain unrepentant. Given the choice I would do it all again, except I would study modern languages harder and I would take a minor in economics. Like Kurt Vonnegut, who admonished students in the 60s to keep the ROTC on their campuses so that they could understand the militaristic way of thinking, more of us who wallow in the humanities need to understand the monetary mindset. And there is no denying that American education, American politics, American culture, and to an alarming degree, American religion, is all about money. We speak in the metaphors of finance, we negotiate relationships through cost-benefit analyses, and we view our entertainments, our arts, and our sports through the narrowed eyes of the calculating investor. That's probably not going to change, but what we could hope is that we come to see the importance of good work over lots of money.

Studs Terkel once wrote that of the hundreds of people he interviewed for his book, Working (1972), the majority of them hated what they did for a living. Not, "were uncomfortable" or "disliked" or "did not prefer" what they worked at, but "hated." Many of these were people whose salaries were substantial, many of them barely made a living wage. The money is not really the issue, just as this study worked up by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce doesn't mean much either. Here's an endless loop: With the cost of education rising almost faster than any other marker on the index, it's not hard to see that the ability to pay back school loans faster upon graduation is one of the main reasons to get an education for a profession that pays well. . . so that one can pay back the loans that provided the education for the well-paying job . . . ad infinitum.

"All traditional philosophy is an attempt to create an orderly system of ideas by which to live and to interpret the world," said Fritz Schumacher in his groundbreaking book, Small is Beautiful(1973). But philosophy is too important to leave it up to the professional philosophers, which is why the humanities—and philosophy—are still needed in this barren and constricted world of profits and cost-effectiveness. The world of science, of engineering, of information technology, is professionally neutral on questions of value. Give them a problem that can be quantified, measured, and calculated and chances are it will be solved, profitably and responsibly. And if it can't be solved today we know that it will be solved some day. There's nothing that can't be fixed with more of what we needed in the first place. Or so the conventional wisdom would have us believe. The essence of education, suggests Schumacher, "is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up."

The point is not to create a wider mine-field between the Two Cultures, but to shift the whole focus away from the money to the meaning. 'Know-how', the stuff of science and engineering, is necessary, admits Schumacher. But 'know-why' is even more important, and that's the area of the low-paying professions.  " 'Know-how' is no more a culture than a piano is music," says Schumacher. "Can education help us finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?"

Yes, it can, provided we, the American people, realize that our fortune lies not in constant consumption but in work that satisfies, restores, and renews. The question is raised, says Schumacher, "How do we prepare young people for the future world of work?" He is unequivocal: we have to teach them to distinguish between good work and bad work and "encourage them not to accept the latter. . . . They should be taught that work is the joy of life and is needed for our development, but that meaningless work is an abomination (Good Work, 1979)."

We can have no quarrel at all with those who choose a profession that happens to pay well. But surely the main reason to spend most of your life at work is because it somehow fulfills your deepest sense of who you are and what you can do for good in this world. How many college grads realize about halfway through their first week on the job that this is their life now? If you come to hate your job, the soulless, bitter minutiae of it seeping into your pores every day, your bi-weekly check, docked for taxes, benefits, school loans, and the cost of living, is small recompense.

"The good that I would do, I do not," says Paul in Romans. What we do should be the result of what we are, not the other way around.

Not the Second Coming

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. . . . Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails

When you are a Seventh-day Adventist—as I am—there are times when you must make firm, if infrequent, denials of the imminent Second Coming. This is not easy since one of the two main tenets of the faith, encapsulized in the name of the movement, is belief in the return of Christ in a bodily form with all the holy angels at the last trump, shortly before the final Judgement. Even to raise the subject can be unseemly for some, like hiccups during prayer or refusing the mint Jello at the church potluck.

But deny it we must, for no one, not even Christ, knows the day nor the hour. And that's just as well, because if we did we'd put everything off to the last minute, like students writing a research paper the night before it's due. Come the morning the student turns it in, but by the afternoon he can't tell you three salient points from it because he plagiarized most of it from the Internet.

