Imagine

 Christians have our cognitive dissonance moments, but so does our culture. The cultural ones may give us a great countercultural opportunity for evangelism.

The funeral of President Jimmy Carter was one of our moments of cognitive dissonance for members of the Christian community. According to his family, the former President requested that John Lennon’s “Imagine” be sung as part of the service. To add to the dissonance, two country singers performed it. Both of these singers had performed gospel music in their commercial albums. What did this moment in our common life reveal?

What is cognitive dissonance?

This concept was developed by psychologists almost 40 years ago to explain an observable phenomenon among humans. In a two part series of David McRaney’s podcast “You are Not So Smart,” he explains this concept and explores it. Cognitive dissonance describes the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. Humans tend to naturally seek consistency, so these conflicts produce discomfort. One of my other favorite podcasters, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs and Mikerowe WORKS, has been using the term lately applying it too much of the craziness and contradictory behavior in our culture. I think he is right.

Why does this matter?

It matters because this may well be America’s age of cognitive dissonance, and its discomfort is adding to the anxiety, fear, and anger of our time. Learning to identify this and resolve it rather than just carrying it around may be essential to our corporate mental health. Let’s return to Plains for that moment. Here are the words.

            Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try

            No hell below us / Above us, only sky

            Imagine all the people / Living for today

And then the full dissonance for Christians,

           Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do /Nothing to kill or die for?

            And no religion, too

At the funeral for a committed liberal Baptist who dedicated his post political life to serving the poor and building houses for Habitat for Humanity, we heard THE SECULAR ANTHEM of our society. In fairness his family said that the president liked the tune. We have to conclude that this otherwise thoughtful Christian leader just ignored the words, not an uncommon practice among Christians today.

Sadly, we do not have to imagine the world John sang about. Societies without heaven or hell or any religion existed extensively in the previous century. In these militant atheistic places, millions of citizens were killed by their own government despite their stated egalitarian values.  I would suggest that we are asked to imagine hell on earth. I would suggest that a secular world may not be the eutopia that its advocates like to sing about. Despite these historic examples, our nation continues to move toward this utopian vision.  When I protested on social media that as an Episcopalian, I wasn’t part of the stereotype hateful Christians, a millennial dismissed it with “you Christians are all alike.” His comment got lots of likes.

Secular Cognitive Dissonance

But there is also a common secular cognitive dissonance that we see and hear all the time. At almost every public event of grief, or mass shootings, or senseless violence some popular artist, or spontaneously, we hear the words of possibly the best-known Christian hymn today. That is, of course, Amazing Grace. Take hold of this dissonance. A celebrity singing these words:

            Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me

            I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

As a friend of mine often observes, “You can’t make this stuff up.” In our popular culture that believes that “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all,” and that popularizes every self-help book proposing self-love justified by the virtue of self-esteem, we are singing about wretchedness. Well, perhaps people just like the tune.

The Greatest Love of All

In the Christian religion, self-love is not the greatest love of all. This doesn’t mean that we are psychologically pro low self-esteem. We understand that self-love and self-esteem are two sides of the same coin and share self as the focus. For Christians humans are created in the image of God, the all loving God. Our love is laid out by the Apostle Paul in Corinthians, “Now abide faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.” This is clouded by the modern English word “love” used in almost all modern translation. In our language love is largely undifferentiated. The Greeks had four words for it. Paul used a poignant one, agape.

Paul differentiates it in the rest of the 13^th chapter. Read it sometime. This love is better translated today from the Greek as “sacrificial love of others and this love was shown by Jesus’ death on the cross. This is the greatest love of all. This statement may be the most countercultural message of Christians in our growingly self-centered, dare we say narcissistic, secular world. Remember that the popular singer who proclaimed that learning to love ourselves is the greatest love of all, drowned while in a self-induced drug coma. Sadly, such behavior is far too often the consequence of too much self-centeredness. 

Imagine This

Imagine a world where a human soul, no matter how lost, addicted, or self-centered, or even violent is loved by God and you catch the resolved dissonance of the Christian vision found in that powerful hymn. The hymn captures the attention so often of many in our country who are addicted or are abused by those who are. It speaks about the cyclical destruction of dysfunction families. Psychic pain like physical pain turns people inward. As AA has always taught, health begins in helping others.

Recently, on my social media, a woman posted that she was raised with a drunken abusive father and that her brothers were repeating that behavior. She described the emotional breakdown her mother had after attempting suicide. Then she said the Jesus came into their family and they have all been freed from the addiction, healed from the abuse, and are growing as a loving family. We were “saved” she declared. A cynic responded with “Or you gained awareness of the dysfunctional behavior, sought therapy and learned how to live a more health life. Jesus probably didn’t have anything to do with it.”

While such recovery sometimes happens to individuals, it almost never happens to a whole family trapped in the dysfunctional behavior she had described. I wanted to post, “It is much easier to believe this family was saved by Jesus than by that psychological babble you are uttering.” But the young lady had already received lots of affirmation. I knew my words would be wasted on such a cynic. I didn’t want to cause him any cognitive dissonance, so I let the testimony and the cynic’s words stand in glaring contradiction. Funny isn’t it how God’s love and grace are so disturbing to the growing secular world that offers almost no salvation to those who need it most and that believes that that learning to love ourselves is the solution to all our world’s pain.

