Posts for category ‘Other Voices’

“How satisfying it would be to call so-and-so on the carpet for their wicked ways. Whether it’s the crazy sister-in-law, the negative co-worker or the selfish spouse, there’s nothing like the dysfunctions of others to bring out the beast in us.”

You know it’s bad when you start practicing the speeches.

You know, the little speeches you rehearse in your head for the grand and glorious moment when you finally get to tell so-and-so what you really think about them.

Your monologue gets more brilliant each day as you practice it over and over again in you car or shower, clarifying your thoughts, honing your points, preparing for that big day when you finally let them have it.

The stunning clarity and accuracy with which you deliver your soliloquy will be amazing. It’s fantasy you can practically taste, that beautiful moment when you finally take the filters off and confront them with the truth.

The truth about their selfishness and dysfunctions.

Or the way they misrepresent facts and manipulate others into taking their side.

Or how they blame everyone else for their problems and refuse to take responsibility for their own self-created mess.

Or the way they conveniently rewrite history to suit their story and get away with it because nobody is willing to call them on their lies.

Or how they hurt people and don’t even seem to care.

Oh, it will be a moment alright. Because once you finally speak the truth, there can be no more denials; because, as everyone knows, there is no defense against the truth – the real truth that is.

In fact, they will probably be rendered absolutely speechless, because they’ve finally been outed.

No more manipulating, no more game playing, no more falsehoods, and no more lies.

Now, thanks to you, they have been exposed and the whole world knows who and what they really are.

We’ve all been there.

Scheming and dreaming about how satisfying it would be to call so-and-so on the carpet for their wicked ways.

Whether it’s the crazy sister-in-law, the negative co-worker or the selfish spouse, there’s nothing like the dysfunctions of others to bring out the beast in us.

And what makes us even crazier is the way everybody else lets them get away with it. It’s almost like no one but us is willing to see the truth.

So we rehearse the speeches, savoring the righteousness of our words as we turn them over and over again in our mind, dreaming of the day when we can expose the evil one. So that God and everybody else will finally know the true nature of their wrongs.

Well, guess what? God already knows.

God knows all about their silly little games. Just like God knows all about your silly little games, and my silly little games, and all the other ways that we human beings make each other nuts.

But God – and feel free to apply that term as literally, conceptually, specifically or vaguely as you like – has decided to love them anyway. Because the mind of God is large enough to hold a person’s negative behavior and their positive attributes, at the same time.

And therein lies the problem. We human beings think in terms of either/or, but God created a world of AND.

As in we’re selfish and we’re selfless; we’re kind and we’re mean; we’re judgmental and forgiving, each and every one of us.

Nobody is all good or all bad, and alerting the world to the flaws of others never changes things at all.

So the next time you start practicing your speech, you might want to ask yourself what little speech might someone be preparing for you?

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality. Lisa Earle McLeod’s comments can be read at <www.forgetperfect.com>.

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”

In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.

The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation), simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.

“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it, until another sin is committed. You can get one for yourself, or for someone who is dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1567 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.

It has no currency in the bad place.

“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”

The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.

Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.”

But in the adjacent Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who said he was unaware that the offer was not on the Web site, but would soon have it posted.)

The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.

“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic.

Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York Archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into confession, in fact, was one of the motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of personal sin back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.”

“The good news is we’re not selling them anymore,” he added.

To remain in good standing, Catholics are required to confess their sins at least once a year. But in a survey last year by a research group at Georgetown University, three-quarters of Catholics said they went to confession less often or not at all.

Under the rules in the “Manual of Indulgences,” published by the Vatican, confession is a prerequisite for getting an indulgence.

Among liberal Catholic theologians, the return of the indulgence seems to be more of a curiosity than a cause for alarm. “Personally, I think we’re beyond the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame who supports the ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their shoulders.”

One recent afternoon outside Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills, Queens, two church volunteers disagreed on the relevance of indulgences for modern Catholics.

Octavia Andrade, 64, laughed as she recalled a time when children would race through the rosary repeatedly to get as many indulgences as they could — usually in increments of 5 or 10 years — “as if we needed them, then.”