Through the millenia since the Jesus movement took off in Palestine, many have looked for the imminent return of Christ triumphant. The disciples did so and it caused sharp dissent among them. Paul admonished groups of Christians throughout the empire to be ready for the Lord's return and described the order of ascension: first the dead in Christ will arise and then the living. "After you, Lazarus!"

When the social fabric wears thin and times are hard people look for salvation, even if they have to manufacture it. In the 1500s the city of Munster was besieged by troops after the Anabaptists holding it threatened to execute all Lutherans and Catholics unfortunate enough to remain within after resisting orders to leave their goods behind and get out. The Anabaptists, lead by a charismatic figure named Matthys, were ready to set up a millenarian community as they awaited the soon return of Christ. Having roused the peasants in the surrounding countryside, the Anabaptist insurgents led them out to the field of battle where they were met by a standing army with artillery. Despite a rainbow in the sky, which was taken as a token of divine favor on the crusade, the Prince's troops fell upon the ragtag army, whereupon the peasants vanished into the mist and the Anabaptists perished by the thousands. European history is dotted with these social revolutions, many of them ending violently, all of them beginning in desperate need.

If it's true that every age believes it is the last one then our present age is certainly no different. Still, it comes as a jolt to hear that the world will end May 21, 2011 at 6 pm. Families are divided over this: parents convinced of the truth of the prophecy, children not at all sure. And there is much merriment and scoffing among the disbelievers. After-rapture looting parties are announced on FaceBook and two enterprising young men have set up a business to care for pets left behind when their owners are taken. Apparently that settles the argument about pets being in heaven.

The believing but selectively doubtful among us have some choices to make. One is to join up—even at the last minute—look with pity and sorrow on the scoffers, and prepare to ride out the convulsions of Earth's last hours. When Monday morning dawns without ascension over the weekend, do true believers call in sick? Having committed all to the cause how do you regroup in the wake of undeniable failure? Some in this group will see it as a temporary setback, a miscalculation of time and events—even a test. If this were a bowling tournament they'd keep setting up the pins even though they're rolling strikes, one after the other.

Another option is to stand on the sidelines and make fun of these pathetic cases. They are such easy targets because they represent a way of thinking and acting that reeks of the supernatural, the mysterious, and the ineffable. To those who sit in the seat of the scornful, there is nothing so inexplicable as a belief in the transcendent because it jams up the bandwidth they've devoted to zombies, vampires, and the commercialized writhings of Lady Gaga.

But if you're not a joiner and you'd rather not scoff, what remains to be done? Because if you have hope at all in some eventual recasting of this old Earth then it must show up in your life, even from moment to moment, since real hope in God's future—not a facile optimism—changes how you live in the present. "I hope in Thee for us," said Gabriel Marcel, a phrase that neatly unites the vertical God-ward axis with the horizontal human one.

To be an Adventist means to live gratefully upon this earth, but to know that "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." All else is diversion, but I shall know it when I see it, for I shall know as I am known.

A Single Step. . .

". . . . once we have arrived at a solution—and in the process of getting there, have paid a fairly high price in terms of anxiety and expectation—our investment in this solution becomes so great that we may prefer to distort reality to fit our solution rather than sacrifice the solution." Paul Watzlawick, How Real is Real?

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk, a writer, and a peace activist who struggled continually with his place in the world. He was torn between committing himself to efforts to end the war in Vietnam and to following his vocation as a monk devoted to the solitary, contemplative life. On the one hand, almost anything he wrote (that made it through the censorship of his superiors) was eagerly published; on the other hand, his growing notoriety encroached upon his time and humility. "The creation of another image of myself—fixation on the idea that I am a 'writer who has arrived'—which I am," he writes in his journal. "But what does it mean? Arrived where?"

His dilemma was not uncommon, but his circumstances were. Here is a man who seems the very embodiment of conflicting opposites. He is gregarious, but seeks silence in order to communicate with his brothers through hand signals. He has spent most of his life running against the grain, yet strives to submit to superiors whom he feels only want his submission for their ego's sake. He loves writing, but comes to loathe the process of being published—the interviews, the book tours, the attention that flatters him and fills him with horror.

