Last night, Governor Bredesen revealed his final budget proposal, which includes additional layoffs of 1,363 people in addition to the elimination of 456 unfilled positions. This follows the elimination of over 2,000 State jobs in last year’s budget proposal, even though while some State workers were losing their jobs, others were getting pay raises. The State payroll amounts to only 1% to 9% of the total State budget (depending on who you talk to), and The Tennessee State Employees Association has rightfully pointed out that there are several things the government could do to preserve those jobs while still cutting expenses.
Laying off State employees has nothing to do with reducing spending and everything to do with the appearance of reducing spending. It’s a political ploy to look as though the government is being fiscally responsible, while they’re actually increasing spending and often cutting the things that would benefit their constituents the most. Voters crying out for “smaller government,” inevitably paid for like this in the life blood of actual jobs, are just as much to blame for these measures as the leaders who respond to their demands in such a counter-productive way. Where government gives back to taxpayers with jobs and services, they are doing good work. Making the government smaller by making it less of a service organization to its people only makes its existence more tyrannical.
So what are we to do in a bad budget year? In 2008, the Executive branch spent as much on copy paper (around $2.6 million) as it did to feed every inmate in Tennessee prisons (around $2.7 million), or approximately 1/5 of the Department of Health’s pharmaceutical spending (approximately $11 million). Was that really necessary? Could we save a few more jobs by saving some paper? Measures like that may seem insignificant in terms of a $400 million budget cut, but every person who has ever budgeted a household can tell you that small efficiencies eventually add up to great surpluses, and it’s certainly not insignificant to the flesh and blood individuals who would get to keep their jobs because of it.
Laying off State employees reduces the services ever more needy Tennesseans will be able to receive, drains the State of skilled workers who know how their programs operate (knowledge we may never get back after they are gone, thus making government even more inefficient in the long term), and creates even more unemployment in a State that is already acutely in need of more jobs. Every State worker spends their paycheck here, giving back their salaries in terms of goods, services, and tax revenues.The state government, in fact, is the largest employer in Tennessee. It does not set a good example for other entities doing business here when the government pursues more and more layoffs instead of making the sacrifices necessary to preserve jobs for Tennesseans. By creating more unemployment, the State is merely feeding the economic fire that got us here in the first place.
There’s been a lot of demand for a kerfuffle recipe lately on Twitter, but none have surfaced, so I thought I should share mine with you. It’s been passed down through my family since we were but poor Scots living on the lowland coast near Dumfries, but is nonetheless quite delicious.
There’s also been a lot of misunderstanding about how this desert got its name. Some people suppose (like these poor, misguided souls here: http://www.fudgeheaven.co.uk/) that “fuffle” is a description of the taste of the dish, being a combination of a fudge and a truffle, but of course they’re dropping the first part of the word and ignoring its ancient roots as a Scottish cuisine. In order to maintain the proud Scots tradition of the kerfuffle (because aren’t all Scots traditions proud?), I’ve been instructed by my forebears that when I pass on the recipe, I must educate the new cook as to the real meaning and history behind it. I beg you, if you should ever pass on this recipe, to please do the same.
Hundreds of years ago, poor Scots would build piles of stones called “carns” on the burial sites of the dearly departed as grave markers. As they mourned, they would dirty and dishevel their clothing. The word for this practice in Gaelic was “fuffle.” Once the mourning was over, the Scots would return to the home of the departed to partake in good food and drink, and singing and reminiscing, in the proper fashion of a wake. The ritual taken as a whole was soon called a “carn-fuffle,” although gradually over time the word’s spelling was altered and its meaning transformed to refer to only two things: 1) a raucous affair surrounding a regrettable public event, and 2) the most popular desert traditionally served at a “kerfuffle.”
So with all that out of the way, here is the recipe:
Prep Time:
10 Min
Cook Time:
10 Min
Ready In:
1 Hr 20 Min
Ingredients
* 3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
* 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
* 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* salt to taste
* 1/4 cup heavy cream
* 1/4 cup raspberry flavored liqueur (can substitute an equal amount of other flavored liqueur to suit the particular kerfuffle, for example, Bailey’s Irish Cream if the person is not a Scot)
* 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
Directions
1. Spray a 9×9 inch pan with non-stick cooking spray, and line with wax paper.
2. In a microwave-safe bowl, combine 3 cups chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk. Heat in microwave until chocolate melts, stirring occasionally. Be careful not to let it scorch. Stir in the vanilla and salt. Spread into pan, and cool to room temperature.
3. In a microwave-safe bowl, combine cream, liqueur, and 2 cups chocolate chips. Heat in microwave until the chocolate melts; stir until smooth. Cool to lukewarm, then pour over the fudge layer. Refrigerate until both layers are completely set, about 1 hour. Cut into 1 inch pieces.
