Shortly after serving as the officiant for the wedding of the daughter of one my colleagues, I decided that I could no longer represent the interests of the state in legal marriage. At that time, no jurisdiction in the United States provided for marriage equality. My decision was to no longer support the laws that discriminated against gay and lesbian people in marriage, so I would not act on behalf of the state and perform legal marriages.

Any time a couple approached me about a wedding, I was clear: I was willing to work with them in pre-marital counseling and lead a religious service of commitment. But I would not sign a marriage license. They’d have to go to someone else for assistance for legal validation of their marriage.

Over my career, I participated in many religious ceremonies blessing lesbian and gay couples. My first was in 1985: a garden wedding lavishly decorated with pink and white lace on wrought iron for two women. I performed many other “gay weddings” over the years in churches, on beaches, in hotel ball rooms, and in homes. Some of those weddings were inter-religious events where I joined rabbi’s and Buddhist monks in leading the ceremonies. But none were legally recognized.

Over the same time period, I performed many other weddings as well. But it bothered me that while the ceremonies and vows were all essentially the same, while the commitments couples made were equally sincere, the state chose to approve one and not the other. Yet, as a Christian minister, I knew that all the marriage commitments made were equally sacramental in their nature. God was with those couples in their commitments and no one could change that.

When living in Arizona, I realized that I simply didn’t need to sign a marriage license if I chose not to do so. The realization came to me in an unexpected way. When serving as pastor of a church in Tucson, I became aware of senior couples living together who I thought were married but weren’t. Their social security benefits and pensions were barely enough to live on. If they were legally married, their retirement benefits would be reduced leaving them without sufficient resources. I offered to perform a religious wedding ceremony for them without a marriage license. After all, there was no reason to not honor these relationships and pray God’s blessing on them. But the relationships didn’t need to be legally recognized.

In the case of the elders who shared their lives in a loving commitment, it seemed to me to discriminate against them by imposing a financial penalty for their love and commitment. It then occurred to me that I didn’t need to participate in the discrimination of gay and lesbian couples by signing marriage licenses for heterosexual couples and not for gay couples. Instead, I would be an equal opportunity officiant: I would no longer sign a marriage license until all couples had the right to legally marry.

Now I cross a new thresh hold: a gay male couple I’ve known for many years had a destination wedding in the State of New York. New York recognized marriage equality. When invited to officiate at the ceremony, I agreed. As a minister, it will be my first wedding in a dozen years – and my first legal wedding for a gay male couple.

I know that I am just one minister. But over the years, I’ve know many other clergy who have made similar decisions to mine: we won’t actively participate in the fundamental injustice of inequality. While many religious leaders receive an inordinate level of media attention for opposing marriage equality, there are those of us who for ten, twenty, and even thirty years have done what we could to make a way for all couples to celebrate their love.

I look forward to the day when marriage equality is recognized throughout the United States and other countries as well. In the meantime, I won’t participate in discrimination by acting as an agent of a state which does not afford marriage equality to all couples. For me, it’s an important act of faith.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

Today, I consider myself to be very fortunate to have had a wise, caring, and gracious mother. Dorothy was a strong and determined woman who repeatedly demonstrated forbearance. She was kind, able to put others at ease, and demonstrated remarkable skill as a conversationalist.

When another family member had become frustrated with a series of life events, she penned her philosophy of life and asked that I lay it out “on the computer to make it look nice.” Without her realizing it, she left great wisdom that has touched others who have read it. In Dorothy’s memory, I share her wisdom for living with you.

Life’s Recipe

1. Be thankful.

2. You do no have the power for controlling life’s situations.

3. You may be able to help – at times.

4. Be the best you can be.

5. Do not judge.

6. Think of all who may be hurting.

7. You are blessed. Now smile!

Dorothy Kavar
August 7, 2004

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

I sat with forty or fifty others in the Buddhist meditation hall. The leader guided us in meditation to consider the ways we are attached to things that bring us suffering. As he spoke, we were reminded of ways that people value wealth and possessions, power and influence, or position and reputation. As he went through the list, I thought about the ways I value having nice things and receiving respect from others. He reminded us that all things we’re attached to will pass from our lives. One day, they will all be gone. If our happiness is based on them, what becomes of our happiness?

