2013-05-19T20:48:14-04:00 Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=barbara-crafton Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Barbara Crafton Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.978951 2011-10-04T16:00:24-04:00 2011-12-04T05:12:07-05:00

Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-crafton/
"What are you doing?!? the owner screamed. It was a reasonable question. "You backed right into me!"

The pavement wasn't  wet and I wasn't going more than four miles an hour. The VW wasn't moving at all. It was broad daylight. I was wearing my distance glasses. I had not been drinking, nor was I fatigued. I just didn't see her car -- it was black, and it was in my blind spot. Anybody who's ever backed up or overtaken another car on a two-lane road knows about the blind spot. You have to look twice when you look behind you before passing, not once.  

It certainly looked to my horrified victim like a deliberate act. Or an incredibly stupid one, which I guess is what it was. "You were in my blind spot," I said, apologizing over and over as we stood there waiting for the police to come. "I didn't see you." Not surprisingly, my explanation was not particularly well-received, and who could blame her?

I thought of this when the news came over the radio that the Supreme Court had refused to overturn Georgia's execution order in the Troy Davis case. It seemed his innocence had not been proven to everyone's satisfaction, a standard in American jurisprudence new to me. I thought we operated under a presumption of innocence here, and that it was guilt that needed to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But what do I know? I am neither a lawyer nor a judge.

But I am a  priest and a religious journalist, and as such am charged with pondering and commenting on what faith may say to us about the way in which we conduct our life together: a communal life lived not only with our co-religionists, but with the larger society in which we find ourselves. Faith is not only about the sublime and nourishing personal sense of God's love, though it certainly is about that. As central as the encounter with Christ is, it does not exist in a social vacuum. Faith is not faith without ethics.  

Christians believe in a life larger than the life we experience as physical beings. We believe there is more to life than meets the eye, that a spiritual dimension, mysterious and beyond our capacity to describe in the concrete ways we use to describe events in the world, is part of human reality. It is true that we affirm it without understanding very much about it at all, but our answer to "Is this all there is?" is a solid "No."

That said, we also affirm the sanctity of earthly life. We don't think it doesn't matter what happens here because we're all going to heaven anyway. We don't think we'd be better off dead. Life matters. Death is an enemy. We found hospitals, sit on their ethics committees, visit the sick. We stand against death, until the moment comes when it is time to leave this world, when life in the body at last becomes too heavy to lift. Then Death, too, becomes an angel, setting the strong spirit free to enter the immediacy of God's unfiltered presence.

Human beings do not have the right to end life prematurely, before that last moment arrives. We need not torture the dying with heroic lifesaving measures after it has become clear that these will not avail, but we can't kill people to whom death has not already laid claim. Even soldiers, who must stand ready to take life in the line of duty, do not escape the stain -- just ask somebody who has had to do it. The Christian theory of the just war, in which self-defense is broadly defined to include the prevention of a greater violence, does not provide a road to the taking of life that avoids the stain. It may mitigate, but it does not absolve. This is one of the many reasons why we recognize a duty to care for soldiers and military veterans: not just because they must sacrifice their safety on our behalf,  but also because they must sacrifice their innocence.

That Troy Davis may have been innocent of the crime for which he was executed may someday be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. If it is, he will join the ranks -- not small in number -- of innocents killed by the state. Even a supporter of the death penalty must acknowledge this as tragic.   

But the greater tragedy is that Americans think capital punishment is ever appropriate. That we do not ask ourselves why it is that we cling to it, in company with regimes we consider wholesale violators of the human rights about which we are very willing to lecture them every chance we get. That we do so in the face of abundant clear evidence that capital punishment fails to deter violent crime. This cognitive dissonance bewilders the countries we like to believe admire us and our way of life. They do admire us, in many ways. But not in that one.  

America has a blind spot.  

The death penalty panders to the basest part of our personalities: our craving for revenge. Everybody has this craving, but we learn in early childhood that violence does not bring about peace. Our parents teach us to talk things out, rather than hitting each other, when we disagree. Growing up is a process of  learning to say no to ourselves about many things, and revenge is one of them. This is not easy: the desire for revenge is a natural desire, upon which we must learn not to act. Punishment in the service of restraining evil? Yes. In the service of exacting payment of a debt to society? In order to ensure society's safety? Yes, there are criminals who must never again be allowed to go free. But revenge? No. Though we acknowledge our primitive longing for it, we must learn to say no. Revenge is far from a solution to violence. It fuels it.

Mature individuals have learned to control this universal urge. Many societies have learned to control it. But not ours. Can we really call ourselves civilized until we do?

