Wrestling with Religion

                                   So-called flag-burning laws were pushed by self-styled conservatives after the United States flag was burned in protests of the Viet Nam War--this despite the fact that the Flag Code encourages the burning of flags (albeit worn ones). Veneration of the federal flag was unknown before the Civil War, and in 1989 and 1990 the Supreme Court ruled the obvious, that the only difference between a Boy Scout troop's flag-burning and an anti- war protester's was in political speech protected by the First Amendment. People aren't outraged by the destruction of a rectangle of cloth, but by blasphemy against a sacred symbol.  Of course, many things symbolize the American nation--Great Seal, the bald eagle, Uncle Sam, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, the buffalo, and the Liberty Bell--but nobody has proposed criminal penalties for disrespecting copies of th...

        In the fall of 1963, my first wife and drove one afternoon to Chewacla State Park, a rocky hill overlooking a creek on the edge of Auburn, and took the winding road up to the big pavilion on top. It was a favorite stop, with a grassy field, a big parking lot, and a climb down to the dam at the head of the lake. At the WPA-built log pavilion, usually empty, was a small crowd of brown people, all ages, the women in old-world dresses, and somehow Jeannie and I drifted over to look at the goat they were roasting on a spit. A little boy sat turning it, and there was loud talk in an unknown language. A young man, a sort of cultural liaison, instructed us to bring beer, so we did, crossing highway 29 to a little store (back then, the park--four miles from downtown--was in the woods; now it's smothered in subdivisions). We passed a six-pack of Old Milwaukee to the old man in the middle of the pavilion, a ritual gift, and were like family. We were barely legal to bu...

          Martin Luther, John Calvin, and most of the Protestant tradition profess the doctrine of sola fide , justification by faith alone, which puts Christian morality in a curious light. If none of this stuff matters, why does Jesus say so much about morality?   Catholicism takes a common-sense view here, given its assumptions. Since Adam's fall, we're all sinners, powerless to save ourselves, but by faith and baptism, we are restored to a pre-Adamic state of grace,  God's free gift. We keep  that gift unless we lose by rebelling by committing a mortal sin.            Grace is freely given--we don't earn salvation--but we do have to keep our end of the bargain. We can't just do any damned thing. Still, we can always be reconciled by confessing and doing penance, in which case we return to the state of grace,  and we go to Heaven if we die in that state. It's all in the timing. This leads, of course, to deathb...

       W. H. Auden notes the selfishness of "the normal heart" in his great poem, "September 1, 1939." The "error bred in the bone" is our craving for what we cannot have: 'Not universal love / But to be loved alone." This is Original Sin--as a fact anyway, if not the Edenic myth. Nobody's perfect, and that's just for starters. In fact, as Augustine illustrates in the almost silly second book of his Confessions about stealing pears as a teen, we're worse than self-interested. We can be vicious. As sure as we live, someday we'll hurt somebody for the worst of reasons, not for real benefit--not, in Augustine's example, stealing food out of hunger, but stealing to feel superior, to get by with mischief. Starting with this kind of shoddy material, this all-hungry ego, we've got some deep plowing to do if the commandment to love neighbor as ourselves is to bear fruit. But, even in a Christian community that makes much of sexual...

  A historic image of me in front of the old Phenix City house, blind to the angel standing beside me. Life if not a fast-food menu, life is not a video. You can't get a ticket telling you where you'll go. And you're already in your coffin if you feel you're in control. Life is taking a stranger into your home. We come in this world as strangers, and we feel from time to time That the place where we are resting is our own. But that old parking meter's ticking, and that feeling is a sign That it's time to take a stranger into your home. Home is where the heart is, and the heart's a living thing, Not some treasure we can lock up and call our own. You've got to find your reflection in unfamiliar eyes. You've got to dare to take a stranger into your home. If an angel rings your doorbell or the Lord stands in your yard, They will prob'ly look like someone you don't know. Don't expect them to remind you, you're a traveler in this world And ...

              Deep in Christian mythology is the image (particularly in the Old Testament books of history and prophecy) of God as a judge who tests his people, abandoning them to misfortunes such as the Babylonian Captivity when they are weighed and found wanting. Psalm 33:12-15 draws this picture, though even David must have seen the chair in the sky as a figure of speech: The Lord looks down from heaven;     he sees all the children of man; from where he sits enthroned he looks out     on all the inhabitants of the earth, he who fashions the hearts of them all     and observes all their deeds. This radical personification of Supreme Being serves to ground our moral responsibilities, denying bogus self-forgiveness. The trope of a Judge-God leads us out of selfish isolation. If there isn't literally an eagle-eyed jurist on a throne above the clouds, the figure has a function.   ...