Eschew The Obvious

Today is another birthday, and I notice that after all these years I still haven't learned. I remember early in my life I read an evaluation of a person and the comment was made that his only trouble was that the had a tendency to "eschew the obvious." I did not know what that meant at the time and had to look it up. It means to avoid, to refuse, to stay away from the obvious. Now after all these years on another birthday, I look back and observe that I suspect that I have been guilty of the same thing. My comments on Facebook are never like the others. Some one posts a comment about a success, and all the rest say "congratulations." I tend to find some question or observation but seldom say simply "congratulations." People today have been sending "Happy Birthday" wishes. I never just send a "Happy Birthday" comment. I would tend to say something like, "Do you find the years have made life better?"

I have learned that there are times and there are moments when the obvious is good to say. There are words that are appropriate to moments and everybody knows them and says them. "Thank you" is a good obvious thing to say. "I love you" to those who are part of your family. "Happy Birthday" is an obvious that is good to say to those who have birthdays. "So sorry to hear about your loss" is an obvious that needs to be said. There are others. I should have learned to say them by now.

Sometimes in our religious debates and discussions we also tend to get away from the obvious and the expected. There is frequently a constant search for creativity and originality. The obvious gets overlooked. There is frequently the passion for apologetics that the obvious is overcome with the arcane. One of the "obvious" observations in the Old Testament is that there is "nothing new under the sun" and the passions and desires of human individuals and society are still pretty much the same and so that which was said for a thousand years about life in community, that which is obvious, probably has a great deal of truth in it. The obvious might be a good thing to remember.

Unintended consequences...

In Wake County, (Raleigh, NC) there is a nasty battle being waged in the Wake County School System. It is a results of the "unintended consequences." The Republicans supported a slate of four new members who won seats on the school board. With one Republican already on the board they suddenly had the majority. They immediately began making complete changes to the whole school system. Last week the Superintendent of the School System up and resigned. He says he cannot and will not be a part of the changes that "politicize the educational process." He has spent the last five years working and directing the board in the direction that the new board has completely reversed. He will not be a part of tearing up what he has worked to create. Now the Republican majority is considering firing him for "insubordination." And so it goes.

It seems to me that it is one of those "unintended consequences" of our zeal for a position that does not allow us to "compromise" or to "debate" positions. I think I first saw a clear example in talking with a middle-aged Baptist minister who had preached long and hard about "Family values;" "Christian Marriage;" "Faithfulness and Divorce." The only problem developed when his own wife left him and he ended up divorced. Then in a few years he met a woman and they decided to marry. Now he was a divorced, remarried, adulterer who wanted to be a Christian preacher. He found that none of his "kind of churches" wanted him as a preacher. He had "unintentionally" made himself unemployable.

A more moving story is told by Tony Campolo about the "unintended impact" of our doctrines and convictions which put us in conflict with our real lives. Tony Campolo is an evangelical preacher who is widely known and is a very exciting speaker. He also is an evangelical preacher who understands the consequences of his faith and so is open to conversations. He does not share the right wing religious exclusion of homosexuals or gays. He said one Saturday night about 10:30 he got a call from a very distraught woman. She said she had a very important question. "Does the judgment of heaven take place individually as people die, or is the judgment all together with everybody there at the same time?" Dr. Campolo said he was very tired, it had been a long week of travelling and speaking around the country. He said, "Lady, I don't know how you got my number, and I am very tired, but the way I read the Bible, the judgment takes place all together at one time. Everybody before the throne at one big meeting. Now, why did you call me up at this hour to ask that kind of question." She said, "Well, her son died recently with aids, he was homosexual, and she was hoping that at the time of judgment she was going to be able to stand next to her son and tell Jesus what a wonderful young man he had been."

We so often get so rigid and dogmatic in our doctrines and faith that we cannot see the "unintended consequences." The new school board members could not see that their agenda was an insult and destruction of what the Superintendent had been working on for years. The minister could not and would not see how his position on marriage and divorce was excluding and insulting people until it affected him, and many cannot see that their focus on the sexuality of a person excludes so many wonderful people from their fellowship of faith.

Can't End Nicely

This will not be pretty for anybody. As I read the story in the newspaper, a young teacher, either agnostic or non-Christian, has somehow gotten herself into a guerrilla war with her students. It has become public because she put some of her attacks on her Facebook page. That is one of the problems with our social network programs. We forget what is public and what should be private.

In reading the article it does sound like the young teacher has gotten herself into an adversarial relationship with her students. The battleground appears to be over religious activities. The story indicates that she has sent students to the Principal's office when they asked about God in the science class on evolution. She has disciplined students for reading the Bible in her class. She has told students to stop singing "Jesus Loves Me". The students have begun to taunt her and to retaliate by bring pictures of Jesus and putting them on her desk, by leaving evangelistic leaflets for her. The school system has suspended her for more information. It is certainly not an example of tolerance and coexistence of different faiths. I have no information to judge this situation.