That’s when an overwhelming sadness welled up within me. Tears began to stream down my face. My emotional response had nothing to do with my worldly possessions, accomplishments, or the esteem of others. Instead, the awareness came to me that one day I would lose what I valued so much: my relationship with a spouse, my companion and friend.

The truth is that I’m not much bothered by my own death. I recognize that life has been very good to me. But for ten years, I’ve shared my life with another. I simply don’t want it to ever end. Recognizing that I am the older person, I know that I am likely to die first. The thought of leaving my beloved and not seeing life continue to unfold was simply overwhelming.

During the break between sessions, I spoke with one of the other participants. She noticed I had a strong reaction to the meditation. As I tried to put words around my experience, she said that she too was struck by her mortality – even though the leader never drew us to consider that our lives would end.

Over the last few days I’ve sat with these feelings. I’ve tried to understand them, particularly in light of the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. It’s a simple lesson found in other great spiritual traditions. Every thing is always in a state of flux. Every thing that exists is changing. What is today will be different tomorrow. When we try to hold onto what is now, we are only left with frustration because it will change. That’s the nature of the lives we lead.

We are impermanent. We are here today but will be gone on some tomorrow. We can’t know for sure what lies ahead of us. We do not know whether our time as human beings will be long or short. Because of this essential truth of human existence, our happiness and fulfillment are only real when we live in a way that affirms the present moment within the context of our transitory lives.

Of course, it is inevitable that the things we cherish now will one day fade away. We ourselves will also fade from life as we know it. No matter what deep convictions we may hold about life after this life, we can’t know for certain what is to come. What I know for certain is that the happiness I find today as a partner in a relationship will inevitably come to an end.

I’ll admit: I haven’t come to full acceptance of this limitation. But I’m finding some consolation in something that another friend once said to me in a very different context.

About twenty years ago, one of my long-time friends got caught up in drugs. At some point, we had a serious conversation and I asked him why. He said, “I want to experience everything there is to experience.” As he was hitting bottom, I took him for a weekend trip in Northern California. There, he had the opportunity to climb rocky shores, watch whales in the distance, and walk among redwood trees. I told him that this was part of my version of experiencing everything there is to experience.

Now, in a very different context, I am renewing this affirmation. I want to experience everything I can. That will include one day passing from this life to something I really can’t know. It will be the experience of leaving behind everything and everyone behind that I have come to cherish. But just as I have come to understand life as profoundly good, I trust that I will discover a goodness in my own impermanence – a goodness I can’t begin to understand today.

Indeed, all of life – and our lives, in particular – continue to change. Nothing stays the same. It’s all impermanent. By affirming this aspect of the nature of all things, we have the opportunity to appreciate and experience gratitude for everything we experience in this present moment.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

Compassion fatigue is also known as burn-out. It’s the experience of exhaustion, of not being able to engage in one’s normal responsibilities, along with feelings of emptiness. Compassion fatigue is also known as Secondary Traumatic Stress. This is when someone has been with a number of people who have experienced traumatic incidence stress (like a natural disaster or gun related violence) and the stress of other people’s trauma becomes one’s own.

Compassion fatigue has a positive sound to it. It seems almost noble. It’s a term that suggests, “Oh, she is such a caring person that she gave too much. It took a toll on her.” Or, “he’s such a compassionate person that he gave it all to others.” From this perspective, it seems as though compassion fatigue is experienced by generous people who care more for others than they do for themselves. Framing compassion fatigue in this way makes it seem like it’s something for which we should strive: to give until it hurts.

I want to suggest that this thing called compassion fatigue really isn’t about compassion. It’s essentially about living in an imbalanced way. And, yes: I should know because I’ve been there.