His struggle is that of the private man called to a public role, the extension of oneself far out over the abyss in ways that most people are almost unaware of. He receives a note, in the autumn of 1961, from Ethel Kennedy, wife of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, and sister-in-law to the President. He had written to her explicitly objecting to the resumption of nuclear testing. "There is something very unsatisfactory, something not quite true about this whole moral question," he observes. "This idea that it is important to take a 'stand' as an individual. As if by mere gestures and statements one could satisfy conscience. And as if the satisfaction of one's conscience (emphasis on satisfaction) were the great thing. It can become a mere substitute for responsibility and for love." Merton is acutely aware of how vain humankind is, how we pride ourselves on having a tender conscience, only to find that our moral consciousness vanishes like mist when put to the test.

A month later he notes, "I am perhaps at a turning point in my spiritual life: perhaps slowly coming to a point of maturation and the resolution of doubts—and the forgetting of fears." As his resolve grows to  work for the abolition of war and for nuclear disarmament he is aware of how much it will cost him. "Walking into a known and definite battle. . . . It appears that I am one of the few Catholic priests in the country who has come out unequivocally for a completely intransigent fight for the abolition of war, for the use of non-violent means to settle international conflicts."

It is not just the inevitability of conflict over public issues that he is facing, it is the battle within himself, the jihad (in the truest sense of the word) against pride and self-satisfaction that he is steeling himself for. How to be selfless when the very abnegation of self can become a thing of pride? How to resist the image of oneself as a public icon? How to live transparently, to disappear, as Merton says, in spite of one's accomplishments?

Most of us will not have to face such temptations. As someone once said, some people are born to smallness, others have smallness thrust upon them. Yet so many are caught up in the effort to promote themselves that they seem like frantic little dogs chasing their tails, spinning endlessly, a retinue of publicists and media experts on hand to goose them from behind should they tire. You don't have to look far to find the pundits, paid by the word perhaps, who offer their paeans of praise to obvious and  self-evident "truths." The best thing in these situations is to turn off the sound and watch the body language.

But I digress, if every so slightly. There are several issues of moral conflict here. Merton points to one, the temptation to self-righteousness and pride in the midst of doing something that is righteous. Another is how to resist evil without becoming a tool of evil in the process. "By beholding we become changed," runs the text, and William Irwin Thompson, a social philosopher, adds, "We become the thing we hate." The epigram at the beginning of this piece points up another problem. Having arrived at last at a place where we feel confident and assured we'll do anything to remain there—even to flying in the face of changing circumstances and facts. Add all this up and it's enough to paralyze a person.

I remember a protest march held in Washington, DC soon after we invaded Iraq for the second time. An exuberant group of students from Georgetown and George Washington Universities had gathered near the FBI Building to join the march. It was meant to draw thousands to the Mall in order to register our complaint with the war and to speak our minds. I went down to it, arriving as the students were forming up the lines and trying out their cheers. It felt like I was at a football game with the drums, the marching bands, the banners and the self-conscious tribalism. I stood on the sidewalk, a bit lost and at loose ends. It wasn't that I supported the war; it seemed to me another horrific mistake with endless consequences. But on that bright, cool, and comfortable morning in Our Nation's Capitol the march suddenly seemed like a lark, something the whole family could enjoy, a revival service that left one feeling momentarily satisfied but came later to be a bitterness in the memory.  It didn't feel like a sacrifice, a denial of anything precious, the giving up of which might have had some transformative power.

So I left, walking slowly back against the crowd to Union Station and a Metro ride back home. I will tell you what I was thinking: I was recalling a line in Merton's journal, "Non-violent action, not mere passivity." That was years ago now, but the line is still with me. I think of it not in the imperative, "Do this! Don't do that," but in the indicative mood, "Look here. . . Consider this."


It's the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step.

The Mark of Cain

"Though hatred is a convenient instrument for mobilizing a community for defense, it does not, in the long run, come cheap. We pay for it by losing all or many of the values we have set out to defend." Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

How strange it is to realize that on a day filled with sweetness and light in one corner of the global village in another corner men are desperately fighting face to face, gun against fist. A man in a corner coffee shop sits down with a newspaper and a latte while far away another man starts in terror at the sound of gunfire and helicopters. One glances later at his watch and gathers his things to go, the other sees the light fading around him as he clutches the earth.