But I do know how life is in rural Southern North Carolina. I don't know what happens in other places but I know what I have had to sit through in a host of different public events. I cannot count the times that I have been at public meetings: Chamber of Commerce dinners, United Way luncheons, NAACP banquets, Political Rallies, and had to sit through aggressive evangelical presentations. The person who has been invited to entertain the group somehow feels it is an obligation to preach rather than to sing, to testify rather than play the piano, to "give God glory" rather than tell jokes. In our community it is not surprising that we have not ever had to sit through a Hindu telling us about her religion, or a Jew "testifying" or a Muslim preaching to us. There are almost none of those religions in our community. But I am absolutely convinced that if that were to happen, all "hell would break lose." Our City and County government sessions still start with prayers that are clearly Christian. All the invocations at most public events are Christian in nature.

The story of the teacher who apparently has found these aggressive presentations of the Christian faith a bit of a pain in her neck may be just one of those bumps in the road to the new reality that we recognize that we are not a Christian nation. We may talk about one nation under God or God bless America, but we have yet to officially define who God is and how God might be identified and worshipped. But in this story neither side has made a very attractive argument for one side or the other.

Another Plan?

Many years ago I was active in a group in Houston that was concerned about the flooding of the streets and often the flooding of the homes along those streets. Houston had decided to use their streets as drainage ditches. One of the consistent discoveries was that the engineers and the public works departments in both the county and the city were aware of the problems. They also had on their shelves a number of studies and plans that had been developed to deal with the problems. The plans were on the shelves and never got used.

I thought of that today when I read where the Economic Development Commission of Vance County was working on another plan for our area. The problem is not the lack of plans. Since I have been in this community, there have been three very expensive and well developed plans for our community. These plans have all said very much the same thing. The problems have not changed and the possible solutions have not changed. The problem continues to be that once the plan has been presented none of the authorities have had the courage and the will to follow the plans. We do not continue in our difficulties because we do not have a plan. We continue in our struggles because we do not have the will and the discipline to follow the plan.

The same lack of will, discipline, courage and determination are missing in our own lives as well. I do not need more lists of how to live healthier. I have seen more of those lists than I can remember. I just do not have the discipline nor will to follow them. Exercise more, eat less, eat better. It is not a complicated plan. But I can not keep to it.

Certainly in terms of religious and moral activities the same is true. There is no shortage of plans and guidelines to better living. There the Ten Commandments or The eight steps to Nirvana, or the Beatitudes, or the different ways of Yoga or the teaching of Confucius. There are lots of "plans" but we lack the ability to follow the plans very well. For some of us that is why the religious narrative that has a big section on forgiveness and mercy to those of us who fail is so important.

Some Observations

Two trips to New Orleans to work on "rehabing" homes does not make me an expert on anything. But in the going, working, and listening to the different discussions, there are a few dimensions to the problems of assistance that were new to me and made me a little more tolerant.

The great horrors of destruction, evacuation, lack of centralized authority, and "red tape" are not the only sources of evil in the community. Most of us were surprised by the suggested percentage of out and out scams that were conducted in the area right after the hurricane. People posing as contractors who wanted up front money to get the supplies needed to repair, took the money, and never returned.

Another level of difficulties were the wonderful, good hearted, eager to help visitors who worked hard, did the repairs necessary, only to discover later that they had not learned all that was needed about the geography and building realities of the local area. Contractors, for example, who knew that in their home area you had to dig deep footers(one foot by one foot) to get below the frost line, did not learn from the locals that in the high water table you did not need to go deep but you needed to build wide (three feet by three feet) to hold up the homes.

There are lots of people still out of their homes who had good contractors, who did good work, and who worked with the owner, but somehow the amount of work to be done and the money did not match, and the home is 85-90% done but the home owner has no more money to finish the job and so still lives in an apartment and worries about if he will ever get home.

After five years it also seems that there is turn over in the leadership of some of the recovery efforts and programs. Young, eager, good hearted people who, in working with the volunteers who are coming down to help, discover that they themselves need more experience to make sure the planning for the volunteers is successful. It is not as easy as one thinks to make sure that the right tools, with all the right pieces, and all the necessary supplies are in place when needed. Volunteer groups come and find there is no work for them to do on a rainy day because the house only needed outside painting. Other volunteers found that they could not finish their work because not enough molding had been ordered. Other volunteers did by slow hand methods a job that could have been sped up by a cheap tool, but one that the young people may not even have known was available.

Administratively for those who run these recovery efforts they are caught in the bind between trying to get one house done quickly and having enough homes under rehabing to keep volunteers busy. One group found it was taking an average of 17 months to finish a house when they had a number of homes being worked on. But if they reduce the number of homes and get a shorter turn around on each home, they end up with fewer options for volunteer groups to work on.

I suspect that the obstacles in New Orleans are the same obstacles for most recovery efforts from disasters. This is not intended to be critical, except for the scams, of any one. These are the kind of problems that exist as one group of humans attempt to help other humans. They will be even more in evidence in Haiti and the time to rebuild Haiti will be even longer than Katrina.

The people in New Orleans say that something like 80% of the people who left have not yet come back to the city. Recovery is a very slow process. But like so much in our lives maybe we are not called to success so much as called to be faithful in the continuous effort to make our own lives and the lives of others a little better than they were. As the saying goes, every 1000 mile journey is made by one step after another.