The word compassion is taken from that Latin roots meaning to suffer with, or to feel deeply with another. Fundamentally, compassion is connected with empathy. Empathy is the experience of being able to recognize, understand, relate to, or in some way share the experience of another. When a person experiences empathy for others, the person enters the experience of others. At the same time, essential to compassion and empathy is the ability to feel, to recognize one’s own feelings, and to understand one’s own emotional processes.

Compassion fatigue occurs when someone isn’t able to recognize and respond to one’s own feelings and emotional processes. Compassion fatigue ignores, suppresses, or discounts one’s own experience and identifies with the other to the detriment of self. Compassion fatigue is a devaluing of self and, in many cases, an attempt to find something of value for oneself in another person’s experience.

Essentially, what’s commonly called compassion fatigue isn’t about caring too much. Instead, it’s about not caring properly. A person is at risk for compassion fatigue when there is a lack of care and compassion for self.

Making sure that one gets sufficient rest, eats properly, exercises, and tends to interior needs, both psychological and spiritual, isn’t about being selfish. Instead, self compassion and basic care of the self means that one recognizes who she or he truly is as a human being. When basic care for self is not provided, we ultimately become a burden to others because we have left ourselves in a weak and vulnerable state.

A time when I experienced this thing called compassion fatigue was over the years I was the founder of a new congregation. Because my denomination didn’t have money available to support this venture, I chose to work full-time while also organizing a new congregation. I maintained my job responsibilities pretty well and, after four years, the congregation had over 120 people at Sunday services. It was a success all around, but I was a failure. I was weary, rigid, with little ability to feel, and frustrated by the smallest things. It took a few years to recover from the experience. My recovery was marked by very intentional time in prayer and meditation as well as more balanced living. My book, Stumbling Into Life’s Lessons, contains several essays on the process I undertook to restore balance to my life.

A number of years later, another experience could have led to compassion fatigue. For a five year period, I was the primary caregiver for my elderly mother who was blind and arthritic. She came to live with us over the years before her death. While the experience was much like being on-call all day every day, the lessons I learned about my need for spiritual grounding, exercise, and compassion for myself enabled me to be present for the long-haul of caring for another.

In the end, I’ve come to understand that compassion fatigue really isn’t about caring too much for others. It’s actually the problem of not being compassionate toward oneself. To tell the truth: I don’t think one can ever care too much about others. Instead, the problem is that we often don’t care in balanced ways for ourselves. No matter the needs of others, our ability to respond to them with compassion begins with the compassion we show to ourselves.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

There’s another story, a more recent one. It gripped our attention and closed a major city for a day. A young man immigrated to the US with his family. He didn’t like it here. He didn’t understand the culture. He kept to himself. He didn’t fit it. One day, he and his younger brother planted a couple of home-made bombs. After the blast, they continued on with their day as though nothing special had happened.

Social alienation. The problem continues to grow in the US and other “developed” countries. It may be more noticeable in the U.S. because social alienation is often a significant factor in the mass tragedies that make headlines. While people throughout American culture experience social alienation, it seems to be most acute among young men. These youth are at a time in life when they are developing a sense of themselves as adults. At least, that’s when the acuteness of social alienation is most significant to society because it undergirds violent outbursts like mass shootings.

Some people lament life in the 1950’s – the era when they were children themselves. They paint a picture of life through the memory of childhood: when everyone got along, was happy, and people looked after each other. In fact, this is not an accurate picture of life in the decade after World War II when the U.S. and Europe were rebuilding and reestablishing themselves. However, this childhood description of idyllic life provides an image of a public life that reduces social isolation.

In most neighborhoods and communities, people today know very little about their neighbors. Daily routines are consistent: people leave home in the morning, come back in the evening, and have little contact with those around them throughout the day. The lack of involvement with those around us is a manifestation of social isolation. An isolated way of living has significant consequences for individuals, like increased diagnoses for depression and anxiety. It also leads to communities that are less safe than they could be. For example, about a year ago, one home in my neighborhood was burglarized while two other neighbors watched and made no report. When questioned, they said they weren’t sure if they should dial 9-1-1. They both said that they considered it but decided that it would do little good and may cause the robbers to target their homes.

