Wrestling with Religion

Ordinarily I travel by rail and have no need of those hospitable families that take in travelers on country roads. In the summer of 1890, however, my appointment as a census agent took me "dead in the country," as the saying goes, where the setting sun caught me miles from the nearest hotel. On one occasion, with an overcast sky and rumbling on the horizon, I came upon an impoverished settlement on a hillside by the road. Six or seven cabins--some of them built, I would guess, before the Indian Removal--overlooked a roadside field of weeds. In the semicircle of ruts that was the village's street, I met barking dogs and ragged children. A bearded man stood in the door of one cabin, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his capacious belly overhanging it with the grace of one who knew his place to be large enough to accommodate his girth. He regarded me in the gray light and extended his arms. "Sir," he called out, "would you be needing lodging for the night?...

Conservatives resist change. Progressives embrace it. This isn't just politics, I think, but character. These are opposite approaches to life. The difference seems to depend on tolerance for uncertainty. Conservatives and liberals are often contrasted, but that's misleading. Because of the conservative two-step , most American conservatives today are old-fashioned liberals.  Conservatives tend to accept contemporary injustices and oppose, on principle, reforms to correct them. Novel reforms, they fear, will only make matters worse. Extreme conservatives oppose all untried reforms and dream of returning to the culture of their childhood, if not of earlier. Pure progressives believe that progress is inevitable, that history is a benign steamroller. My own progressivism is more pessimistic. I simply acknowledge that changes happen. If we don't at least try to promote good changes, bad ones are likely to accumulate. Continual reforms are needed. A conservative friend of m...

"Love your enemies?" What could be more ridiculous than that? More contrary to nature? Even without buying into Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, we can all agree, I think, that hard-wired in the mind of every person are the opposites of friend-enemy, good-bad, love-hate. Love implies a tendency to move toward, hate to move away from. We move toward good things, away from bad. A near-synonym of hate is fear. We are unlikely to love people we fear. The obvious reason for this is survival. Love for enemies, in the sense of moving toward them, can be deadly. You don't smooch with a cobra--or with anything else, for that matter, that is likely to take offense and damage you. Love of enemies is, in this obvious sense, suicidal idiocy. So how are we to take Jesus' command in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies? To begin with, we might take it as a cryptic, provocative aphorism like much of the Sermon on the Mount. It's a mystery, not a rule. "If your right eye...

I was in construction until the crash, which some of us still remember. Those who do remember how we survived. After my last job in Chicago, I took a Greyhound home. The big construction man was whipped. If I’d cared to be a farmer, I'd have stayed home, but farmer I became and proud to have the option. When Aunt Lillian died in '28, her old farm went to Mama. I could work it for the taxes, a burden on Mama even if they weren’t but fourteen dollars. That's how tight money was. What was left from my Chicago paychecks covered seed, an old mule, and enough to get me through a crop. There was no thought of fertilizer or other frivolities. Like in the parable of the sower, whatever dirt the seed fell on, it could look out for itself. But the farm did back on High Log Creek with sixteen acres of bottom that ought to feed Hard Times and me in spite of Herbert Hoover. Growing up, I'd learned just enough about farming to prefer construction, so it was lucky the mule was my only ...

After writing last week about Kris Kristofferson's inexplicable spiritual experience, the one that inspired his song "Why Me?" I was reminded of Jonathan Edwards 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a classic of American Literature.             Kristofferson asks, "What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I've known?" The implied answer is, of course, "Nothing." At least, nothing sufficient. In an absolute sense, as a cosmic universal, this seems undeniably true and only incidentally religious. No religious doctrine is necessary to realize that our very existence depends on something (if not God, something else) that preceded all of our past and future. All existence is gratuitous, given to me by something Not-Me. This jibes with Edward's trope of a spider dangled over a fiery pit, but without the image of an angry man: The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or som...

  Kris Kristofferson In 1971, songwriter Kris Kristofferson had pushed the envelope with relatively explicit country songs about sex and drugs such as "For the Good Times," "Sunday Morning Coming Down," and "Help Me Make It Through the Night," all popularized by other singers. His breakout hit as a performer came the next year with "Why Me": Why me, Lord? What have I ever done To deserve even one of the pleasures I've known? Tell me, Lord? What did I ever do That was worth loving you and the kindness you've shown? Lord help me, Jesus. I've wasted it so. Help me, Jesus. I know what I am. But now that I know that I've needed you so, Help me, Jesus. My soul's in your hand. Kristofferson has repeatedly shared the origin of this song. He didn't normally attend church. Connie Smith persuaded him to attend a service at the Evangel Temple, a Nashville church pastored by Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank Snow'...