Don’t Believe Everything You Think

30 December 2007

Davidson Loehr 

(NOTE:  All page numbers are from Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) — Why we Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts [Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, 2007]) 

SERMON:  Don’t Believe Everything You Think

            One of our favorite myths is that we are a rational species, for whom reason trumps emotion – at least in grown-ups.  It’s hard to understand where such an idea came from – surely not from watching human behavior in politics, economics, religion, gambling or dating.            

There are hundreds if not thousands of counterexamples, because what really drives us has very little to do with reason.  You can probably all think of five or ten, and I’ll share some this morning.  One of the more famous stories comes from the field of medicine from 160 years ago, and is a story every medical student learns.            

In 1847, a physician in Vienna named Ignac Semmelweiss saw a pattern others hadn’t seen.  He worked in obstetrics, and obstetricians both delivered babies and also did the autopsies on women who died in childbirth – without washing their hands.  The mortality rate of women in childbirth was running between 10% and 30%, and he decided the doctors must be carrying something on their hands from the autopsies to the deliveries.  So he made all the doctors working under him wash their hands in a chlorine solution, and childbirth deaths dropped dramatically.  He tried to get other doctors to wash their hands, and was ridiculed because he seemed to believe in invisible agents, like demons, which was unscientific and didn’t fit the teachings of the modern medicine of the day.  Still, women delivering babies were far more likely to come out alive in his hands than anywhere else in Vienna.  You’d think that would count as enough empiracle data to at least try washing hands.  But his idea didn’t catch on widely for several decades.  I don’t know if anyone has tried to estimate the number of women who died needlessly during that time, but he is now known as “the savior of mothers.” 

What’s going on here?  These doctors were smart, and they were good people.  They went into medicine to save lives, and I suspect all of them would have felt horrible if they believed they were actually killing their patients.           

What’s going on is that a very different aspect of human nature is showing.  It’s happened in science and every other field, probably forever.  Thomas Kuhn wrote about some of this in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’d still propose as the most influential book of the past fifty years.  As long as scientists share the same paradigms and assumptions, he said, they can think very logically.  But when they can’t agree on basic assumptions, they can barely communicate at all.  Like whether there could be invisible agents on the hands of doctors capable of killing mothers, an idea Semmelweiss proposed more than a decade before Louis Pasteur had proposed his “germ theory” of disease.             

But you don’t have to go to 19^th century medicine.  This is so deeply a part of human nature you can find it anywhere.  Here’s a story that combines comedy and politics, then adds some neuroscience.           

In 1960, the comedian Lenny Bruce watched the very first televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  He said he would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and they would be saying, “He’s really slaughtering Nixon.”  Then he’d go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, “How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?”  And then he realized that each group loved their candidate so much that a guy would have to be this blatant — he would have to look into the camera and say: “I am a thief, a [criminal], do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!”  Yet if he did that, his followers would say, “Now there’s an honest man for you.  It takes a big guy to admit that.  There’s the kind of guy we need for President!” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 18).            

Neuroscientists have recently shown that these biases in thinking are built into the very way the brain processes information.  Three years ago, in a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process information about George Bush or John Kerry, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with information that contradicted their biases, and the emotional circuits of the brain lit up happily when they heard information that supported their biases (Mistakes Were Made, p. 19).   In other words, once our minds are made up, it’s hard to confuse us with the facts, because we’re often not even able to see the facts.             

Some of these stories are pretty unbelievable.  They must shock my own naïve hope that we’re rational creatures, because I find that I don’t want to believe them.  In the Dinka and Nuer tribes of the Sudan, for instance, there is a shocking practice that has gone on for many generations.  They extract several of the permanent front teeth of their children.  Apparently, this began during an epidemic of lockjaw; missing front teeth would enable sufferers to get some nourishment.  If so, it once made some sense.  But very few children ever got lockjaw, and for several generations now, none have.  So why continue it?            Because it evolved into something else.  They’ve forgotten about the medical history, and convinced themselves that pulling teeth has an esthetic value.  They turned it into a rite of passage into adulthood.  “The toothless look is beautiful,” they say.  “People who have all their teeth are ugly: They look like cannibals who would eat a person.  A full set of teeth makes a man look like a donkey.”  “We like the hissing sound it creates when we speak.”  “This ritual is a sign of maturity” (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 23-24).  Now I know some parents are thinking about your children and their tattoos and piercings, but forget it.  They’re looking at you and wondering why your body didn’t matter enough for you to put some art on it.             

Or we can move from body art to the body politic.  One researcher took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, then asked Israeli citizens to judge them.  The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposals attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposals attributed to the Palestinians.  Think about this.  If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it really does come from the other side? (Mistakes Were Made, p. 42).

            Closer to home, another social psychologist found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party.  Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people if they will favor a policy proposed by a coke-snorting Taliban official.  What’s more, none of these people believed they were being influenced by their party’s position.  They all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government (Mistakes Were Made, p. 43).  Yet their attitude of certainty has trumped reason, truth, and nearly everything else, and this seems to be as deeply a part of human nature as anything we have.             

If we’re wrong but certain, and our brain doesn’t even let us see what we don’t want to see, we could do harm, feel no remorse, and not even want to make it right later if we had the chance.  And there are plenty of stories from actual court cases like this from our rational species.           

Many of you will remember the awful 1989 case of the Central Park jogger, the woman who was assaulted and nearly beaten to death.  Five teen-agers were arrested, questioned for up to 30 hours straight, finally confessed and under coaxing, added details of what they did.  They were sent to prison for life.  Donald Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, urging the court to give them the death penalty.  Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, already in prison for rapes, robberies and murder, admitted that he alone had done the crime.  His DNA matched, and he provided details about the crime that no one else could have known.  The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, under Robert Morgenthau, investigated for a year and found no connection at all between Reyes and the boys, and in 2002 a motion was granted to vacate the boys’ convictions.  But the court decision was angrily denounced by former prosecutors in Morgenthau’s office and by the police officers who had been involved in the original investigation, who refused to believe that the boys were innocent.  After all, they had confessed (Mistakes Were Made, pp. 128-9).  Never mind the DNA evidence, or the fact that the boys had said after their confessions that after 30 hours of constant interrogations they would have said anything, they just wanted to go to sleep.  It isn’t about being right.  It’s about being certain.  And we are often incapable of telling the difference.  

The best known of the efforts to clear innocent people on death row is The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld.  They keep a running record on their Web site of the men and women imprisoned for murder or rape who have been cleared, most often by DNA testing but also by other kinds of evidence, such as mistaken eyewitness identifications — and mistaken eyewitness identifications are involved in about 75% of false convictions: people who were dead certain, and dead wrong.             

As of December 6, 2007, their site reports that 209 defendants previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing. Almost all of these convictions involved some form of sexual assault and about 25% involved murder (Mistakes Were Made, p. 3).  This is good news!  Besides setting innocent people free, it also means that now we might find the guilty ones who actually did the crimes.  Or so you would think.  