P.S. I really got it here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Raspberry-Truffle-Fudge/Detail.aspx
My life is one giant statistical anomaly. I try to draw inspiration from that fact, but mostly it scares me. What if I wake up one day and realize that I didn’t get to where I am by defying the odds through intelligence and hard work, but through sheer dumb luck? What if the luck runs out? The math says I shouldn’t even be here in the first place, so what’s to say I can keep going? What if everyone realizes (as I’m usually convinced they already have), that I don’t really belong, that I am, essentially, pretending to be one of them? The higher I reach, the worse the fear. Usually I cope by taking a few steps forward, then retreating into my comfort zone long enough to recover, and then taking a few more steps forward, but the going is slow and I know I’d be more productive if I could just let go of the fear.
Most of what I’ve experienced in life has taught me that achievement is not tied to predictable causation. You work hard, you sacrifice, you’re honest and trustworthy, and life just beats you down harder, while the wicked or clueless still go on prospering. My religion and politics largely stems from my dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and my desire to change it if we possibly can. This philosophy doesn’t give you confidence no matter how much you achieve, however; in fact it makes you want to check out of life unless you’re one of the lucky few who end up being dealt a good hand anyway (and you don’t think about it too much). I made the choice ten years ago to keep fighting even if I didn’t get anything out of it in the end. It was a crazy decision, but I believe a little insanity is needed to continue living in the face of reality, so I chose to go out with the proverbial guns blazing. So far it’s worked out for me, but I still know in my gut that could change at any moment.
There are strengths and weaknesses to living life without serious regard to consequences. I’ve found a good rule of thumb given any situation is to ask myself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” If I can live with that outcome, then I might as well proceed. It’s not that I don’t believe in cause and effect. Obviously, some consequences are easily predictable, or should at least be expected, but ultimately life is a random mess and we no more earn what we get than we deserve it. Real morality doesn’t happen in the realm of cause and effect, it takes place in the borderlands where rewards and punishments no longer demonstrate a direct relationship to good and bad behavior. Morality is what you do, even when it doesn’t benefit you. It’s also what you don’t do, even if it would.
On the one hand, this equips an individual to respond to setbacks without being overwhelmed by personal failure. It’s an outlook for those at the bottom, who are most often and most deeply subject to the vagaries of existence. On the other hand, it isn’t very encouraging of serious investments and it can lead to a lack of personal responsibility. Americans in particular are in love with the Horatio Alger mythos, of the superman who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps and has total control over his own fate if he but believes and works hard enough. Sometimes, this mythos proves out. I’ve often read stories of immigrants who rose out of the worst sort of violence, persecution, and poverty, made incredible journeys across deserts and oceans, and ultimately realized the American dream, and I marvel that opportunity can build us up just as quickly as it can cast us down. Certainly the stars aligned for these individuals in ways they did not for others, and certainly if they had not invested their own faith and effort they would not have achieved what they did.
The only remedy I’ve discovered for such despair is to actively choose the alternative in the face of it. Faith in this sense is not an idea or a belief, it’s something you must do. One of my favorite quotes is from a Scots author named William Paton Ker, who was quoted at length by Tolkien in his essay on Beowulf. He once wrote, “The Northern gods…are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason; but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.” Dumbledore made a similar point when he exhorted Harry Potter on the difference between doing what is easy, and doing what is right. It’s easy to give in, to check out, to join the forces of evil if necessary in order to live a comfortable life, but what is right is to choose to create a world worth living in even in the face of your own defeat. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a happy ending. If you’re not – like the majority of the humans on this planet – well, at least you’ve lived life on the side of the gods.
I’ve been subject to a good deal of religious training over my twenty-eight years. My great-grandfather was a founding Elder of West Nashville Heights Church of Christ. My uncles and cousins were deacons and elders there. I went to their pre-school, and then attended services with my family every Sunday and some Wednesdays until just before my seventh birthday, when my mother and I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our family told my mother she was taking me to hell in a handbasket. I remember sitting on the couch between my two great-aunts, and one of them asking me, “Why do you want to go to that church with your mother, Amber? Don’t you love Jesus anymore?” To which the six year old replied, “Of course I love Jesus! I’m joining his Church.” They disowned us.
I was a faithful Mormon for the next twelve years. My religion was the most important thing in the world to me. My relationships with Heavenly Father and Jesus were the one thing that really gave me comfort and peace. I took joy in reading the scriptures, in going to meetings, even in keeping the moral standards. I earned awards in Seminary. I wrote talks for the high priests. I did genealogy and went to the temple whenever possible. I received my patriarchal blessing. I also went to Catholic school.