 

Randomness and the Human Soul

My major in college was history and my minor was psychology. As it turns out, the two are often complimentary because they are about human behavior. Recently, I recalled something from my study of psychology that remains revealing to this day.

There was a famous experiment about 50 years ago having to do with animal behavior. We are, after all, on a basic level animals. We just aren’t only animals. It started with a simple question about learning. A group of chickens were put into individual cages. Each cage was rectangular and had a food dish on one end and over it was a round disk. The disk was attached to a device that would distribute a food pellet when pecked. Chickens are prone to peck most things in their environment, so they soon discovered that when they pecked the disk, to their delight, a pellet dropped. Researchers observed that when the chicken wanted food, it learned that all it needed to do was peck the disk. Then came the “what if we” experiment.

The first one was to make the device only pay off every 2 times the disk was pecked. There was no change in their behavior. What if it took 3 times than 4? The results were the same. They ate when they were hungry and pecked the times needed to get the food. Then came, what if we turned the disk off and no food came out no matter how many times the chickens pecked? The results started getting more interesting. They would give up for a while, go back and peck as if to check and see, and after a while, they finally gave up. Then researchers tried randomness. It must have been a grad student who came up with this idea. They set the disk to pay randomly. There was no pattern. Sometimes it paid off after two pecks followed by 5 pecks followed by 3 pecks. But randomly meant no pattern. The chickens’ behavior changed radically. They quickly learned to keep pecking the disk whether they were hungry or not. Peck, peck, peck, they couldn’t stop. It was almost like a compulsion.

In the end, the researchers found that if the disk then was set not to pay off, chickens would stand by the disk and keep pecking till they dropped from starvation. It seems randomness has an almost addictive and transrational effect on animal behavior. Remember, we are animals too.

Randomness and the Human Soul

This, of course, is the rational explanation of many human behaviors that seem irrational on the surface. Take gambling for example. Even though everyone knows the odds are stacked in favor of the house, or now the app, people do randomly win. They may develop a system that they think works, but that doesn’t matter. All winning proves is that the pellet still falls. Extended over a wide population, like the lottery, its effects are powerful even given the overwhelming odds against winning and in favor of the State. Put another way, when one person wins a million dollars, the State wins many times over. The difference by the way between a State and a casino seems to be that casinos sometimes have someone “break the bank.” I have decided this is staged and aimed at packing the casino the next night. Lots of pellets dropped. Maybe we are next.

Now, knowing that Fentanyl can kill you, why would anyone take it? Start with this. When ICE raided a member of a cartel in Chicago, he had 175,000 Fentanyl pills. If that were to lead to 175,000 deaths, it would not only be the biggest mass murder in our country but afterward no one would take the risk. So, good for the cartels, that many pills will only kills a few hundred. Now randomness works against sanity. What are the odds against getting killed when seeking a high. They are randomly low. I mean only the families will really notice the random deaths anyway. Let’s move away from this topic before anyone becomes more aware of why people take such a drug and try to do something about it.

The Theology of Randomness

Now let me go on a soul journey, a religious phenomenon, a current cultural one. Do you know what the largest Church in America is? That’s right, it is Joel Osteen’s. He is a prosperity evangelist. He has two beautiful expensive homes, a private jet, and takes no salary from his church because God has richly blessed his message. His money comes from speaking events and the sales of his books. His message repeated endlessly is God will protect and provide for you by faith. Have enough faith and boom!  Or the corollary, no boom not enough faith. How can anybody who reads the bible believe such babble. The answer is randomness.

Take this example that I heard him use. He had preached that God promised to put a hedge around his faithful believers. That is actually in the Bible. He then told the story of a man in his congregation that embraced this teaching and by faith claimed it. Soon after, he took his family to Forida for a vacation (Disney no doubt) and while driving on the interstate they got tangled in a multicar accident. Sure enough, cars and bodies were strewn around, but his family passed safely through. He told Joel how God had saved them putting a hedge around their car. That will preach, at least in Joel’s Church.

In mainline places someone will at the coffee hour say, “You know that sermon troubled me. Not that I think God isn’t good but is God that cruel or capricious? What about those other people in the accident? Weren’t some of them Christians?" Joel’s system makes it clear. Yeah, Christians but faithful? I think it not so much God, but randomness. Take it one step further. Imagine a family of non-believers who were in the same accident but were not hurt. After all, scripture tells us “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” Seems the God of the bible isn’t that random.

God’s Collateral Damage

Recently, the new President declared that he believed that God saved him during the assassination attempt in Pennsyvania. When I heard this, I was standing among obvious cynics one of whom cracked, “What about those wounded and the guy killed? Was that God’s collateral damage?" That is a tremendous theological question! Perhaps it would be better to note that wildfire strikes both the just and the unjust and learn to live with it. This world is full of randomness and we Christians think it is related to our fallenness. Maybe?