Here’s the part that’s hardest for me to accept.  Of all the convictions the Innocence Project has succeeded in overturning so far, there is not a single instance in which the police later tried to find the actual perpetrator of the crime.  The police and prosecutors just close the books on the case completely, as if to ignore the fact that they made serious mistakes that imprisoned innocent people and have let guilty people go free (Mistakes Were Made, p. 151).  It isn’t about catching criminals or following facts.  It’s about the almost supernatural power of certainty.  They were so sure, they believed they couldn’t be wrong.  But how much sense does this make?  We are dead certain yet dead wrong a lot of times.  Certainty is only an attitude, not a guarantee.  The attitude of certainty is about us, not the world outside of our psyches.  If I tell you something of which I am absolutely, without reservation, dead certain, you’ve learned something about me.  Whether you’ve also learned something about the world we both live in is something you might want to check for yourself.  This is why certainty is so dangerous, and national, religious or political ideologies are so deadly.  If one person who is dead certain but dead wrong can do harm with a clear conscience, a large group who think alike can change history, sometimes in horrible ways.           

Here’s an insight from an unexpected place, the memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s henchman Albert Speer:  “In normal circumstances,” he wrote, “people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility.  In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum.  On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.  In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over” (Mistakes Were Made, p. 65).             

That’s a pretty remarkable confession and insight.  But doesn’t this describe the self-reinforcing certainty within political parties, scientific communities, religions, nationalisms, discussions of astrology, abortion, homosexuality or discussions among University of

Texas alumni about their favorite football team?

There are many more stories like this, but what do we do with this?  What does it have to do with us – especially us liberals, who like to think we are rational people and sometimes even imagine we might be the hope of the world?             

Years ago, I heard a great scholar (Stephen Toulmin) explain the Atlas myth to an audience which, as I remember it, included graduate students and professors in religion, science and philosophy.  “We must understand,” he tried to explain, “that the picture of Atlas holding up the world is not meant to answer the question ‘What is holding up the world?’  Instead, it gives us a mental picture to reassure us on an emotional level that this world on which we live, die, hope, love, lose and try to think big thoughts, this world rests on shoulders that are not only strong, but also friendly to us. That’s what all our stories are trying to do: create pictures that can embrace us within comfortable certainties.”  The same is true of our religious certainties, political certainties, nationalistic and racial certainties, and all the rest of them.  It isn’t about truth, any more than it was for those obstetricians Dr. Semmelweiss tried to talk into washing their hands 160 years ago, or about the Kennedy, Nixon, Bush or Kerry fans, or the happily toothless tribes of the Sudan, or those who cover themselves with body art and those who are sure it’s a ridiculous idea.  It’s about wanting and needing to believe that when we are absolutely, positively dead sure, we couldn’t possibly be wrong – especially if we hang out with others who share our beliefs.  Because if we can’t trust that deep feeling of certainty, what on earth can we trust?  I think this is a deep human dilemma, not a shallow problem.             

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once said, “Remember that we stand on the world, but the world doesn’t stand on anything else.”  Then he added,  “Children think it’ll have to fall if it isn’t held up.”  I think that’s a far more profound statement than it seems at first sight.  Because like that scholar I heard explaining the Atlas myth – a scholar who had been one of Wittgenstein’s students – he wasn’t really talking about our planet.  He was talking about the social, emotional and conceptual “worlds” we each live in: worlds that are finally held up not on the shoulders of Atlas, but on the shoulders of our own certainties, reinforced by the certainties of those who think like we do.             

It looks like human nature is not built to seek and defend truth.  After all, how would evolution have a clue what truth is?  We are built to seek and defend an attitude of certainty, and to justify our opinions in the face of nearly everything that should snap us out of it.  First we become certain, in a dozen different ways: from swallowing whole some ideology, absorbing second-hand beliefs, annexing our family’s or society’s biases and bigotries, reading some focused collection of authors (rather than others), and many other ways.  But first, we become certain.  Then we name whatever it is that made us certain, The Truth.  Of course, there’s no necessary connection.  Certainty is only an attitude, and has nothing at all to do with being right.  But try telling that to thousands of years of persecutions in the name of religion, nationalism, race, culture, politics, and preference for particular soccer or football teams.  Try telling it to doctors who waited for decades to begin washing their hands before delivering babies, to prosecutors whose behavior says they don’t care who really committed over two hundred rapes and murders if it wasn’t the one they convicted.  Try telling it to billions of people who have lived their lives in fear of religious or political damnation.             

We live within certainties that have become familiar and habitual.  They define and bind our world and often our possibilities, in religion, politics, nationalism and a hundred other ways.              The philosopher of science who explained the Atlas myth once said that the way scientific thinking usually changes isn’t through a rational or scientific process at all.  It mostly changes when the deans of top schools and editors of top scientific journals retire and are replaced by people who were educated under different assumptions and paradigms.  Then different kinds of scientific articles are published in the leading journals, and different kinds of PhD theses are accepted by the most influential universities, and there has been a kind of scientific revolution.              What’s this got to do with us?            What all of this has to do with religious liberals, honest religion – and the scientific method, while we’re at it – is absolutely fundamental.  That dilemma of identifying with the process that can question everything, versus the need to stand some place solid is the greatest challenge for human beings who want to take either science or honest religion seriously.             

This is what is meant by saying that both the soul of liberal religion and the scientific method are a process, but never a position.  The liberal spirit is the spirit that challenges an orthodoxy to make room for the truths that give us life.  The minute we’ve chosen one and declared it to be true, we have created our orthodoxy, and then try to protect it from the spirit of liberal religion, which would question it, too.  So we’re all friends of the spirit of liberal religion or science as long as they help us criticize the beliefs of others.  But we’re not as eager to understand that once we’ve found our own orthodoxy, our own position of certainty, those same spirits must question our certainties.             

You can tell that this is a subject we could talk about for weeks, and one that can lead into a hundred different directions, many of them very pertinent to the world we’re living in.  And I will invest some time doing some sermons on these themes in the spring.             

But for now, I have painted us – or at least I’ve painted myself – into a corner filled with questions more profound than answers, so I’ll end with questions:           

If you can’t trust your certainty, or even the certainty of a group of people who agree with you, what can you trust?  If honest religion can’t ever be grounded in absolute unchanging facts, how do we live with confidence?  Are there some absolute unchanging facts?  What do you think they are?  If you can’t believe everything you think, what can you believe, and why?  If you can’t share the certainties of your friends on important topics, do you think they’ll still be your friends?  If you now thought they were wrong on fundemantal issues, for how long could they stay your friends if you had to work together on these things?  If being certain has no necessary connection to being right, what does?             

In some ways, this is like Cassandra’s dilemma in ancient Greek mythology.  Apollo, the god women never liked, was after her.  So he gave her the gift of prophecy; she could see and say what was going to happen in the future, and she would always be right.  When that failed to soften her heart toward him, Apollo got angry.  But there was some kind of rule that gods couldn’t take back gifts they’d given, so she still had the gift of prophecy.  To get even, he added a curse.  She would always see the truth and always be right, but nobody would ever believe her.  Which would you rather be – certain, or right?  Or are these really the right questions to be asking in an honest church?           

Your move.

23 December 2007

Davidson Loehr and Dina Claussen

PRAYER:

I almost never write prayers in a lighthearted mood, but I did this morning. I keep replaying an imaginary phone call I am making to whatever cosmic department is in charge of Christmas, try to get the kind I want.