China, together with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the United States, carried out the most executions last year. Runners up include Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Somalia and Libya under Muamar Qaddafi. In Europe, only Belarus retains the death penalty in its law; abolition is required of European Union member states. See a complete listing of state-sponsored executions carried out worldwide last year.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.954355 2011-09-09T12:23:51-04:00 2011-11-09T05:12:02-05:00

Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-crafton/
I won't be in New York, where I was on that day. I won't be at St Clement's or at St. Paul's or on the pile -- there is no pile anymore. Won't be at the Seamen's Church. Won't be at any of those places.

I won't be at my current parish. I wish I were. Actually, I wish I were lots of places, and I also wish I were  nowhere. I don't know what I want on that day. I know I want something, but I don't know what it is.

I want to run away. Maybe to Italy, where 9/11 is not front and center in public memory. Maybe India, where so many millions of lives have ended suddenly, in so many ways, for so many centuries, from so many causes. Maybe Africa, where I have never been. In those days, I wanted everyone to visit the smoldering site of the World Trade Center. I wanted everyone to see. I felt impatient with people who would not go. I hid this because you don't help people by scolding them. But it was so. And now, 10 years later, I want to run away.  

The radio this week is all 9/11, all the time. I understand this, but I have a hard time listening. Actually, I can't listen. I, who dissolved in tears when the familiar beloved voices of WNYC-FM came back on the air five days after the attack, cannot listen to those voices talk about any of it now, not for very long. People need to remember, someone tells me when I very tentatively bring up my inability to listen. Of course they do, I agree quickly. I do not share my desire to run away.

But what about those of us who never forget? Who think about it every day? I can honestly say that there has not been a day since the bombing when I have not thought about it at least once, and usually more than once. No matter where I have been, at home or abroad. Every construction or demolition site I have seen, every pile of rubble from a building site, every fire truck, every siren brings it  back. Every glance at the skyline of Lower Manhattan, or of any other city, every glance down Seventh Avenue. Every entry into the station, as we screech around the curve in the tracks, a sound I heard so absentmindedly for so many years. We screeched around the curve, riding the cars into the dim bottom of the World Trade Center. Now we emerge into the open air. We can see the slurry wall from the train windows.

I live my life. I'm productive. These persistent memories do not paralyze me. But they are never far away.  

The day was beautiful -- a perfect sunny New York day.  Not too hot, not too cold. The sky a brilliant blue. I've grown weary of hearing, again and again, about how ironic it was that the weather was so perfect. There were greater ironies afoot that day than that one, believe me.   

But indeed, it was a gorgeous day. Most of the anniversaries of 9/11 have been gorgeous, too, maybe all of them --  prompting many more wondering exclamations about the unbelievable irony of this meteorological  fact.

I hear it might rain on Sunday. I hope it does. I don't want it to be gorgeous like it was that day. I guess I do know what I want. Even now.   

I want it not to have happened.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.870699 2011-06-03T18:25:00-04:00 2011-08-03T05:12:01-04:00

Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-crafton/ New York Times: the space shuttle Endeavor coming in for a landing last night, after completing its final mission.  Discovery is already finished its career, and Atlantis has one more run, which will be in July.  No more NASA space shuttles will lift off after that.  

A television was brought into the cafeteria at school.  Televisions weighed a ton back then -- I can still see our principal struggling under the burden as he carried it in.  We huddled as close to the set as we could get, which wasn't very close -- there were about 60 of us, and the screen was small.  But this was historic, and he wanted all of us to be able to say we saw it as it happened: The first American was about to rocket into space.

We saw him walk toward the immense rocket and disappear into the elevator for the ride up to the nose cone.  Clouds drifted back and forth around the rocket's base; this was oxygen, our principal told us.  There was no oxygen in space, we knew, and very little of anything else -- the oxygen pumping into the space capsule was all that would stand between Alan Shepard and a terrible death.  Once he was inside the capsule, the elevator descended with its load of engineers and the final countdown, began.  It was eternal.  We all chanted along -- 10,9.8.7.6,5,4,3,2,1,0...

Liftoff was curiously slow.  I had expected it to be like a shot, but the rocket groaned at its fiery leaving of us, fought to loose  itself from our pull.  When at last it had broken free, it veered crazily off to one side of the screen and then off it entirely, until another camera caught its jagged ascent.  A moment or two of this and then it was gone.

Some static on the screen and then we were inside the capsule.   The astronaut sat in his seat, trussed like a turkey, surrounded by instruments and dials, his thick white oxygen tube tethering him to life.  Only his eyes moved inside his windowed helmet, and his hands moved slowly, jerkily in their clumsy gloves.  They seemed incapable of picking  up much of anything.  We watched the strange sight for a few minutes as Shepard's remained in inscrutable technical conversation with his earthbound partners, interrupted only once by an exclamation in plain English, shocked at the loveliness of the earth he had left behind.  "What a beautiful view!" he said, and the few dozen who have made that escape from its bonds since then have all said some version of the same thing.