Still, she supports their reintroduction. “Anything old coming back, I’m in favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.”

Karen Nassauer, 61, said she was baffled by the return to a practice she never quite understood to begin with.

“I mean, I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong,” she said. “What does it mean to get time off in Purgatory? What is five years in terms of eternity?”

The latest offers de-emphasize the years-in-Purgatory formulations of old in favor of a less specific accounting, with more focus on ways in which people can help themselves — and one another — come to terms with sin.

“It’s more about praying for the benefit of others, doing good deeds, acts of charity,” said the Rev. Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese.

After Catholics, the people most expert on the topic are probably Lutherans, whose church was born from the schism over indulgences and whose leaders have met regularly with Vatican officials since the 1960s in an effort to mend their differences.

“It has been something of a mystery to us as to why now,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael Root, dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., who has participated in those meetings. The renewal of indulgences, he said, has “not advanced” the dialogue.

“Our main problem has always been the question of quantifying God’s blessing,” Dr. Root said. Lutherans believe that divine forgiveness is a given, but not something people can influence.

But for Catholic leaders, most prominently the pope, the focus in recent years has been less on what Catholics have in common with other religious groups than on what sets them apart — including the half-forgotten mystery of the indulgence.

“It faded away with a lot of things in the church,” said Bishop DiMarzio. “But it was never given up. It was always there. We just want to people to return to the ideas they used to know.”

It will be a moment, a moment when the entire world watches, as the United States of America inaugurates our first African-American president.  There will be parties. There will be cheering. There will be speeches. I suspect a lot of people will probably start to cry.

Busloads of people, thousands of them, are making the trek to Washington, D.C., to witness the historic event, and millions more will be glued to their sets at home.

The donors, big and small, will feel proud. The media will chatter about what a big day it is, and all the volunteers who made the phone calls and sent the e-mails and registered the voters and went door to door will be elated because, thanks to their hard work, an idea that once seemed improbable has become real.

But there are some other people who also contributed to this moment. We’re not going to see them at any of the inaugural balls or marching in the parade. They don’t have front-row seats at the swearing-in ceremony and they won’t be interviewed on television.  But I suspect that they’ll be there during that moment when the Obamas walk up the steps to enter the White House.  

A strong, silent group of contributors who I hope realize that, without them, this moment never could have happened.  They didn’t vote for him, they didn’t raise money and they certainly didn’t make YouTube videos.

But they’ll be by the first family’s side nonetheless, because they’re the unsung heroes whose literal blood, sweat and tears built the house that the Obamas will now call home.  In a grand full circle moment, America’s first black president will walk up steps that were built by slaves. 

I’ve often imagined what it would be like to go back in time and tell those slaves how things worked out.  Imagine standing there at the foot of the White House steps, watching as the crew of black men hauled the stones in place, sweat streaming down their bodies, eyes downcast and their hands gnarled and mangled from years of hard labor.  Imagine walking up to the oldest, most tired-looking one, knelt down near the bottom of the steps as he struggles to push another rock in place. 

Imagine bending over and whispering in his ear:  ”One day, on this very spot, a black man will stand with his wife and two beautiful daughters. He won’t be wearing laborers’ rags; he’ll be wearing a suit.  As he stands with his family at the foot of these stairs, the eyes of the world will be upon them, but they’ll be thinking about you.  They’ll pause right here on this very spot and, as they look up at the doors of the house they are about to enter, they will send you, and every other worker on this site, a silent prayer of gratitude and thanks.  Because they want you to know that you mattered, that your life was not for nothing. Because these rocks that you’re laying, they are the very surface the black man and his family will walk on before they ascend the stairs, so that he can begin his work as President of the United States.”

The old slave would have thought that you were crazy if you had spun him that tale. But perhaps somewhere, somehow, he now knows.

I pray that they all do.

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality. Lisa Earle McLeod’s comments can be read at <www.forgetperfect.com>.

From Newsweek, January 19, 2009

“Shall we meet hate with hate?” that has been a recurring question throughout history and, recently, a personal one for me. On a Sunday morning last July, a man walked into the sanctuary of my church, took a shotgun out of a guitar case and opened fire on a room of unarmed men, women and children. Two precious people, Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, lost their lives. Six others were injured. Our entire community was traumatized.