I call this number, and when they answer I say Hello, I’d like to order a perfect Christmas. Who handles that? The line goes dead. I call back. OK look, how about a nearly perfect Christmas? Can I get one of those? Silence. What about a truly Special Christmas? More silence. OK look already, it’s getting pretty late in December and I have to have something. What have you got? A Messy Christmas. Messy Christmas? I don’t want a messy Christmas. Who wants a messy Christmas? What about a truly horrid Christmas? No, I don’t want that one. So we’re back to Messy Christmas? You’re sure it will be all right? It will be messy. Messy. Oh fine, very well, I’ll have a messy Christmas. After all, how bad could it be? They’re laughing. They’re all laughing. When will it get here? You’ll know. What’s that mean, “You’ll know”? Hello? Hello? They said Amen.

HOMILY: Angels, Here on Earth Dina Claussen

Angels rule at Christmas time. They grace trees, cards, wrapping paper, clothes, tableaux and children’s pageants. And we sing hymns with angels in them: ‘Angels on High’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.

The angels have various roles to play - announcing incredible events like the birth of a very special child, Jesus, for instance, or helping someone to remember that life is a gift like in the Christmas movie ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.”

In the 1987 German film, Wings of Desire, a story is told about an angel who chooses to become human rather than continue to stay in the life of looking on and serving humans. In one particular scene that has stayed with me, the angels are in a library. You can hear the murmuring thoughts of the humans that are there, as the angels stand close by. As one person or another expresses sadness, despair, or agitation in their thoughts, each angel leans in closer and then the human’s thoughts gradually get a bit brighter and calmer.

I don’t know whether there are unseen angels out there, watching and occasionally leaning in closer when we need it. I certainly like the idea of that. But I do know that there are angels walking around that we can see, but they are hard to recognize because they look just like you and I.

The ones that we are liable to recognize are the famous men and women who have only to enter a room and people’s spirits are lifted. And when they send out messages, many listen, even those who are outside their faith or path. I am thinking here of the Dali Lama, as one of the best known these days.

Years ago, I sat in a room with other people and experienced Katagiri Roshi, founder of the Zen monastery near San Francisco. I hardly remember his words, but his being shouted a message to me: Here is what it looks like and feels like when someone does not try to hold on to anything in the moment. He’d have an emotion on his face and then he’d let go of it - another emotion, he’d let go of it also. I can’t really do it justice with mere words, but somehow just witnessing that and the compassion on his face, changed me. I came in bored and tired, but emerged energized and deeply moved.

It is a wonderful thing to experience someone else’s over the top angel moments, but those kind don’t happen too often for us normally. Fortunately, there are other types of angels walking around. It’s you and I and maybe even everyone that we know. We have those moments when we can be the person who sets an example, sends a message of hope, but especially, leans in closer and gives comfort.

In ancient Hebrew tradition, there is a story about a special group of people called the Lamed-Tov: 36 people who are capable of responding to human suffering. Because of them God is said to have spared the world. The catch is that no one knows who they are, no even the 36 themselves. It is said that we need to treat everyone with compassion just in case we are one of the 36 and should be doing our job. Our compassion saves, blesses and sustains the world.

There is so much compassion needed, especially at this time of year. Sometimes it can be receiving a touch on the arm, a smile, a laugh, being listened to for a moment or something more. Sometimes it is a stranger doing a small favor in the moment, or a member of your family stretching past their usual routine with you in the moment. Whatever it is, it is part of what keeps us all reminded of the best of life, and then we can get on with life even if harder things are happening. We are reminded of community - that we are not alone; we are cared for; we belong.

I say all this especially, because this is my last sermon with all of you. You will hear soon enough, if you haven’t already, that things have not gone well in my internship - Davidson and I have turned out to be a bad match. It happens that way sometimes. We both take the internship experience too seriously to want to continue when our styles are not compatible. It makes it too difficult for others around us as well and neither of us wants to continue that, for sure. I am exploring options for a next internship in the Bay area and will return there to look for jobs in the meantime, as it will make things easier for me to be in one of my home areas while that is in progress. I will, however, be in Austin through the end of January.

I want to let you know that I have appreciated those angel moments that I experienced here in your midst: the kind words, hugs, smiles, sharing and listening; the people who offered rides or the use of their cars; the people who welcomed me into their homes; the people who I got to work with on various committees and projects; and the staff who welcomed a newcomer into their midst warmly and completely. I felt in community and not alone fairly quickly. It has made all the difference. May you continue to bless all who come here in this place.

I want to wish you all well - and the best for this next year as this congregation moves into the next phase of your community adventure. You will continue to be in my thoughts and my prayers: Shalom, Amen, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

HOMILY: A Messy Merry Christmas Davidson Loehr

It may feel a little surprising to come to church expecting some kind of release from whatever stresses and strains you’ve had this week, and then learn that even Christmas services often take place against a real-world background. Even ministers and interns who sometimes dress up in robes like this, can have such differences in their understanding of what religion and ministry are about that a supervisory relationship can’t work. It hasn’t happened here before, but it does happen several times each year within the UUA, so it is part of the normal run of things. And it isn’t necessarily tragic. Other ministers who had a bad match in their first internship have done fine in second internships, and gone on to serve churches happily and well. But no matter how we wrap it, it’s painful, and feels like a failure – for both of us.

These are the kind of very human feelings with which everyone here can identify: ordering a perfect Christmas and getting a messy one. As I thought about it, I realized that most of our favorite stories – and most of our favorite Christmas stories, are also kind of messy. I think it’s why we like them. So I want to share a few messy stories of some of the things that life brings us. A couple of them may not sound like Christmas stories, but I think they are. They’re at least Christmas gifts today.

One of the messiest has to be the traditional Christian story. A young couple can’t even find a decent place to have their baby, who winds up being born in a barn. A million preachers have played on that picture of the birth of the sacred, taking place off-stage and out of sight, the last place you’d expect it, but the place where it’s usually born.

That’s really the message of the ancient winter solstice celebrations too, which were all about finding light and hope in the middle of the darkest and coldest nights. But not all good stories are like Hallmark cards or rides at Disneyworld. Some of the most memorable are also the most real.

I’ll share one from my own family of origin, which was the favorite Christmas story of my parents and an aunt who lived with us when I was two and a half. She was 22, and was living with us to save money for her coming marriage. But for Christmas, she put aside enough to buy something special for me that she knew I’d love: a little red scooter.

She put off shopping for it until December 24^th. Unfortunately, Tulsa had a rare snowstorm that day – two or three inches of snow. She took the bus downtown, and found the scooter – she told me it was the last one the department store had. Those little red scooters were very popular that year.

Then she had to carry this thing through thousands of shoppers, with every third person yelling at her because they’d been hit by the handlebars. All the way home, the scooter or its handlebars seemed to seek out people to hit, and by the time she got to our stop she felt like she’d been yelled at by half the bus.

It got worse. She got off the bus and began to walk the seventy or eighty yards to our house, when she saw me out in the front yard, playing in the snow. So she snuck behind two neighbors’ houses, climbing over or through their fences and dragging her presents and that scooter along, trying not to scratch it. As she came through our neighbor’s snow-covered yard, she stepped in a hole and twisted her ankle. Somewhere about right then, she stopped loving the little red scooter — and may have had second thoughts about me, too.

But she got to our back door, got the thing down into the basement, and hid it in the furnace room, cleaned it up and put a big bow on the handlebars. On Christmas Day after all the presents had been opened, my aunt said she had bought a very special present for me, but I had to close my eyes while she brought it up from the basement. She brought it upstairs and set it up in front of me, then told me I could open my eyes. I looked at it, then looked at her, and said, “I didn’t want a scooter!” My aunt told me this story when I was twenty-one, and said the moral of it was that I was lucky to be alive!