Orbiting the moon, then walking on it.   Building an island in the darkness of space and then living in community on it for months at a time, even modeling an international unity on that island in advance of that unity becoming a reality back home.  Creeping across the plains of Mars. Photographing the gorgeousness of heaven, a thousand thousand galaxies in colors too splendid to describe in mere words.  Commuting between the earth and outer space.  Even, perhaps, house hunting.

One shuttle will be on display in California and one at the space center in Florida.  Discovery will live at the Smithsonian Institution, where many of its ancestors also live in retirement, including the one that began it all, in which the Wright brothers first gained the sky in 1903.   

I am always sad when inanimate objects are set aside.  We partner one another, we and our bikes and cars and planes and rocket ships.  We shape them and then they shape us.  When I was little, I wept when we traded in our car for a newer one.  

But the objects don't mind.  They are all right. People who care about history will care for them with something that can only be called love.  And we will know that, without them,  we would not be who we are. 
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.831657 2011-03-09T20:43:55-05:00 2011-05-26T14:51:12-04:00

Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-crafton/
But wait a minute -- I'm a pastor. This reminds me of what has irked me about DOMA -- and about the whole moral conversation in general -- ever since it appeared: People think there's only one kind of Christian. People think there's only one kind of religious moral vision. People outside faith communities imagine a conservative social consensus within them that isn't there, and people within them often think there should be one, even though there isn't. The old inside joke about Jews -- two Jews, three opinions -- is true of all faith communities. We share a certain moral and cultural inheritance, and our spiritual assignment is to puzzle over it. Often we agree among ourselves about its meaning and application in the world and sometimes we don't. That's the way assemblies of human beings and faith communities are nothing if not human.

Still, many faith communities -- most of them -- do claim a monopoly on truth. They want to proclaim it and then they don't want anybody messing with it. The last sentences of the Christian scriptures contain this warning to anyone who might be toying with the idea of adding something to Holy Writ: I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book (Revelation 22:18).

Our reverence for our ancient texts trips us up. We imagine the truth of scripture to be of the journalistic sort, the who-what-when-where-how kind of truth, the it-either-happened-or-it-didn't kind of truth, which many among us have come to believe is the only kind of truth there is. But it is not so. There are many truths -- the truth of story, the truth of archetype, the truth of poetry, the truth of group aspiration. None of those fit easily into who-what-when-where-how. And the world's holy scriptures contain them all.

Because we have so beggared our notion of what truth is, we can easily find ourselves imagining religious truth to reside only in our past, as the words on the page record it. There it is, in black and white, we say. Just do what it says. And so we reach back across several linguistic groups and several cultural groups, through the filters of redactors and translators too numerous to count, and struggle to don first-century clothing we can no longer wear. Or we project ourselves backwards through time. "Well, they must have been just like us," we think. Our own local version of The Family, as we know it today, must be and always have been the timeless rock of humanity.

In order to believe this, we must not only ignore the varieties of contemporary family
arrangements but also significant portions of the very scriptures we tell ourselves we are protecting -- our polygamous patriarchs, their concubines and the children they begot upon them. We must ignore the custom of the Levirate, by which you had to take your sister-in-law as your wife if your brother died. We must read the story of David and his beloved Jonathan selectively, resolutely ignoring the sexual aspect of their deep friendship. And we must ignore some very interesting women of the Hebrew scriptures -- Tamar the wronged daughter-in-law who turned the tables on those who wronged her. Rahab the brave and crafty prostitute, who used her profession to save her people. Ruth, who secured her future by seducing a wealthy farmer. Old Testament women who thought outside the box, remembered fondly in the New -- each of them listed by Matthew the evangelist as part of Jesus' family tree.

The nuclear family, so often imagined to be the norm in America, is not the only family of the scriptures. It is not even the majority family of the scriptures. In fact, it is not even the only American family: American families have had many configurations in the short history of our Republic. The family has always changed. Yes, it has always been a basic building block of society, but it has changed shape throughout history. Human history is shaped by living people, as well as by the testament of dead ones. It is a conversation between the living and the dead. And the history of any community is shaped by forces outside it, as well as by those within.

So, not with a bang but a whimper, the Defense of Marriage Act fades from the headlines. Don't Ask, Don't Tell has ended, too, with hardly any truculence to mark its departure. Maybe we are turning a page. Maybe we are beginning to save our energy for something more worthy of it than the culture wars about sex and marriage we have fought so long and with such zest.