As a society, we pay a high cost for social isolation. Social isolation increases with urbanization. With more than 50% of the world’s population living in cities, the experience of social isolation has grown from past decades. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities. The closer we live to each other, the greater the tendency to set-up internal barriers to isolate us from the many people around us. Today, walking down the street in any major city in the world, one is more likely to find people talking on a cell phone than to people around them.

What’s the solution to reducing social isolation? While there’s clearly no simple solution to social isolation, there are strategies that can help us move beyond it.

First, it’s vital for us to recognize that it’s in our own interest to reduce social isolation. Reducing social isolation will reduce crime and violence in society while improving the overall quality of life in our communities.

Second, we each need to recognize how we erect barriers that prevent people from being part of our lives. We create our own sense of isolation and disconnection from our immediate communities. Our barriers often make us feel misunderstood, unappreciated, or as though we have little in common with others. Yet, we don’t actually know what we may have in common with others because we’ve not attempted to make connections with them.

Third, those who are able to reach out beyond themselves need to have empathy for others. I wonder how many acts of violence would have been prevented if only one person made a connection with a lonely, isolated young person. Would there be as many shootings at schools, movie theaters, or shopping malls? Would there be problems with bullying or teen suicide? Perhaps if someone had been able to connect with a young man from Chechnya, yes, just perhaps those bombs at the Boston Marathon would not have been planted.

Ultimately, what leads us beyond social isolation is compassion. When we live with compassion for ourselves and empathy for others, the barriers between us and others melt away. It’s then we come to live in a way that reflects the truth: we’re all in this world together.

It’s a simple lesson for us all: compassion enables us to move beyond our own fears and live fuller, healthier lives with others. In the face of growing social isolation, we need to grow together in compassion.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

I know that you were raised in a family that practiced a religion. You told me that at one time in life you considered preparing for ordination in that tradition. But you became disenchanted with it, eventually concluding that there was a great deal of hypocrisy in organized religion. Sometime later, concluding that the god of your youth didn’t exist.

To be honest, I’m quite glad that you grew beyond the god of your childhood. Just as growth and maturity should bring about a greater depth in thinking about many topics, religion and faith need to grow and evolve from our childhood conceptions to ways of understanding that are more appropriate for adulthood.

It’s interesting to me that while you’ve made many comments about religion, you’ve never asked me what I believe. I think you assume that you know about my beliefs. I’m not so certain that you do.

Let me begin by saying that I don’t believe in a deity who is a magician. My understanding of a deity doesn’t include defying the laws of physics or over-riding the choices people make in order to cause some “divine will” to occur. I find it frustrating that many people appear to believe in a Great Magician who causes some people to have fortunate circumstances while others suffer, or even for one person to find a good parking space while others continue to circle the block in hopes that someone moves a car. While children are often taught about a deity who does wonderful things for them, such notions don’t reflect the heart of the great religions of the world. Essentially, it’s much like teaching children about Santa Claus as a way to make the more complex messages of Christmas, like generosity and good will among people, more understandable.

What I want to share with you will be clearer if I refrain from using terms like god or deity entirely. I prefer to use the term, “the Divine Mystery.” The terms god, deity, and titles like “the Almighty” come with lots of baggage. Most people think of God as a person, as someone much like us. There is a saying, “In the beginning, God created humanity in his image and likeness, and humanity has been returning the favor every since.” I don’t recall the source of this saying, but it is true that people have tended to imagine God to be the deity they want God to be. I want to avoid those conceptions and want to think more broadly and honestly about my own beliefs.

The Hebrew book of Genesis conveys a story of the creation of the world in which the Divine Mystery spoke and things came into being out of a formless void: night and darkness, dry land and oceans, plants, animals, and people. While this sounds like magic, the metaphoric story conveys something about the Divine Mystery. What we understand from the story in English about god speaking, this Divine Word, is “dabhar” in Hebrew. While it’s commonly translated into English as word or words, it conveys the sense of a wisdom expressed in action. This story in Genesis attempts to convey that before there was time and space as we know them, a grand sort of wisdom expressed the action that brought the cosmos into being.