I don’t remember that Christmas at all, and have absolutely no memory of that scooter from my childhood. Apparently, I really didn’t want it and never played with it.

Sometimes, what life brings isn’t a gift at all, but an attachment to something that will harm us if we can’t let go of it. For about a decade, I’ve loved a story told by San Francisco physician Rachel Naomi Remen, about a young man she worked with many years before. He had been stranded in snow for three days on a skiing party, not long before he was to be married. His right foot developed gangrene, and the doctors said it would have to be amputated. But he would not give them permission to do the surgery, and kept refusing until the time was approaching when they would no longer be able to save his life unless they removed his foot. Finally, his fiancé got his attention, when she became so angry she took his engagement ring off and put it onto the swollen black little toe of his right foot. “I hate this damned foot,” she sobbed. “If you want this foot so much why don’t you marry it? You’re going to have to choose, you can’t have us both.” Sometimes, survival demands letting go of everything but life itself. (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 192)

A third story is one I had never thought of as a Christmas story until now. It’s one that has been told in a lot of ways. It’s also from Dr. Remen.

It involves a star football player for one of the California colleges, who developed a bone cancer in his right leg, and had to have the leg amputated above the knee. It ended his life as he had known it, a life of fast cars, many women, and an easy popularity. He went into a long destructive period of fury, alcohol, drugs and a couple car accidents. In one of their first sessions, Dr. Remen gave him a sheet of drawing paper and a box of crayons, and asked if he could draw a picture of his body. He drew a sketch of a vase. Then through the center, he began drawing a huge deep crack. He went over and over the crack with a black crayon, gritting his teeth and ripping the paper.

In time, his anger began to evolve into an empathy with other young people he read about in the paper, who had also gone through life-changing injuries like his. Now his anger was at the statements by doctors that were printed in the paper, because he felt they didn’t understand a thing about what their patients were really going through. One day he asked Dr. Remen if she could get him in to see any of these patients. Within a few weeks he was visiting them, and within a few months doctors were asking him to see patients who had lost legs, arms, anything that would change their self-image in dramatic and depressing ways. He really did understand them in ways the doctors couldn’t.

Then he was asked to visit a young woman who had a tragic family history: breast cancer had claimed the lives of her mother, her sister, and her cousin. Her other sister was in chemotherapy. So at age twenty-one, she took one of the only options open at that time, and had both her breasts removed surgically (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 117). Afterwards, she sank into a very deep depression, and would not talk to anyone. This young man took it on, and finally got her attention by going into her room wearing summer shorts and unstrapping his artificial leg, which made so much noise when it hit the floor that she looked up, to see him hopping around her room in time to the music from her radio. It was a ridiculous sight. After a moment, she burst out laughing. “Fella,” she said, “if you can dance, maybe I can sing” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 117). Before long, they began visiting patients together. She was in school, and encouraged him to return to school to study psychology so he could develop his gifts further. A couple years later, they were married.

In his final meeting with Dr. Remen, she found the picture of the broken vase that he had drawn two years before, and handed it to him. He looked at it for some time, then said, “You know, it’s not really finished.” He took a yellow crayon and began to draw lines radiating from the crack in the vase in every direction, out to the edges of the paper. Thick yellow lines. Finally he put his finger on the crack, and said softly, “This is where the light comes through” (Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. 118).

Though I’d never thought of it this way before, this is almost a perfect Christmas story, from the very heart of what this season has always been about: the birth of something sacred from within the darkness of the real world, the return of light after it had seemed to disappear forever. The most formative moments of our lives are almost never in the well-laid plans we made, but in the unexpected and unwelcome disruptions of those plans, and our sometimes remarkable responses to them. As John Lennon said, life really is what happens while we’re making other plans. So the story isn’t a miracle in the sense of supernatural beings, wandering stars or adoring wise men coming from afar. It’s better than that. It’s a real-world miracle of transformation in the here-and-now, by the kind of light that can sometimes enter only through the cracks in our well-planned lives.

Life’s a messy thing. Sometimes we do get just what we wanted, but that’s not a very interesting story. Sometimes we get gifts that really are little red scooters, and the truth is that we didn’t want them at all, then or ever, in spite of the best intentions of the giver.

And sometimes we are given curses, to which we become attached, and which we must leave behind in order to choose life. Alcoholism and other addictions are like this. We become attached to them, but like that young man’s dead foot, eventually they can kill us if we don’t let go of them and choose life again. Relationships can be like this, too. Unhealthy relationships can become habit-forming, and to choose life we may have to leave a relationship that is killing our spirit.

And once in awhile we can be cursed with a terrible and life-changing loss – of a leg, a career, a beloved person, a partner who was our soul mate – and it creates a crack that seems to split us in half. We hate it, and don’t want to choose life again. Then if we’re lucky we may find somewhere down the road that a new kind of light and a new kind of life enter only because that crack had opened us up in ways we had never been open before.

So these are some of the gifts of life, at Christmas or any other season: the “little red scooter” gifts we really don’t want, in spite of the giver’s sincerity; a seductive attachment that’s going to destroy us if we don’t let go of it; and an awful kind of curse that breaks us open and ends life as we had known it – but which, with luck and work, can open us to a kind of light that can transform us in ways we had never imagined.

This mess is the gift of life for which we give thanks. And one reason we give thanks is just because part of the gift is our chance to sort through the gifts and other offerings, and put together our own life. It comes, as you know, in kit form. And part of the reason people gather in churches like this every week is to piece together parts of a diagram for their own lives — because there is some assembly required, and a lot of little sticks and things to put together. But if we can rub the right sticks together, they can make light. They really can.

Merry Christmas — to all of us.

Click here to listen to the audio/mp3 file.

PRAYER:

        Let us not sleep through this holiday season.  We don’t get a lot of holiday kits – these do-it-yourself or do-it-together chances to come alive.  Let us not miss this one.

        It isn’t belief that will keep us out, for hardly anyone would even know how to believe the many fantastic parts of this holiday season.

        It is, in many ways, such a simple season:  lights, candles, music, costumes, decorations, plenty of good food, chances to be present with people we don’t make time for most of the year.

        And throughout the holidays, getting together is mostly a chance not to have political fights or once more go down our favorite list of what’s wrong with the world, but a time to try and recapture what’s right with the world, and with our lives and the people who matter to us, or the people we wish were more a part of our lives.

        Christmas gives us an easy excuse – even a socially acceptable excuse – to mend bridges, to send an unexpected gift, to wish someone well, to re-establish connections.

        Let’s not get so distracted by all the hoopla of the season that we forget that it’s offering us another chance to get caught up in one another, and in being alive.

 

SERMON: The Real Reason for the Season

        Christmas is really quite a new holiday.  In our country, it only caught on after the War Between the States – or as some longtime Southerners know it, the War of Yankee Aggression.  And in spite of all the hype about Christmas as a religious holiday, many Christians still don’t accept it as having anything to do with Christianity. 

        Modern Jehovah’s Witnesses and other fundamentalists still see Christmas as a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice.  They note that Jesus didn’t tell people to celebrate his birthday in his Sermon on the Mount.  In Boston, a fundamentalist religious group has run advertisements in the subway proclaiming that early Christians did not “believe in lies about Santa Claus, flying reindeer, elves and drunken parties.”  They don’t mention that early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas either, didn’t have any idea when Jesus was born, or that Jesus also never counseled people to engage in self-righteous games. 