Maybe. Because there are, indeed, threats to the health of families everywhere, but they are not other kinds of families. Shocked by an economic downturn, sickened by the sacrifice of young lives in ill-considered wars, sobered by a new consciousness of societal and environmental limits, perhaps we can begin to see an urgency in finding ways through all of these, instead. Perhaps we already do see it.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.828478 2011-02-28T21:12:28-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

Barbara Crafton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-crafton/
"Could you see somebody?"I asked. "A therapist?" He had just told me of his despair. He shook his head. "I could never witness to anybody again if I were in therapy. I'd feel like a fraud."

Witnessing is telling the story of how God came into your life. Ultimately, it's supposed to be a happy tale -- although you're allowed many trials along the way, it must end up with your accepting Christ, and then things are supposed to be all right with you. You're not supposed to be hopeless and want to die. There's not a lot of room in this narrative for despair, so people committed to it who find themselves staring despair in the face tend to keep that fact to themselves.

This conversation took place years ago. It was before people were as open about their inner lives as they are today. It took place at a time in the man's life when his faith had become very important to him. The style of faith that had grabbed him was that of the charismatic renewal, the movement within the church that embraced healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues. It had a lively sense of the living presence of Christ in the world, and expected to see signs of that presence. Like this young man, many people in it had rediscovered the faith in which they were raised and felt it quicken to vivid new life.

But the culture of his prayer group, and the things he read, saw a fairly immediate relationship between faith and spiritual well-being. It ought to feel good to be a Christian, they felt. The songs they sang were all happy praise signs about the joy of loving Jesus, and their understanding of scripture tended toward the literal. They were committed to healing prayer, and excited about miracles of healing that had happened in their midst. They had the gift of seeing God everywhere.

Or almost everywhere. The people in the prayer group drew a sharp distinction between The Spirit and The World. They had ample scriptural justification for this, they believed -- the Gospel of John was a favorite, with its stark imagery of darkness and light, its larger-than-life Jesus striding magnificently through the events of his life and his death. The teachings given at the meeting were often about how to resist the world, about its lures and temptations, about how the categories of the world were nothing like the categories of the Kingdom.

Nobody in the prayer group ever talked about depression. They talked about having faith. You needed to believe that God would handle everything. It was but a short walk from there to the idea that if your healing was a result of your faith, then your continuing illness must be due to your lack of it. This came dangerously close to the feelings the young man was having already: guilt about the very fact of his desolation.

He may have felt isolated, but he was far from alone. Many people -- most people -- who suffer from depression resist turning to their communities of faith with the truth about themselves, for fear that understanding and support will not be forthcoming. Some are so convinced that their condition is shameful that they don't even even apply. Others do, and wish they hadn't- - as one woman wrote me, "I survived the church telling me the following: If I confess my sins, the depression will go away. If I were not gay, I wouldn't have this problem with depression. I must be out of right relationship with God. Pray more. Have more faith. You will go to Hell if you kill yourself."

Oy. No wonder so many just close out the church's account. But there are at least two sides to everything -- depression and faith are both complex enough that there are as many reasons to come as there are to stay away.

At its best, a faith community offers love, and the honest admission that life can be hard. It is matter-of-fact and unsurprised by human limitations and mistakes. It carries memory, powerful stories of redemption and release. It provides a context larger than that of our immediate surroundings -- faith asserts that what I can see is not necessarily all there is. It welcomes the good wherever it appears, and is quite able to understand psychotherapy or medication as miraculous, too, in their own right.

Faith, like everything else in the world, comes in different flavors. We are responsible for finding the one that speaks best to us. And yes, a sloganeering faith probably does do more harm than good. But that's not the only show in town.

Because we have lots of company. Probably 10% of the population in the United States will suffer from depression at some point in life, not to mention the other people affected by it. Every religious leader should be aware of its signs, and stand ready to be the kind of friend a sufferer needs. This may mean being a sympathetic listener, but also may mean learning how to help someone over the hump of misplaced shame that prevents him from seeking the professional help he needs. It may mean using the community 's healing rituals -- confession, healing prayer, the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick, silent meditation, spiritual direction -- in new ways. And it may mean being appropriately candid about one's own struggles. I have come to view my own history of depression as a very useful tool: I may wish with all my heart that I had learned what I know about it in any way other than by experience, but I cannot deny that it has helped me understand other people's struggles with the beast in a way I never could have done without it.

Pick up a Bible and turn to the Gospel of John. Find the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead -- it's in the 11th chapter. It contains the shortest verse in scripture, just two words: "Jesus wept.". Then thumb through the Hebrew scriptures and notice how many of the psalms are laments -- about a third of them. Reflect for a moment on church hardware -- you see lots of crosses, not many smiley faces. Our tradition is no stranger to sorrow. Honest faith has no interest in brushing aside our grief, and the beloved community does not demand it. It accepts the present as it finds it, and looks toward a future in which life is not only possible, but blessed.]]>