Genesis contains another story of creation that conveys another understanding of how the cosmos came to be. In this second story, the Divine Mystery breathes its own life, its own spirit to animate people and the cosmos. The Hebrew word is “ruah.” Ruah is breath, spirit, or the essence of life.

What I’m attempting to convey is that my understanding of the Divine Mystery is at work in the universe. It is the essence of cosmic life and energy in all its forms. Our individual lives are part of this over-arching mystery of an integrated, balanced, and wondrous whole. To borrow the words of Paul in the New Testament book, Acts of the Apostles, it’s in this dahbar, this wise creative mystery, that “we live and move and have our being.”

Just as I don’t accept a belief in a deity who is a magician, I also don’t understand the Bible to be a magic book. Indeed, all too frequently contemporary Christians seem to think that the Bible is itself divine, or is a deity. There’s a term for that in theology: bibliolatry. It refers to worshiping the Bible as deity. Such people are, at the least, very foolish and surely very wrong in their understanding.

I do consider the Bible to be sacred. The term “sacred” simply refers to something that is devoted to special use. The Bible is unique. It was compiled over a period of a few thousand years and is drawn from several cultures. The most recent writing occurred about two thousand years ago. Taken together, the Bible conveys how people over millennia attempted to make sense of their lives and beliefs in a context greater than self. The specifics of what the people of the Bible believed changed a great deal from earlier periods of time to later ones. Perhaps more significantly, scholars have clearly demonstrated that many of the stories of the Bible we consider key probably never occurred. They are simply sacred stories. I would suggest that while the events of the Bible are generally not accurate and many of them probably never occurred, there is a greater truth about life, meaning, and purpose that the book conveys. The Bible, much like other sacred texts, often conveys truth through metaphor and story in order to transmit lessons of wisdom.

New Testament scholars have long contended that we know very little about the actual person of Jesus. There’s some historic evidence that he existed. But we have no record of his actual life other than the Bible. Further, many Biblical scholars state that we can’t be sure any events about the life of Jesus recounted in the Bible actually occurred other than he was born and that he died. It’s generally accepted that we can only be sure about two things about the words and teachings of Jesus from the Bible: 1. that his message was one of love, including God’s love for humanity and our need to love each other; 2. that he referred to God using the familiar term, abba, meaning dad or daddy. This use of abba would have been scandalous in his time and culture and is not found in any other writing of that period.

I find the Bible to be inspired and inspiring not because some other-worldly being dictated the words. Instead, the Bible is a collection of writings about how people sought to understand what it meant to live in an inspired way. It continues to be inspiring because when we examine these stories, they address the heart of the human condition even today.

Conversely, the Bible is not a newspaper that recorded facts – and just the facts. It’s not a scientific treatise. It’s not even a history book in the way we think of history today. Taken together, the books of the Bible are an interpretive biography about how people have sought to make sense out of life. The “truth” of the Bible is found in the life-lessons it conveys not the literal rendering of the stories reported.

Ultimately, I don’t find my belief in a Divine Mystery to be incongruent with science. In fact, I would suggest that the more we know about the cosmos through scientific investigation, the more we know about the Divine Mystery. As a psychologist, I know this is particularly true. It’s because of neurological research on prayer and meditation that we know today that not only does spiritual practice relate to a person’s belief system but that the practices themselves are beneficial for physical and mental health and well-bring.

In the end, I call myself a Christian not because I believe in magic. Instead, I am a Christian because I value the wisdom of what we have come to be known as the teachings of Jesus about love, compassion, care for others, and living in ways that are balanced. Where I look first for guidance in my life about meaning, purpose, and value is the creative wisdom attributed to Jesus. That doesn’t mean I think other religions are somehow wrong. Instead, my path in life is illuminated first by the message of Jesus.