        It’s kind of ironic, but almost nothing about Christmas that people really love has anything at all to do with Christianity or Jesus.  Yet people have been celebrating at this time of year, the winter solstice, since prehistoric times.

        Though really, even the winter solstice is mostly an excuse rather than a reason for the season.  In our modern calendar, the solstice occurs on 21 or 22 December, though in the old Julian calendar, it sometimes came on December 25^th, and was identified with December 25^th as far back as the 3^rd century, when the Romans had their week-long Saturnalia and the festivals celebrating the birth of the invincible sun, not Jesus. 

        As far as we can tell, observations and celebrations of the winter solstice may go back 10,000 years – thousands of years before any of today’s religions had been born.  In some ancient mythology, the Great Mother Goddess gave birth to a new sun god on that day.  Sun gods are pictured with a glow of light, or halo, around their heads.  So most of the paintings of Jesus portray him in the stylized way solar deities are portrayed.   The solstice was celebrated in many cultures at this time, and by definition that 25^th of December – the day the sun was “reborn” – was the birthday of all sun gods, of whom there were many.  If you go to Wikipedia, you can find a list of over 100 solar deities, all of whom are “born” each year on the same date – though most of those gods have long since been forgotten.   All gods die, and gods who last a few hundred or thousand years have lasted a very long time, as gods go.

        So while over a hundred different religious cults and sets of rituals are known, each one of them was a kind of “cover” story over the real reason for the season, which had nothing to do with all those local and temporary gods. 

        In another twelve days, we will have the shortest day and longest night of the year.  Leaves have died and fallen from a lot of trees; it’s been getting dark earlier and getting light later in the day.  If we were living through this for the first time, we might think the world was slowly coming to an end, and the light would just continue disappearing until it was completely gone, and we might engage in some pretty desperate hoping. 

        But this isn’t the season of hoping the sun will come back, and it hasn’t been for over a hundred centuries.  It’s the time of knowing the sun will return – after all, they knew exactly which date to plan their parties around, even thousands of years ago, and Stonehenge was built around 4,000 years ago to frame the sun’s rays precisely at the winter and summer solstices.  They didn’t hope, they knew.  We know full well that the sun will start returning and days will get longer, and we are safe in the hands of Mother Nature, for she will always give birth to the light again.  That’s part of the message of this most optimistic of seasons: this is our home, and it’s a safe place for us.

        In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine, whose religion was Mithraism, wanted to combine Mithraism and Christianity.  He gave Christians protection from prosecution, but then assigned Mithras’s birthday – December 25^th, since Mithras was a sun god – to be celebrated as Jesus’ birthday as well, and also assigned Sunday – the day named after the sun god – as the holy day of Christianity.  Until then, Christians did not have a holy day.  Christian writers in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries used to brag about having no holy days, unlike those heretical pagans who were always naming days after their gods – like Sun-day.  So officially, Jesus started being born on December 25^th in the middle of the fourth century, and we’re still meeting here on Sunday, the holy day of a dozen sun gods whose names we no longer even know.  But Christmas didn’t start then, because from the very start, Christians wouldn’t buy it.  Even 1700 years ago, they knew it was a pagan holiday about a sun god, so the day just wasn’t an important day for them.

        A lot of people are surprised to learn that Christmas wasn’t an important day in modern times, either.  But it’s a very recent holiday.  In England in the 17^th century, the Christian Oliver Cromwell ordered people put in jail if they were caught celebrating Christmas. 

        And when the Puritans came to America, they would not allow the celebration of Christmas, because they too knew their history.  Our Congress was in session on December 25, 1789, the first Christmas under our new constitution.  Christmas was a normal workday.

        Christmas didn’t start catching on in our country until the last third of the 19^th century, and then it had almost nothing to do with Jesus, and everything to do with Santa Claus. 

        In 1822, a dentist named Clement Moore wrote the poem we know as “The Night Before Christmas.”  It’s still a magical poem, and it became immensely popular.  That’s the poem we all know, about the visit of old Saint Nicholas flying up onto the rooftop in his sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, slipping down the chimney to bring presents to the children, then as he flew away calling out, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”  There’s nothing about Jesus or God.  Nothing about the winter solstice, either – just jolly old Saint Nicholas, presents, and a wonderful, magical atmosphere.  After this poem caught on, the Santa Claus story became very popular. 

        Then in 1843, Charles Dickens published his Christmas Carol the week before Christmas.  The US Congress was still meeting on Christmas.  They kept meeting on December 25^th as a normal workday until 1856.  Meanwhile, the Santa Claus story became more popular, and the idea of Christmas as a special day – a day with family and a big Christmas dinner – caught on over much of the country.  Two years after Charles Dickens published his story, in 1836, Alabama was the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday.  But from the start, as in ancient times, it was about family, friends, sharing good food together, and celebrating – with a big boost from commercialism, just as in ancient Rome. 

        Christmas cards were introduced in England in 1843 – the same year Dickens published his Christmas Carol.  They were simple lithographed cards that said “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”  The first Christmas cards in the U.S. were used by merchants for advertising.  So making money from this season has been a part of it since it began, as it was also in ancient Rome.  We also owe our modern picture of Santa Claus to a cartoonist and a soft drink company. 

        Thomas Nast was the political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper’s Weekly from 1859-1886.  He was born in 1840, so started his career as our country’s first top-quality political cartoonist at the age of nineteen.  He gave us both the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey.  And in 1863, at the age of 23, he drew Santa Claus dressed in a fur-trimmed suit.  Up till then, Santa Claus was usually drawn either as an elf or as a tall thin man.  (That’s why it hadn’t strained the imagination so much that Santa could get up and down chimneys.)  So Thomas Nast gave us the symbols for Santa Claus and two political parties — and it’s still safe to say that more people love Santa than those other two animals combined.  In 1870, Christmas became a federal holiday for the first time, and in 1907 Oklahoma was the last state to make it an official holiday.  But as late as 1931, nine states still required public schools to remain open on Christmas day, still saw it as a normal work day. 

        But this new holiday didn’t have much at all to do with Jesus or God, and everything to do with the ancient festivals and giving presents.  And the gifts which have become the main point of the season for all children and many adults were traditionally given on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6^th, not Christmas. 

        St. Nicholas was a real person, a wealthy 4^th century bishop known for his generosity – though not really a saint.  The most famous legend about him tells of a poor man with three daughters. In those days a young woman’s father had to offer prospective husbands a dowry. The larger the dowry, the better the chance that a young woman would find a good husband. Without a dowry, a woman was unlikely to marry – much as it still is in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries around the Indian continent.  This poor man’s daughters, without dowries, were therefore destined to be sold into some kind of slavery.        Mysteriously, on three different occasions, a bag of gold appeared in their home-providing the needed dowries. The bags of gold, tossed through an open window, are said to have landed in stockings or shoes left before the fire to dry. This led to the custom of children hanging stockings or putting out shoes, eagerly awaiting gifts from Saint Nicholas. Sometimes the story is told with gold balls instead of bags of gold. That is why three gold balls are one of the symbols for St. Nicholas. It’s also the origin of the three gold balls that you can still sometimes see hanging outside of pawnshops.  St. Nicholas’ Day was celebrated on the anniversary of his death, December 6^th, beginning in 13^th century France.  So the first part of our modern Christmas to become popular was the gift giving associated with St. Nicholas, but not any story about the birth of Jesus. 

