Dear Andrew

Andrew,

You did a great job preaching a couple of weeks ago.  I think your sermon was well-crafted and well-delivered.  You were convincing and authentic and effective and engaging.  You seem relaxed and confident in your message to us.

I hated it.

Forgive my obliqueness. I ‘enjoyed’ it – for whatever that really means.  But the sermon, combined with Beth’s sermon the week before on Amos’ call for justice, placed me, as would have been said in earlier years, ‘under conviction.’ It doesn’t feel good to be under conviction. It makes me feel itchy and squirmy and uneasy – spiritually sweaty.

The upshot is this: To get serious about following Jesus I am called to look at the presence or absence of justice in my outlook and in my life.  I have been doing this and I am coming up short.

The first challenge in moving toward a just life is coming to grips with prejudice, and prejudice is about perception.  How clearly do I see? How accurate is my discernment? Do I see others as they truly are, or are my perception shaped by decisions I have already made about who and what they are?

I guess I didn’t hate your sermon as much as I hate the answers to these questions.

I have such a long way to go, and, clearly, we all do, some more than others. My prejudice seems to have ‘levels’ to it. 

The first level is a conscious rejection of the politics of hate. For most of us this is not a huge feat. To affirm that ‘all men [sic] are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…’ is an affirmation most of us can and do make without much pain. So we support equal pay for equal work legislation and quit using words like nigger, kike, slope, and cracker to describe those whose ethnicity differs from ours. We encourage our daughters to be firefighters, cops, and truckers, if that’s what they want, and our sons to cook, clean, paint and sew. We vote African-American political candidates into office and even celebrate their success. We hire the handicapped. We  join the majority and come around eventually to supporting gay marriage.

Then there is the next level – the level to which we are brought, for example, by the Zimmerman trial. This level is usually hidden from our conscious notice, which makes us much more likely to deny its presence. It is visceral and deeply embedded in the places that fundamentally effect our perceptions, particularly our perceptions when under threat or stress. It, I think, is primitive and tribal. The guy who would never use the n-word in conversation walks sheepishly to the other side of the street when he seems the Trayvon-hoodie-wearing-kid coming the other way.  We lock our car doors when driving across the tracks. We scream ethnically-charged epithets in traffic that, when they spring out of our mouths, surprise and embarrass us even when there is no one around to hear them. Our churches are the most segregated places in the culture - still. We make snap judgments about folks when we see their clothes, their cars, and their dental work. Our ‘enlightenment’ does seem to have much effect on the social strata that shape our daily lives. We have no objection to interracial marriage but are quite relieved our child is not in one. Try as we may we can’t seem to fully accept the mixed ethnicity of our president and so subject him to absurd judgments. We claim that some of our best friends are gay.

I can’t make out who others are because of the filters through which I see them even though I ‘know better’ – filters that are known by another name: Prejudice. Premature judgments. I know who you are before I know who you are.

And now my preachers are telling me that my walk with Jesus demands that I face this and deal with it? Is this perhaps where justice begins? Is this lingering, visceral, second-level prejudice ungodly?

I will have to pray about this. Keep up the good work.

UNFRIENDLINESS

Dear ______________ ,

As soon as I finish this note to you, I am going to ‘unfriend’ you on Facebook.  Although I can do this surreptitiously, I wanted to be clear about my reasons for doing so.

I know you are politically and socially conservative. I knew that long before we became reliant about social media to maintain our friendship networks. And I have no problem with your positions on the avalanche of issues that seem to bury the American public daily, and may even find of few of them compelling, although I usually am to the left of center on most things.

And I know, too, that you don’t care for the president. Although Barack Obama came into office long after you and I ceased having daily personal face-to-face contact, I could have guessed you would respond this way to his election. Even though he has taken some very moderate positions which have enraged his original base of support, nothing he does or says seems reasonable or acceptable to you.

Okay. I get that. You don’t like the guy. You are not alone.