In the end, my friend, I would welcome you to visit my church – but not as a guest speaker to correct what you think is wrong with our beliefs. To be honest, my church is more concerned with helping people articulate questions about the deeper meanings of life than about providing stock answers. Instead, I’d welcome you to meet people (some of whom are scientists and researchers from various disciplines) and learn how we understand the role of religion and the beliefs we share. I suspect that the reasons you have for concluding that a deity doesn’t exist are the same reasons that brought others to evolve to a deeper understanding of faith. While I don’t ask that you agree with me or with others who understand faith in ways similar to me, I hope that you could consider that there are many ways to understand faith, belief, and religion. It’s not all about magic or superstition.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

Given that she clashed with many of the values of British society and caused hardship for many people, it was not surprising to discover that day of her death, iTune downloads in Britain resulted in an old song moving to top-20 placement: “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”

From what I know of Mrs. Thatcher, she was strongly influenced by her father, Alfred Roberts. Roberts suffered from poor eyesight, which prevented him from entering the family business of shoe making. Though the Roberts family was politically liberal, Alfred Roberts’ determination for success, which led him to open a small grocery and later move into politics, took him from liberal politics to conservatism. Margaret would have grown up with a father who didn’t allow life’s misfortune to limit him. Instead, her father’s self-determination was the bedrock of his success. Clearly, Margaret came to embrace his values of self-determination and understood it as the way all people should properly live. These values were intermingled with her father’s understanding of Methodism, a tradition in which he was a preacher.

Much like Mrs. Thatcher’s father, my own father was considered “a self-made man.” Having been born in a company-owned coal town in Western Pennsylvania, my father and his brothers completed military service in World War II and returned home to work in the coal mines. Their sense of self-determination led them in different ways to break free from the cycle of life they had known and risk failure in order to create a better life for their families. Ultimately, my father became a successful real estate broker in a small city. Despite his success, he was always embarrassed of his past and wanted to keep his early life hidden from those who knew him in business.

What made my family different from the family of Margaret Thatcher? While there are several different factors that came into play, I believe that the fundamental difference was compassion. While my father valued hard work and personal responsibility, he also taught me that most other people could not do what he had done. I remember him explaining to me that there was a great deal of social pressure to not step out on his own and risk financial ruin by trying a new occupation. Friends would tell him, “You have a wife and children to care for. You at least have a job now. You could end up with nothing if you strive for more.” My father knew that there was a significant chance it wouldn’t work out. Yet, he was determined.

Similarly, my father was aware that his success was not just his own doing. In later life, he shared stories of others who helped him along the way and provided him with opportunities for advancement. While he worked hard, there were times when others opened doors for him.

Key in my father’s transition from life in a small company owned coal town in Western Pennsylvania to a life as a successful business man was not just self-reliance and self-determination but compassion. He experienced compassion from others who provided him with opportunities and open doors. He, in turn, remembered to show compassion to others. There was never judgment that others should be able to do what he had done. He also provided opportunities to others without the expectation that they should either repay him or even succeed because of him.

While Margaret Thatcher was a great woman and a powerful political force, her legacy demonstrates a consistent lack of compassion. Insisting that everyone should be able to achieve success through self-determination as did her father, she failed to understand how unique her father and her family had been. Most people, even when doing their best, are simply not able to succeed on their own. Instead, the success of one depends on the support of others.

The conservative movement in Great Britain, the United States, and other countries suffers from the same limitation as Mrs. Thatcher: a lack of compassion. While there is something to be said for people being empowered to take responsibility for their own lives, people also need to be taught, equipped, and provided with the tools for their own success. Insistence on austerity and a mentality of “pulling yourself up by your own boot straps” only lead people to greater depths of failure.

It’s a difficult lesson to learn but ultimately it is true that compassion empowers people to grow and find ways to lead lives that contribute to the common good. Stern criticism, like that of the Iron Lady, only leads to social discord and suffering while allowing the privileged few to feel superior to the rest.

The world is a different place because of the legacy of Mrs. Thatcher. Perhaps, just perhaps, by reflecting on her legacy and her treatment of others in society we can learn to make the world a better place. Sometimes the best lessons others can provide are lessons that show us what not to do.