        But combining gift giving with a religious holiday is like combining fireworks with the celebration of our nation’s declaration of independence on the 4^th of July.  Guess which one will trump the other one? 

        Some people in this country were giving gifts for St. Nicholas Day, which had become a secular holiday.  But by the end of the 19^th century, merchants succeeded in getting people to combine St. Nicholas’ Day with December 25^th, and give the gifts for Christmas, to help focus the shopping season.  Earlier, Christmas gifts were almost always made by hand to give to your family and friends.  But between about 1880 and 1920 merchants managed to sell us on the idea that they should be bought, and gift-wrapped in fancy paper.  In the 1930s, they got President Franklin Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving back from its former date of November 30^th, to November 23^rd, so there would be a longer Christmas shopping season.   A few years later, Congress made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November, and the Christmas shopping season has officially started the day after Thanksgiving since then – though now it seems the Christmas ads start after Halloween. 

        You notice that so far, Jesus, God and Christianity have hardly been mentioned at all.   Our modern Christmas was begun by storytellers, cartoonists and merchants, creating the shopping season that is the most profitable time of the year for them.  It features holly, ivy, mistletoe, evergreens, fir trees, and the lights and fires and parties that go back to before Christianity existed, probably to before any religion still alive existed.  But also notice that none of these stories talk about the winter solstice, either. 

        Our favorite Christmas music isn’t religious, either, though our favorite music comes at Christmas.  The Number One selling record of all time is still Bing Crosby’s 1942 version of “White Christmas,” and the Number Two selling record of all time is still Gene Autrey’s 1949 recording of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” 

        The single most important picture that established our image of old Santa Claus as the fat guy with the white beard in the red suit with white fur trim wasn’t by the political cartoonist Thomas Nast who started it, but another commercial artist.  For 33 years, from 1931 to 1964, the Coca-Cola Company published ads picturing this fat Santa in his red suit and white fur, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.  Then in 1957, Dr. Seuss published his story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, a kind of cartoon version of the Scrooge character.  And again, the “Christmas spirit” the Grinch had tried to steal wasn’t about religion, but about parties, celebration, giving presents and having a wonderful time together. 

        Today, Christmas has become an almost completely secular holiday.  That even seems to be becoming the law.  In 1999 a US District court ruled that Christmas decorations didn’t violate anybody’s religious beliefs because as they put it, “The Christian holiday has become almost completely secularized.”  One of the great ironies of Christmas is that it really isn’t a Christian holiday – or even a religious holiday – at all.  It is, as that court said, a secular holiday, just as St. Nicholas Day was and St. Valentine’s Day is. 

        So all the focus on gifts, merriment, meals with friends, singing, evergreens, mistletoe isn’t distracting from the reason for the season.  It is the reason for the season, and has been for thousands of years before any of the world’s religions had been invented. 

        From all of the ancient and modern histories, whether around Rome or around the U.S., it looks like the real reason for the season was the need to celebrate, to get together with family and friends, to surround ourselves with merriment, and to just come alive.  That’s a victory of the human imagination, inventing the brightest holiday in the midst of Nature’s longest nights. 

        What this season has been about since prehistoric times is coming alive.  Early Christians said that the old Roman Saturnalia had parties, drinking, good food, singing, dancing and laughter – as though that were a bad thing.  But remember, most of this partying was done with their families and friends.  The winter solstice was an excuse for it, just as the 4^th of July is an excuse for shooting off fireworks.  But the solstice wasn’t the real reason, any more than any holiday is.  We love holidays because they give us permission to come alive more theatrically and openly than we can do the rest of the year without being seen as a bit odd. 

        During 4^th of July fireworks displays, all those “Oooohs” and “Aaaaahs” you hear when the fireworks go off aren’t in memory of a bunch of men signing a declaration of independence.  They are the delighted gasps of our inner children, thrilled with being alive and being together.  And that’s the real reason for the Christmas season, too.

        I keep thinking of the wonderful words from theologian Howard Thurman, when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  I had never thought of them as having anything to do with Christmas, and doubt that he meant for them to be.  But they are about what this season is really about.

        This is the most creative, positive and human of all our holidays.  Fifty or a hundred centuries ago, some people were facing another solstice season.  The days were short, the nights were long, and it could look like the end of the world.  They knew it wasn’t – the world isn’t likely to end unless we boil it away or blow it apart.  But once they started lighting fires, somebody got a very creative idea: let’s have a party!  Let’s do an in-your-face to Nature, by having our biggest, brightest party right in the middle of Nature’s most dismal days! 

        There were other facts that made this a perfect time for huge feasts.  They often slaughtered many of their cattle at this time, so they wouldn’t have to feed them throughout the winter – so there was a lot of fresh meat available for the feast.  And the wine they had made last summer was finally ready to drink.  Well, that’s a sign from the gods!

        The best parts of nature have always been claimed by the mythmakers of the day for their particular story.  In ancient Rome, the official storytellers said what’s going on here is the birth of that invincible sun.  A few blocks away in the neighborhoods of Mithraism, they said no, it’s really the birth of Mithras, who was both the sun god and the Son of God.  Disciples of Apollo would claim the time for him, and remind you that the only reason the sun even comes up in the morning is because Apollo drags it across the sky behind his golden chariot. 

        Then after the fourth century, Christian mythmakers said No; it was the celebration of the birth of another Son of God named Jesus that just happened to come on the birthday of Mithras and all the other sun gods.  Then they connected it with the earlier story about Joseph and Mary, a wandering star, shepherds and wise men, and the rest of it. 

        These are all such wonderful stories!  They are far more imaginative stories than the truth, which is pretty dull: “Well, the days will start getting longer for six months, then they’ll get shorter for six months, and they’ll probably keep doing that forever, as they’ve been doing on this planet for over four billion years.  Now there’s a boring story!  Nobody is lining up to see that movie!  

        Meanwhile, back on earth, a lot of people are getting ready to party.  They’ve preparing a menu, inviting friends, deciding on the right gifts for the right people, whether they make them or buy them.   They’re picking out fancy wrapping paper, hanging all sorts of things on real or artificial green trees – a lot like people did in ancient Rome, in the communities of Mithraism – the fir tree was Mithra’s sacred tree – and in more times and places than we can count.  That’s the real reason for the season: a rare chance to come alive, to celebrate the gift of life by offering gifts to those in life who mean a lot to you, a chance for good food, good friends, and family who, if we can’t quite love having them around for the holidays, can at least tolerate them in good humor, and hope they return the favor. 

        It’s a time to get out not only our best behaviors, but some of our silliest and most child-like behaviors, too.  My god, this is the season when full-grown people talk about flying reindeer, take their children to a million malls to sit on Santa’s lap, then line up and pay good money to see that ballet with mice that dance, and a magical nutcracker who comes to life.

        “Comes to life.”  That’s it.  The real reason for this season has always been coming back to life.  Not coming to worship the invincible sun, not coming to Mithras, not coming to Jesus, but coming to life.  And all the stories, music, costumes, decorations and parties are like training wheels for us, to help us get back into that habit of being more alive – a habit we seem to slip out of so easily that it’s a good thing we have arranged this annual reminder that more than anything, what the world needs is people who have come alive. 