According to a manifesto in his handwriting, the alleged assailant reportedly wrote of his hatred for liberals, whom he believed were soft on terror. He was in for a surprise. Members of our congregation rushed forward and tackled the shooter. Others acted instantly to guide children to safety, call police and emergency assistance, care for the wounded and counsel those in grief and shock.

This misguided man may have picked our congregation because we call ourselves a liberal church. In our church, the word “liberal” is meant to describe whom we include, not whom we exclude. The children in our congregation say these words in chapel services: “Ours is the church of the loving heart, open mind and helping hands.” Our understanding of liberalism speaks to a generosity of spirit that transcends partisan politics. Sadly, though, the word “liberal” has become demonized. The man accused of the shootings owned books by popular media personalities who vilify liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless and treasonous. I think our country needs to reclaim the word from those who defame it. Far from being evil, we liberals aspire to overcome evil with good. If you walk into a liberal church and open fire on its members, we will still defend your right to due process, access to an attorney and a fair trial.

The trial for the man accused of attacking our church is set for March 16. A reporter asked me what results I would like to see from our day in court. “Justice,” I said. The follow-up question was predictable: “What does justice look like?” “A community,” I replied, “where our children are safe.” After the incident, everyone in our town felt as if the children of our church were their children. For weeks, people would stop me to ask, “How are the children doing?” Fortunately, none of them was injured in body. We continue to work on healing the spirit, and healing has its own timetable. A miracle story in the Bible is that of Jesus walking on the water. A miracle in my time has been witnessing the young and the old, the wounded and the whole, walking into our sanctuary without bitterness or resentment.

Of course, the question keeps coming back: “Shall we return hatred for hatred?” Anyone who has endured a brutal act of violence will know the temptation. Our congregation’s experience, however, offers a cautionary tale. The man who brought violence to our church hated liberals. But in his desire to defeat terrorism he became a terrorist himself.

I have tried to use the power of the pulpit to advocate for a better way. I have told my congregation, “The man who attacked our church is in prison, but we do not have to remain prisoners of our own anger. Without denying the reality of our feelings in the present, we can be open to the possibility that one day we will be able to lay down our burden and say, in the words of the old African-American spiritual, ‘We are free at last’.”

Since that terrible day, people have flooded our church with immeasurable amounts of love. Postcards, letters, banners and artwork have come to us from across the nation and from many other countries. Our little town on the banks of the Tennessee River was once the site for the 1982 World’s Fair, and it remains surprisingly diverse today. On the night after the violence there was a gathering in the Presbyterian church next door, where we were hugged and held by our neighbors of all faiths and convictions—Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, rationalists and more. For years, there has been a sign at the entrance of our church that reads EVERYONE WELCOME, and we do mean everyone. All God’s children. The sign is still there.

Members of my congregation have been hurt. But we have also been healed by the feeling that there is a love greater than our theological differences, a compassion that is not limited by the boundaries of any creed. I firmly believe, now more than ever, that love is stronger than death. Love is more powerful than hate.

Rev. Chris Buice is the minister of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville.

If you pick just one spiritual truth that resonates deep within you and live it constantly and with every ounce of your being, it will change your world forever. But that is not how I started my first attempt at a spiritual life. However, 28 years later. I landed on one spiritual truth that carried me, like Columbus, to a new world.

The mistake I made when I first attempted to live a spiritual life was trying to swallow the whole thing. I had perpetual indigestion as many of the beliefs of the church of my youth just would not go down my throat. Years later when I went to “orientation” to consider joining another church, some of those same beliefs that gave me indigestion earlier were right back again sticking in my throat.

To try to force any belief down your throat when it violates your good judgment or conscience, is a sin against your own soul. I believe it was Ingersoll who said anything that shocks the mind and soul of a child cannot be true.

Some people don’t ever try to accept the litany of beliefs their church broadcasts. They just noisily gargle them so people will think they are swallowing. Others swallow them but in their moments of highest fidelity to their own minds, they stick their fingers down their throats and regurgitate them — usually after the revival is over.