“Compassion and generosity are the true measures of human worth.”
– Jonathan Lockwood Huie

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

The stories that comprise the drama of Holy Week are familiar to Christians and to many people of other faiths. The events of the sacred story begin with Jesus riding into the ancient city of Jerusalem on a donkey with crowds waving palm branches and proclaiming him king. But a few days later, he is betrayed at a Seder meal by one of his companions, abandoned by his friends, and sentenced to death as a seditionist and executed along with common criminals. While there are centuries of theologizing built around these stories, what do they really mean for me, or for us, in our day?

A jaded side of me is tempted to buy into a theme I’ve often heard from preachers – and perhaps have used a time or two myself: that people are fundamentally fickle. It was easy to join the Palm Sunday parade but when faced with Roman power and oppression, the crowds turned and ran, leaving each person to fend for her or himself. While there is something of a survival instinct that we all have, I’m not willing to accept that people have little fortitude or commitment. Rather than being a fickle bunch, I tend to believe that most people honestly do the best they can in life when faced with changing circumstances. While we aim to do our best, we are also very limited as individuals.

Instead, at this point in my life, I hear the stories from this week called “holy” as stories about Jesus, his vision, commitment, and inner direction. The other characters in the mythology of these accounts are meant to serve a role in relation to the protagonist. (In case I offended anyone by my choice of the word “mythology,” let’s be honest: even the gospel accounts don’t agree on the facts. We don’t know the details of what happened. Instead, we’ve inherited a tradition of various stories that form a larger mythology about the final days of Jesus’ life.)

Taken together, the biblical accounts present Jesus as one who maintains an unwavering focus on moving through the good and the bad of life. He holds a clear sense of self and maintains integrity to that self-understanding. When crowds attempt to pull him off course by making him something he isn’t, when he’s faced with betrayal, when he experiences abandonment, and even when he is unjustly accused and sentenced to death, he remains true to himself and what he understood as his vocation in life.

While each of the four gospel narratives in the New Testament present different events and contexts, they each convey this central theme: that despite wild and crazy up’s and down’s, Jesus remained focused and maintained integrity till he drew his last breath.

As I look at my life and our lives together in a globalized culture where values profit, advancement, and success permeate each aspect of life, I find the sacred story of Jesus to be fundamentally counter-cultural. He refused to accept the image of success and became the leader of a revolution. He also took in stride the fact that his friends betrayed and abandoned him. In this, I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther during his trial for heresy: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

In our day, and in our global culture, perhaps what we need most is this prophetic yet grounded way of life exemplified in the stories of Jesus. With great integrity and fortitude, we need to live in a way that withstands the pressures to change, to conform, and to go along with the crowds. Doing so may lead to false accusations and abandonment. Yet, ultimately, living in truth will prove to be life giving.

Of course, while the stories of Jesus clearly convey that many of his friends abandoned him, it’s important to note an often overlooked tidbit of the stories: the women in Jesus’ life found ways to support and care for him both through his death and into the experience of resurrection. The stories of the women subtly convey the consolation that even when we find ourselves most abandoned, we are not alone.

What good is this week called holy for me? It’s an important reminder of what it means to be faithful to myself and to live with integrity. Faithfulness and integrity wind their way through each of the stories associated with the events remembered this week. Perhaps that’s something from these stories that’s also good for you.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

There’s something about star gazing that’s always captivated me. To be honest, I know very little about astronomy. While I do own a telescope, it’s old and not very good. I rarely use it. Instead, I prefer to sit and gaze at the night sky and allow myself to take in what I can see.

Much like walking the beach and looking out over the ocean to the horizon, watching the night sky and gazing on the stars is an activity that gives me perspective about life. In my day-to-day life, I often take details far too seriously. It’s easy to get caught up in responsibilities while trying to assure myself that each thing is done as it should be. All of those things fall away when I look at stars in the night sky. I realize again how small my world really is in comparison to the expanse of the universe.