2 December 2007

Davidson Loehr

PRAYER:

Let us listen to some words of Jesus and see if we can hear within them the voice of a life-giving spirit. What good does it do you, he asked, if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

Our soul. Our center. That place inside where we need to feel the presence of a life lived with integrity and courage, in the service of high ideals that bless the lives of ourselves and others.

That’s also what Jesus thought of as the narrow path that few would ever want to take, because it isn’t very attractive or seductive. Yet it asks us, as these words from Jesus ask us, to measure our lives in a different currency than the world fawns over. The currency that matters is how we respond to the sacred worth of ourselves and others - whether we try to develop these gifts life has offered.

The reward, Jesus thought, is the deep feeling that we are serving life, and life is returning the favor. The other meaning is that if we can not find that inner feeling of worth, we may not be serving the right gods at all,

Surely these things are right - not because Jesus said them, but because they resonate at such deep levels within people in all times and places.

Let us listen to the words that tell us life is to be honored and empowered, and that our reward for serving life in this way is that we will grow a soul that offers us comfort and love that can not be taken away.

Just this could transform our lives - just this. Amen.
All page numbers in parentheses are from the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, Edited and with Commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (Doubleday, 2007)

SERMON: Mother Teresa, Revisited

This is the story of a woman who wanted to serve God by helping people. She did it, felt the presence of God, and was happy. But then something odd and I think tragic happened. She answered a new call, which took her in a different direction. She followed this new call for 49 years, becoming one of the most famous women in the world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, winning a Nobel Prize and the adoration of nearly the whole world. But she lost her soul in doing it, because she was no longer serving a God who could make her or anyone else whole. That’s my understanding of what happened to this sainted woman, after reading the controversial and disturbing new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, just published a few months ago, and containing for the first time some of her private writings.

In a way, her story strengthens my own faith, though not in a way of which she would have approved. So this is an odd sort of sermon. Part biography, part very dark confession by Mother Teresa, and then my own theological assessment of what happened to her, what it meant for the world, and what it might mean for us. She’s such a famous saintly figure, I don’t expect we’ll all agree on this.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Agnes Gon’-cha Bo’-ja-tswee) (August 26, 1910 - September 5, 1997) was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun. She first felt a call to work with the poor when she was 12. She became a nun and moved to Loreto, India at 18 (p. 14). She taught in the school at Loreto for eighteen years, was much admired, very satisfied and feeling the presence of God, just like it’s supposed to work.

In 1946 she had what she experienced as direct mystical communication from Christ, telling her to start a mission of charity working with the poorest of the poor. She mostly referred to these communications as the “Voice” until her superiors recoiled from the thought that she might be hearing voices. But she thought she had heard the voice of Christ.

She said she tried to talk Jesus out of this new calling, but he said, “I want Indian Missionary Sisters of Charity - who would be my fire of love amongst the very poor - the sick - the dying - the little street children - The poor I want you to bring to me - and the Sisters that would offer their lives as victims of my love - would bring these souls to Me” (p. 49). That odd idea of being a victim of Jesus’ love would become one of the deepest facets of her life and work.

It took two years to get approval from Rome, and in 1948 she began work in Calcutta with her new Missionaries of Charity. She would work with them for the next 49 years, building this into a worldwide phenomen with over 4,500 nuns working in more than 130 countries.

Few people have ever understood just what the purpose of her work really was. From the start, it was a proselytizing mission to win souls for Jesus, so more poor people could go to heaven - and to serve the Catholic Church. Her theology was among the most reactionary in the Catholic Church, absolutely against any ideas of women’s rights or social and economic reform.

She was not setting up places to provide good medical care or pain relief for suffering and dying people, and would sometimes tell people that the more they suffered, the closer they were to Jesus. She believed this as deeply as she believed anything. She wanted herself and her nuns to provide them with care and love as they were dying, and her biases come through some of the stories she told. See how these three excerpts strike you:

“We picked up [a man] from the drain, half eaten with worms, and we brought him to the home: “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.” And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming anybody, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel.” (p. 292)

“The poor are bitter and suffering because they have not got the happiness that poverty should bring if borne for Christ….” (p. 92)

“The work for AIDS keeps growing fruitfully. No one has died without Jesus. … In New York already over 50 have died a beautiful death.” (p. 309)

She seemed either oblivious or indifferent to politics, economics, or any of the causes of poverty - certainly including overpopulation and the disempowerment of women.

She had a genius for organizing and also, as she became a celebrity, for attracting big money. No one knows how much. She didn’t keep it in India, which requires detailed identification of charity funds. One former worker in her New York office said the New York account alone contained about $50 million. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

The money did not go toward buying good medical equipment or training: her centers looked as impoverished at the end of her life as they had before all the hundreds of millions of dollars were received. It seems that the money was simply spent to start more of these Missionaries of Charity centers all over the world. Numerous medical journals reported on the primitive condition of these centers, the fact that hypodermic needles were washed out in cold water and reused, that pain medication was not given to suffering people, and that these were simply places for people to die, but not to be healed. She told her nuns that these poor existed so she and the nuns could earn credits with God.

Along the way, she also attracted some rich but sleazy people who wanted to buy her public endorsement in return for donations to her mission, and she seemed eager to oblige. After donations from the Duvalier family - Duvalier was the brutal dictator of Haiti - she spoke publicly about how much the Duvaliers loved the poor. After Charles Keating gave her more than a million dollars of the money he had stolen from his investors in the Lincoln Savings and Loan swindle, she wrote to the prosecutor’s office praising his love of the poor, saying she could not believe he could have done anything wrong, asking for forgiveness for him. Then the story took an interesting turn.

The deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles County answered her, explaining the process by which Keating had cheated huge numbers of poor people out of their life savings, and then pointed out that in their audits they discovered that quite a lot of the money he had stolen he’d given to Mother Teresa. He said, now that you know the money was stolen, when are you going to give it back? She never answered. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Danny Postel, 9-15-98)

She and Princess Diana formed a well-publicized relationship, and after Diana and Prince Charles divorced, she was asked about Princess Di’s divorce. She said, yes, they’re divorced and it’s very sad but I think it’s all for the best; the marriage was not working, no one was happy and I’m sure it’s better that they separate.

But two months earlier, Mother Teresa had been campaigning in Ireland to pressure voters into keeping their constitutional ban on divorce. The Irish Catholic church threatened to refuse to remarry divorced women. There were no exceptions to be allowed: it didn’t matter if you had been married to an alcoholic who beat you and sexually assaulted your children, you were not going to get a second chance in this world or the next. And that is the position that Mother Teresa supported. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

When the Union Carbide corporation flew her to Bhopal, India after the accident in their chemical plant there killed thousands of people, she was asked by the media for a comment on this tragedy, and she kept saying “Just, forgive, forgive.” So under her values, it was O.K. to forgive Union Carbide for its deadly negligence, to forgive the Duvaliers for the brutality and murder of their Haitian dictatorship, and Charles Keating for stealing the life savings of thousands upon thousands of poor people. But for a woman married to an alcoholic child abuser in Ireland who has ten children and no one to look after her, there is no forgiveness in this life or the next one. But there is forgiveness for Princess Diana. (from Matt Cherry’s interview with Christopher Hitchens in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4.) She worked with the poor and forgotten, but her special dispensations seemed only to be for the rich and famous.