Randomness explains a lot. Remember the chickens dying of hunger while still pecking away. Remember too that suffering and pain in this world is part of the package and that to declare that God is nevertheless good is a remarkable statement of faith. African Christians say it this way often amid poverty, “God is Good, all the time. All the time, God is good.” Faith is not in a payoff, but trust in the father’s steadfast love as in the prodigal son story. Our example is of course Jesus himself dying on the cross. “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” That is called faith because it involves two dynamics: trust and courage. Randomness has nothing to do with faith in God. As Paul said in Romans 8, “For those who love God, all things work for good.” In God, for the faithful, there is no randomness only God. Poetically, the night and the day are both alike. For those who love God, there is only God’s love that triumphs over all things.

The Wind Beneath My Wings

Beaches is a 1988 American comedy-drama film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. It tells the story of two women, C.C. Bloom and Hillary Whitney, who meet as children and become lifelong friends despite their very different personalities and lifestyles. For me, it is the ultimate “chick flick.” But more importantly, the film’s beautiful song sung by Midler at her friends passing is the ultimate pastor wife's anthem. Its title “You are the Wind Beneath my Wings” and first line “It must have been cold there in my shadow, a beautiful face without a name…” says everything.

My wife Sharon of 60 years has been the love of my life, my best friend, my partner in marriage, the mother of my children, a wonderful Nana to both our grands and our great grands. She has also been my partner in ministry and is a clergy spouse. Often introduced as “The Rector’s wife,” she is her own person and made major contributions to every church and ministry I have served. After our children reached school age, she began working full time. It helped our meager income. When I served a church in Westerville, Ohio, she became the Executive Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. It was at their social gatherings that I was regularly introduced as “Sharon’s husband.” I got it. It was a painful realization.

Sharon has always had a gift of being able to lift me up when I became discouraged or down. She also had a good way of leveling me off if I got too big headed. Her gift was knowing when to do each. When I was a student in college, I was elected for the first time to be a convention delegate to the Diocese of Dallas. I went with my Rector who I admired and three professors from my college. I had taken classes from all three and respected them. When the convention ended early, they decided to go to lunch and invited this 19-year-old to attend. I bowed out. I wanted to go but felt out of place. Later at home, I told her what happened. She saw my sadness. Setting next to me, she reached over, took me by the chin, looked right into my eyes and said, “I don’t ever want to hear the man I love put yourself down again. Do you understand me? You are as good as any man!” Then she kissed me. It was a life changing moment for me.

She is a redhead. I read a study once that said redheads are hypersensitive people. Their smell, hearing, and touch are more intense than the rest of us. I believe it. I have seen her hair almost glow when she gets angry. At 4’11” she stands, looks up at me, points her finger and speaks. I’ve learned to keep quiet. It is not my turn to speak. At a women’s gathering in our church in Ohio, they once for fun took a survey on “The Sensual Woman.” The ladies were stunned to find out she outscored all of them. “I aced it,” she told me. “I’ll bet!” I added.

In my last full-time work as Dean of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, she saved the resale shop. Its purpose had been to raise money to help run the Cathedral. She transformed it into a ministry. She had great retail instincts. She also knew her market. It was among our Spanish speaking members and their friends. She would take the Nordstrum dresses from donors and sell them from $2 to $5 dollars. The place got packed every Saturday. “You charge them?” I sternly asked her once. She got that your clueless look and responded, “Do you not know what it means to ladies to buy such clothes at such bargain prices?” Then she cut off any further suggestions from me with, “They’re not looking for charity, you know. They are our members!” I wish my elitist denomination understood her wisdom. You do not gain members by giving people charity. You win their hearts by welcoming them as equal members of the family. 

I am thankful that we are Episcopalians for her sake. We have always had a lot of professional women and then woke up and allowed women to even be ordained. That has made a clergy spouse freer from the restraints of a piety that is often forced upon the pastor’s spouse. It’s worse in the groups that have descended from Wesleyans, “keep them poor, keep them humble” culture. This is still true of the evangelical brand or the Pentecostal variety. Today in a Pentecostal church, the pastor’s wife is often one the only women still not wearing makeup or a new dress. Check out the old movie “One Foot in Heaven” that portrays the life and career of a Methodist pastor and the restrains forced upon his wife and children. It is classic American church culture of the 50s. Alas, it is still alive in churches today.

This last Christmas was the first time that I decorated our tree by myself. My wife would contend that sitting in your recliner and watching re-runs was supervision. We have collected many ornaments over 60 years. While her short-term memory is sometimes lacking, she remembers everyone; when we got it, and who gave it if it was a gift. The second day, it was late, and I was tired. I finally said to her, “I think that this year we could just do with half of these.” She snapped back, “I love all of them.” Then I added hopefully, “Maybe we could give some of them away to Goodwill.” She gave me that your clueless look again and said, “Over my dead body.” I then mumbled, “That could be arranged.” Her hair began to glow, and her stare penetrated the space between me. Then she gave me a non-verbal response that was so incongruent with her petite size and usual kind manner that I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Now came, “Why are you laughing at me?” Then even she laughed.

She is the wind beneath my wings.