Just think: young stars are those whose ages are counted in millions of years. In contrast, our shining light, the Sun, is middle-aged: it’s about 4 ½ billion years old and expected to shine another 5 billion years. And here am I, in my fifth decade of life: what is that in comparison to these cosmic lights?

Most of us spend a great deal of time caught up in the details of life: finance and economics, tensions in relationships, political agendas of various sorts, and preoccupations about how others view us. When compared with the expanse of twinkling lights in the night sky, how much does any of it matter?

It’s a simple lesson, conveyed by wise people of the ages: what matters most is the way we embrace each day and live it to the fullest. Our concerns and worries don’t add a day to the span of our lives, which are quite short indeed. Gazing at stars at night brings me back to this realization. I am reminded that what’s most important is to live fully, to love deeply, and to embrace the experience of each day with gratitude for what life brings my way.

As simple or as trite as it may seem, perhaps you can join me from wherever you are and gaze upon a star or two some night soon. Keep a quiet vigil long enough for the cares and worries of life to pass away. My hope is that you’ll find the experience as renewing for you as it is for me.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

While many things struck me about the interview, one item in particular stuck with me. The seminarians said that they hoped the next pope would carry on in the tradition of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Pelley asked if that meant that they wanted another conservative. One seminarian jumped in and said that it’s not a matter of being conservative. Paraphrasing him, he contended that the church had been entrusted with the truth and that next pope needed to safe-guard the truth.

As Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, as recorded in the gospel attributed to John, chapter 18, verse 38: What is truth?

It was clear from their expressions that the three young men had a sense of certainty about the Roman Catholic Church as custodians of truth. To be honest, this concerns me much more than whether a pope or any religious leader is conservative, progressive, or holds any other perspective. My concern is that the claim to be the custodian of truth is that the implication is that one group has the truth while others don’t.

When I teach courses in ethics or critical thinking, one of the lessons explores how it is that we come to know something. In Europe, during the Middle Ages, the source of knowledge was Divine Revelation. The only way to know something was if God revealed it. With the rise of the scientific era, we’ve come to understand that knowledge is based on a process of reasoning and investigation. This shift has meant that we’ve come to know that Earth is not the center of the solar system but is one planet that revolves around the Sun. We come to know many other things, like the laws of physics, the chemical elements found in the universe, and the understanding that truth, itself, is relative and not absolute.

A simple example may help clarify what I’m attempting to say. Because of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity, we know that it is true that all of us are subject to gravity. In other words, because of gravity, we’re not going to float up off the ground and end up in outer space. Because of further research by other physicists, we’ve come to know that gravity is not absolute: the gravity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that it’s different on other planets, and that the Earth, the moon, and the Sun all exert different levels of gravity. Gravity, while it exists, is a relative force.

Truth is much like that. What is known to be true can vary among cultures and evolves over time. Truth is interpreted based on one’s knowledge and context. Because we have the ability to learn from history, we can come to understand that things once thought of as true are no longer viewed as such. It’s not just that times change, but social constructs, cultures, and ways of understanding also change.

My post-modern understanding of truth runs head-long into conflict with how the seminarians understand truth. From a post-modern perspective, truth is rooted in a context not in a revelation from a deity. In this context, I understand that truth of the Bible is to be found in the ways people sought to be faithful in discerning a sense of the Divine in their lives. The stories of the Bible convey this process of trying to understand living faithfully with a God who is the source of all being, is generous, and provides for all creatures. That’s very different from a literalist view of the sacred text that insists that science must be wrong for the Bible to be right.

In the end, I have no reason to believe that Roman Catholicism or any other religion is THE custodian of truth. Instead, humanity, through our shared experience of living deeply and fully, moves toward deeper truth and understanding – something that no one can claim as their own but that is shared by us all.

While I’m glad that I watched the brief interview with the seminarians, what they conveyed is nothing less than alarming to me. By claiming to have a monopoly on truth, the stage is set for others to be continually subjected to hurt and condemnation in the name of Jesus, whose message was one of love and compassion.

© 2013, emerging by Lou Kavar, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.