Osama bin Laden is dead, shot in the face by Navy SEALS and CIA agents in a daring raid deep inside Pakistan. America's number one enemy, a man whose single-minded hatred for all things Western—and especially American—cost the lives of thousands and will continue to burn up lives for years to come. Here in Washington, DC, many people cheered at the news, danced outside the White House, and generally carried on as if their football team had spiked the division rivals in the Superbowl. The Daily Beast, heir to the remains of Newsweek, and current arbiter of What's Happening Now, published a poll for the occasion which gave Obama no bounce at all for ordering Osama's death. Details of the raid were predictably confusing but the public called for more. Many decried the decision of the White House not to release photos of the deceased and Sean Hannity huffed about the burial at sea of bin Laden's body. If one looked closely in the evening sky at the end of that day the glowing contrails of a conspiracy theory could be seen drifting at high altitudes.

The raid was contrasted to the disastrous attempt of the Carter administration to spring the American hostages from Tehran and favorably compared to the Israeli raid on Entebbe to grab their own and split in a hail of gunfire without the loss of innocent life.  What a difference 10 years makes: American intelligence in the field concerning WMD and Saddam's whereabouts back then could not be trusted. But this raid reveals an unusual patience on the part of the Americans, almost British in its willingness to gather details, observe patterns, slowly, slowly close the net, and then strike. So it is with relief but not celebration that this death can be understood. Of course, as common sense would dictate and some voices have already cautioned, this is not the end of Bush's 'War on Terror.' As Churchill said, "It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

A 'War on Terror' might play well in a headline but it makes no sense on many levels. Can you imagine a war without terror? Do abstract concepts galvanize troops, launch Predators, fatten the wallets of the bomb merchants, and stiffen the spines of the weakest politicians? Yes, actually, they do. Words like 'freedom,' 'the American way of life,' 'honor,' and 'sacrifice,' are tossed around, hammered into steel and concrete, emblazoned on jackets, license plates, baseball caps, and T-shirts. We use them up, these words, drain the life out of them, freeze-dry them into slogans, and sprinkle them like fairy dust when the situation gets serious, just in case anyone should mistake victory for tragedy or object to living with delusions.

In a strikingly different context, Reynolds Price noted that, "Despite such a likably humane doctrine as what might be called the universality of the human heart in all times and places, it remains beyond doubt that human beings alive on the same day in the same city block—not to speak of different countries and centuries—will witness, reflect on, and respond to equal stimuli in ways as divergent as an infant's and a leopard's." Thus, while some cheer at the death of a hated enemy others may take the occasion to think on the brevity of life, on the tenuous grasp we have on the weight and measure of our own times, and to regard with sorrow the ferocious drive within us to blot out our complicit guilt. "If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us," says Ernest Becker, "it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed." And so it goes.

The Religion of Money

"The acts of consumption define the spirit of the age, and it would need a library of many volumes to catalogue the texts of extravagance." Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America

Nothing I could say about money will sound anything but resentful to the true worshiper of American capitalism. Such is our reverence for both money and the means of free market acquisition that we feel compelled to offer a weak disclaimer, "Now, I've got nothing against people making a profit for all their hard work. . ." before we go on to register our doubts. But money is the means of establishing value in American society to an extent that takes one's breath away. Everything can be monetized, everything—and it seems—everybody, is for sale.

The takedown of Greg Mortenson, lately of Three Cups of Tea fame, is a case in point. Just when you thought you had a hero of significant proportions, he turns out to have jiggered the accounts in literary, philanthropic, and managerial ledgers. The ascension of Donald Trump to the Republican flavor-of-the- month club for the presidency in 2012 is yet another example of what money can buy. Buffoonery takes on a kind of burnished luster when accompanied by a gazillion dollars. It says something exceedingly tragicomic about the state of American democracy when a person is considered by many to be qualified for the highest office in the republic simply because he cuts the sharpest deals in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

Don't worry, this won't be another screed about the barbarians at the gates and a rant against the philistines who populate the halls of Congress and Wall Street. After all, they paid dearly to be where they are. Who are we to deny them the fruits of their labors?