The way to ascertain spiritual truths for yourself is to munch, meditate and experiment. Munch on them with your mind and see if they ring true. God gave us a brain to use as a hat rack but it’s OK to think with it, too.

Munch on them with your soul, too. See how they taste to your deepest being. The taste buds in you soul are very sacred things.

Now experiment with them. Find a situation in your life to test them on. To test the deep truth Jesus taught about turning the other cheek, be willing to feel a little pain just to see if forgiveness and love really work. The smack will smart but when you realize you are testing a Jesus truth, it will ease the pain.

I proved this truth for myself when I took a couple of slaps from a man who seemed determined to be my political enemy. I asked God to help me love him until he could see that love was the best thing for both of us. Over the next few weeks after that prayer, I started seeing the good in him. We made peace. We accomplished great things together.

That truth went through my lips, down my throat, into my digestive tract, and settled forever into my soul. I know exactly what Jesus was talking about and I know it works.

When I was embarking on a great challenge and adventure I asked God to make His presence so real to me that I would feel it, know it, and learn to trust in it in times of great stress. The message I got was, “Be still and know.” Every time I needed to feel the Presence, I would get very still until I knew. Sometimes the presence of the Lord would be so real to me that I felt he was in the passenger seat of my car.

We are told to “taste the Lord.” Experiment with His teachings. Each time one becomes Truth to you, you know it for yourself. As John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” reveals, you will know you are “not shackled by forgotten words and bonds and the ink stains that have dried upon some line” but that your own body, mind and soul have been gentled by an eternal truth. Your personal creed becomes not a thing on paper or something to noisily gargle but the very marrow of your spiritual bones.

Yes, just one truth like this can change your world forever.

Dalton Roberts writes for IPS features. Read more at <www.daltonroberts.com>.

“Why do we always wait until things get awful before we ask for help?”

We wait until our marriage is in a ditch before we go to a counselor.  We wait until our kid is failing before we hire a tutor.  And we often wait until we’re desperate before we turn to God. 

No, this isn’t going to be a lecture about religion. Faith and spirituality transcend religion and I would hope that we’re all smart enough to realize that by now.

Back to the point: why do we humans wait so long before we turn to God, Allah, Mother Earth or – insert deity here – to ask for help?

People say there are no atheists in a foxhole. I would also say there aren’t too many atheists during an economic collapse or when your kid gets really sick or when your car flips over in a traffic accident and you find yourself lying bruised and bloody in a ditch.

There’s nothing like a big problem to bring us to our knees, both literally and figuratively.

A quick trip to any hospital chapel and you’ll find people who aren’t even sure they believe in God, praying with all their hearts promising to do anything if only the Almighty will intervene and help their loved one get better.

I have to wonder what would happen if we prayed for answers when things were going well.

As a former atheist, turned agnostic, turned religiously confused, turned seeker, turned conceptual believer, I’m well acquainted with the spiritual quagmire of trying to pray when you’re not sure what, or who, you’re praying to.

But vagueness and confusion about the source need not stop you from tapping into it.

Call it hedging your bets if you like, but people generally feel more peaceful when they believe in something larger than themselves. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that you don’t have to have all the answers.

A minister friend of mine tells about a time in her life when she was spiritually lost and couldn’t find a faith. After many frustrations with the dogma and rigidity of organized religion she finally joined a church that told her, “All you need to know about God right now is that it’s not you.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

To be honest, I’m always kind of envious of people who claim to know exactly what God looks like and what he thinks about everything.

However, I’ve also noticed that most of the major religions also include a part about free will. Perhaps that’s because the journey to faith is only ultimately a personal one.

Rabbis, priests, ministers and other teachers may help, but at the end of the day, you don’t need a third party to connect with the divine.

And you don’t have to understand who or what’s out there to ask for help. If you’re feeling lost or alone, the vague God of your understanding is good enough for today.

It’s like my friend’s church says, all you need to know about God is that it isn’t you.

And thank heaven for that, because wouldn’t it be awful to believe that you were supposed to handle everything alone?

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality.  Lisa Earle McLeod’s comments can be read at <www.forgetperfect.com>.