You can see why someone like Christopher Hitchens would attack her in print as a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud, charges he made in his 1997 book about her. He said that what she loved was not the poor, but poverty. Poverty kept providing her with poor people to let her nuns earn credits with God, tending to them without doing anything to improve their lot.

Some of you probably have your own opinions of whether what she did was good or bad. But I want to consider it from a theological perspective, which seems to me the most interesting way to look at this simple yet complex religious woman’s life.

Theologians say that the quality of the gods or ideals we serve has a lot to do with the quality and depth of satisfaction we can find in life. A first century Christian theologian once attacked the pagan worship of statues of gods, saying they were all made of wood, and “we become what we worship.” I’ve always thought there was a lot of insight in that statement that we become what we worship. Other theologians say that only real gods - really high and life-giving ideals, in other words - can make you feel whole and fulfilled, and that serving lesser ideals - or idols - will drain your soul until you are empty inside. For theology to have any relevance at all to real life, what we serve has to make a qualitative difference in your sense of satisfaction and happiness in life - meaning that what you serve will catch up with you: a variation on the ancient Greek saying that “Character is destiny.”

In some ways - and perhaps this will sound unkind - Mother Teresa comes as close as anyone I’ve read to Oscar Wilde’s story about the portrait of Dorian Gray. You’ll remember this was the man who lived a destructive life, yet always looked young and happy. But up in his attic was a portrait of him that showed the progressive degradation of his soul. Mother Teresa’s “portrait” was inside her soul rather than in her attic, revealed for the first time in the recent publication of her private writings (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 2007) but … well, I’d rather read you some of her confessions so you can hear for yourself. I’ll warn you that this is pretty sad and dark stuff - and for most who hear it, probably very surprising.

In 1953 she began sharing the description of her inner darkness with her spiritual advisor, then later with several other priests over the next forty years. These quotations are taken from letters to several of the priests. I should add that for several decades, she repeatedly begged these priests to destroy all her letters to them. As far as I can tell, they all kept them, and allowed them to be published in this book, saying the letters showed the very human struggles she endured. It strikes me as an immense violation of confidentiality, though I can’t get too righteous about this because I’m glad people have a chance to read them. Here are some of the things she wrote to her spiritual mentors and confessors:

“… there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work” [with the Missionaries of Charity]” (p. 149).

“Pray for me - for within me everything is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness” (p. 163).

“There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so deep that it is painful - a suffering continual - and yet [I'm] not wanted by God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything” (pp. 169-170).

“If you only knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the pain is so great that I feel as if everything will break. [My] smile is a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains” (p. 176).

At one point, her spiritual director suggested she write a letter to God. She did, and then shared it with him. (Father Picachy, 3 July 1959) In it, she said: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love - and now become as the most hated one - the one You have thrown away as unwanted - unloved. I call, I cling, I want - and there is no One to answer - no One on whom I can cling - no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark - and I am alone. Unwanted, forsaken. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. Where is my faith? - even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness. So many unanswered questions live within me - I am afraid to uncover them - because of the blasphemy. If there [is a] God, — please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven - there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me - and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul…” (p. 187).

“They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God - [that] they would go through all that suffering if they had just a little hope of possessing God. In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss - of God not wanting me - of God not being God - of God not really existing” (p. 192).

“Now Father - since 1949 or 1950 [I have had] this terrible sense of loss - this untold darkness - this loneliness - this continual longing for God - which gives me that pain deep down in my heart…. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great - I just long & long for God - and then it is that I feel - He does not want me - He is not there. Heaven, souls - why these are just words - which mean nothing to me. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls - to go where? Why all this? God does not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out - “My God” and nothing else comes” (p. 210).

“People say they are drawn closer to God seeing my strong faith. Is this not deceiving people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth - “that I have no faith” (p. 238).

She came to see her suffering as a sharing in Christ’s redemptive suffering (p. 215). This was her solution: suffering, being a victim of God’s love, is what brings you closest to Jesus. No wonder she wouldn’t give pain-killers to her suffering and dying people.

At one point she wrote that the physical situation of the poorest of the poor - left in the streets unwanted, unloved unclaimed - was the true picture of her own spiritual life (p. 232).

That’s enough of a sketch to get a feel for this simple yet complex woman. She had immense dedication, energy, skill and stamina, this modern saint who became the most famous woman in the world. Yet all the while she carried within her a soul like the portrait of Dorain Gray. Her suffering and desolate soul needed to hear the one thing she could or would not hear. That was the Voice that said God was no longer present within her because since starting the Missionaries of Charity, she had stopped serving a God of love and healthy empowerment. It was simpler when she had served as a teacher, because education empowers people, and can lead them toward more possibilities and fullness in life. But to work as a missionary in the service of an extremely conservative and reactionary theology is to reduce people’s horizons, rather than enlarging them.

She fought vigorously against the only thing proven to help reduce overpopulation and its resulting suffering: the education and empowerment of women, to give them options beyond remaining the victims of uncontrolled breeding and the victims of those who see that as their God-given role. Uneducated, powerless women and the awful results of overpopulation became the victims of the god Mother Teresa served for the last fifty years of her life.

Mother Teresa wanted to bring people to Jesus, and in an ironic way, she brought me to Jesus, too - to his asking what good it would do if you gained the whole world and lost your soul. Christopher Hitchens wrote that she did far more harm than good, and that many more people suffered because of her work. I think it came not from a bad heart, but from very bad theology, and a nearly perverse willingness to work with the poorest of the poor while pandering to the worst of the wealthy, to fund the pyramid scheme of starting more and more missions of charity, which loved to hug the poor - as she wished for half a century that God would hug her - but never by empowering them, nor by providing decent medical care or social and political intervention on their behalf, to improve their lot in life. Instead, she told them to find Jesus and love their suffering.

But it matters a lot which concepts of “Jesus” and “God” we serve. After 1948, she served the wrong Jesus and the wrong God, and paid for it through 49 years of deep inner pain, suffering and loneliness. I see her tormenting inner voices as the voices of conscience trying to tell her she was not on a path that was bringing her life.

So what did it profit her to gain a whole world and lose her soul? She made the lot of the poor far worse by popularizing an adoration of their suffering rather than working to change the structures that continued to cause it, so that the numbers of the poor and desperate might be reduced rather than merely fawned over.

As that first century theologian said, she became what she worshiped, and inside the outward saintly face of Mother Teresa, the Saint of Calcutta, was the portrait of a lonely, unloved and tormented Albanian woman named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhui (Gon-cha Bo-ja-tswee), abandoned by the God of life who had once loved and comforted her during the first twenty years of her career, when she was educating and empowering people rather than using them as part of the landscape to impress a God who tried to tell her for half a century that he wanted them raised up, not patronized.

I feel sorrow for the deep emptiness of this woman named Agnes, and for the plight of the ever-growing poor - a plight I think she made worse. My hope and prayer is that she might become a lesson after all, of the terrible cost of serving gods not worth serving, and the call to return to the service of life, health and empowerment of all the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. In a terribly ironic way, her life demonstrates, more than any life I know of, that you can’t fool God. You can’t serve shallow aims and find deep fulfillment. Jesus was right: we gain nothing of real value when we lose our soul, lose the sense that we are serving life, health and an empowering love.

That’s not what Mother Teresa said, but it seems to be the message her life taught, both to her and to us. If we can hear that message she could not hear, perhaps we can find the blessings she could not find. At least, that is what I hope and believe, for all of us.