Money and the worship of it has been much on my mind these past months as I have prepared for and conducted a class entitled "Religion and Money." To an extent I would not have thought possible while growing up in the 60s in California, I have immersed myself lately in the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, R. H. Tawney, John Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Andrew Carnegie and others. Advice has been taken from Jacob Needleman (Money and the Meaning of Life), Jim Wallis (Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street), Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, The Big Short, and The Next Next Thing), as well as Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy) and Craig Gay (Cash Values: Money and the Erosion of Meaning in Today's Society). The last two were the assigned textbooks for the course.

Early in the course I made a simple assignment—to keep a money monitor log, just for one day. The idea was that the students would track throughout the day every time they made a purchase, thought about making a purchase, or otherwise found themselves thinking about money. The results were surprising. Some came back with a short list of purchases, misunderstanding that I wanted them to reflect upon, not simply catalogue, their dealings with money. When they returned with a narrative it was clear that the exercise had opened their eyes. They spoke of realizing how much they spent on lunch at work, how much a tank of gas for the truck cost, or the prioritizing of bills at the end of the month. They marveled at how much it cost for a family lunch out or Easter outfits for the children. They worried about the bills for their education, rejoiced that they had money for tithes and offerings at church, and vowed to cut out the glass of wine at dinner. In ways both revealing and unsettling they found that in their own private state Money held all the offices, advertised all the goods, told the stories, and conjured up the language.

It's not that we were surprised at how much things cost these days. As gas tops $5.00 a gallon in the District of Columbia you realize that the legislators don't drive themselves to work, and even if they noticed the prices without being advised by their constituents, it wouldn't be in their interests to fuss about it. No, what became clear to us is the pervasiveness of what theologian Craig Gay calls the 'Money Metric' system, that which is closer to us than the DNA in our cells. It objectifies everything, quantifies all values, reduces relationships to a cost/benefit analysis, and flattens the curve of experience to a line graph of projections. It is the pesticide devised to sabotage all unhappiness that travels up the food chain to accumulate in our guts. It was also clear that extracting religion from this pecuniary life-cycle might also kill the patient.

Mainline denominations are on the endangered species lists as their spiritual forests are being clear-cut by the evangelical megachurches. At this rate, one estimate shows the Presbyterians will be extinct by 2050, to be recalled only by those who compile the statistics on vanishing fauna. Where once vast herds of Methodists roamed out West, now there are the Willow Creeks, the Saddlebacks, and other purposefully driven spiritual centers catering to thousands of religious consumers. What makes the difference? The relentless marketing, advertising, and branding of the message of liberation from worry and the sweet reward of success the American way, blessed by Him from Whom all blessings flow.

In the midst of all this there are many, no doubt, who yet feel the stirrings of true godliness. Who would have the arrogance or hubris to claim that God's spirit simply cannot be present in a gathering of 10,000 in a church with an annual budget in the millions? And while poverty is no ticket to transcendent spirituality neither is mass-produced religion a guarantee of spiritual success. American religion, by necessity in this country, is a business, its assets protected by the Constitution, but its daily bread provided by those under no obligation to stay, a voluntary association of consumers used to having their wants catered to in the marketplace.

More than one observer of the American culture has said that Money is the religion of America and the key to its deepest anxieties. Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1840s that Americans have a desperate fear of 'sinking in the world' that results in a kind of ADHD in which they "clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and lose grip as they hurry after some new delight."

Jesus said 'the poor you have with you always.' While not disputing that, we could add that 'the monetizers you have with you always, even to the end of the world.' There will always be those, the majority most probably, who see no value in that which cannot be reduced to utility, that which has value that cannot be calculated, projected, and sold. Craig Gay's recommendation is to sidestep the Money Metric system by regarding life and everything in it as a gift. Lewis Lapham, slightly more irreverent but no less to the mark, notes that the most subversive doctrine in America today comes to us from the ancient Greeks and the early Christians as the virtue of temperance and says, 'I've got enough, I don't think I'll buy anything more this week.'