You are the object of my first ever ‘unfriending’ because of the tone of your posts. They are remarkably racist and irrational.  I am surprised daily. I have plenty of trouble dealing with my own prejudices, most of which are not racial in nature, and it makes me squirm to deal with yours every morning, noon and night. When you sent your friend request several months ago you warned me that you would be posting quite a bit, and I told you to post away. I did not anticipate that these postings would include Obama in cartoon caricature as a monkey and Martin Luther King being described as a ‘race baiter', and a celebration of Trayvon Martin's death.

I have noticed something in the advent of electronic social networking.  We seem much more likely to express ideas and opinions through keyboards and touchscreens about which we used to be mute. There are restraints and inhibitors in face-to-face social networks that restrict us from saying stuff that ordinarily would be left unsaid via the unspoken requirements of group cohesion.  In earlier days, I would have viewed these strictures as repressive and censorial - now I am not so sure. Those restraints and inhibitors have shrunk, and, in some cases, vanished altogether. We say impulsively whatever comes to mind like Mel Gibson during a traffic stop, and what comes out is not pretty - nor do they do a thing for the common good.

I have a mental image of you as I am writing this.  I see you standing in the middle of your den vociferously defending your right to free speech and casting aspersions on me for being fearful and sheepish as I knuckle under to, and become another shill for, the left wing media establishment. I guess I have plenty of shortcomings so I will take this into consideration. But in a world in which we seem to have less and less control over what drifts our way on computer screens and airwaves, decisions about what we ingest and digest are vital to our dwindling autonomy and our moral health.

So I am taking your crap off my plate.

My best to the wife and kids …

FOR YOUR TRAVELS

I reckon a few of you will be taking to the roads this summer and I wanted to pass on to you some audiobook recommendations.  I live and breathe audiobooks and the offerings of Audible.com have helped me pass endless hours cruising the highways and byways.

Anything by Jo Nesbo, James Lee Burke, and Stephen King.  These guys are not only successful, prolific, and literate authors, but also their works translate unusually well to a spoken word format.  Nesbo is the Scandinavian creator of Inspector Harry Hole and, as far as I’m concerned, his work surpasses that of Stieg Larsson.  Most of his books are read by Robin Sachs who is Harry Hole. Burke as many of you know is the creator of Iberia Parish flatfoot Dave Robicheaux and his colorful partner Clete Purcell as well as attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland and his uncle Sherriff Hackberry Holland. To classify Burke’s work as mystery writing is like saying Herman Melville wrote about whaling.  I read a review of one of his novels in which the reviewer described JLB’s writing as “muscular-“I am not sure exactly what that means but I completely agree.  His characters are flawed and incomplete and prone to astonishingly bad choices; his villains are among the most vile anywhere.  Will Patton reads most of Burke’s stuff and there is none better in the business – none. King writes voluminously, and in spite of the thematic threads that run throughout all his works, manages somehow to be original and compelling in each of his new works. If you are as yet uninitiated into the Weird World of King, you might want to start with 11/23/63 or The Shining. It, Under the Dome, The Stand, and even the more benign Stand by Me are scary, fascinating, and a lot of fun. And long. Very long.  I finished Joyland a couple of weeks ago, and think it was as fine a book as King has written. And shorter. Much shorter.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The majesty and brilliance of TGG is sorely wasted on many a secondary school literature student. Many have tried to render this American classic into film and spoken word but with limited success.  I haven’t yet seen Baz Luhrman’s 3D adaptation, but Jake Gyllenhaal’s vocal interpretation knocks it out of the park.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. I think I acquired this one as a result of something I saw on the NPR website. I downloaded it and it sat in my ipod for several weeks before I actually starting listening – I was an instant captive.  Well-written and well-read, Walter’s work is the archetype of a great summer beach book.

World War Z by Max Brooks. Be advised not to blow this off as yet another offering in the blood-and-guts-zombie-apocalypse genre. This is a dazzling exercise in fictional oral tradition, and a huge multi-voice cast delivers convincingly. Who would have thought the progeny of Mel Brooks would have come up with this?

I am currently midway through George  R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Fantasy writing does not always make for good listening, but this is fine stuff. I did not not include it above because of its ponderous length and I would guess that most of you do not spend as much time in the driver's seat as me.

I welcome your recommendations. Safe travels!