I started out looking forward to the experience – some of my extended family was Catholic, and it’s the largest Christian denomination in the world, so naturally I had some curiosity. Joseph Smith had an ecumenical bent, even if the LDS Church never acquired it, and I took his teachings over theirs even then. I enjoyed religion class and Sodality and the retreats at the St. Cecilia Mother House. Mass was a welcome respite during the week. When I returned to public school in college, I felt the lack of a chapel on campus. It had always been a refuge for me to go in there to pray. Unfortunately, the Sisters didn’t always appreciate my fervor. In fact, the more I expressed my agreement with them, the more agitated they seemed to become. I tried taking different tacks with them, but none of them were successful. Soon, my Mormonism again became a problem. I wasn’t entirely surprised at it by then, but it was still a disappointment.
After high school my faith changed drastically. As you might expect, I’d been a strict conservative up to that point. Unfortunately, my life experiences didn’t exactly fit within a conservative paradigm, and I was growing up. I was beginning to see the disconnect between what I thought and what I believed to be true. It took a number of years before the disillusionment was complete, but eventually I left the LDS Church. Ironically, it was not for the same reasons my family thought I should do it. I still shake my head sometimes when I think of my first step-mother, who also went to Church of Christ, showing me “The Godmakers” when I was nine years old. I would sit there and refute the entire thing point by point with her. If only she had taken the time to actually get to know the religion (and open herself up to a little liberalism), she probably would have gotten a lot further along with my deprogramming.
After I left the LDS Church, I joined a feminist Seminary. Part of my motivation was to study religion from a different viewpoint for a change, and another part of my motivation was to seek a new community where I didn’t feel I had to check my evolving faith at the door. After about three years, I earned a doctorate in theology and accepted ordination as an interfaith minister, and eventually the Director put me on the Board. Not long afterwards, she invited me to join her family in polygamy. I decided I didn’t want anything else to do with cults after that.
That was a little over a year and a half ago. It’s felt like a lifetime. I’ve been reading a lot of books on atheism and staying as far away as possible from anything having to do with religion or spirituality. In a way, it’s been good for me. One of the major problems with the previous 26 years was that I didn’t practice nearly enough skepticism, and ended up with some really kooky beliefs in the process. Relativism didn’t help at all. I needed to take a break and a fast to figure out where I actually stood. Recently, the fast has come to an end. It had to. It was driving me into some very dark places.
I am, evidently, the type of person who needs faith in her life. I will be the first to admit that it’s a drug, but it’s a drug that keeps me sane, so I’m not going to refuse it. My belief system has been subject to a major overhaul about once every seven years, and I just turned twenty-eight. I’ve decided that it’s time to determine exactly what I want to keep, and what isn’t worth having. The past seven years of searching have given me a pretty good idea of what’s available, and the fourteen years before that have taught me exactly what doesn’t interest me. I plan to whittle down and smooth away until I have a faith that I can truly live.
The most important thing I’ve found in my faith is healing. Religion is nothing if it does not transform us moment by moment into our better selves. Religion is nothing if it does not give us the power and the right focus to make our world whole. This is at the heart of every religion, really, but the problem is that so much of the rest of it is taken up with the theology and rituals meant to open us up to that idea in the first place. When we idolize those things instead of seeing them as the means to an end, we miss the point of religion entirely.
A friend of mine once observed that it’s impossible to have more than one lifestyle. You can be a Democrat, or a Christian, or a soccer player, or a vegan, or a Renfaire re-enactor, but it’s difficult to be more than one of those things at any given time. Personally, I thought his statement was bullshit, but then I’ve never been very good at fitting in with a group, and I stopped identifying myself under any particular social label(s) a long time ago.
The consequence of being curious about everything is that I’ve sampled nearly every subculture this country (and a few others) has to offer, and I’ve taken a little (and sometimes a lot) from nearly every one of them. I’ve learned in the process that I can enjoy a lot of different activities, a lot of different ideas, and a lot of different people, without dedicating the rest of my life to any them. The result is that I’m undisciplined and virtually incapable of commitment, but it has also provided the advantages of adaptability and versatility. I can’t help it – I am a liberal by nature. It’s vital to my happiness that I embrace this fact instead of fighting against it.
Ironically, my tastes still tend towards the traditional. I love family, I just don’t define it under the terms of 1950s sitcom comedies. I love being at home. I enjoying gardening and crocheting, reading and writing, making and listening to music. My vision of bliss is a farm on a lake. I believe in giving service, in healing, in prayer. I think that education, freedom, and conscientious capitalism, can take us further along the evolutionary road than anything else we’ve come up with as a species.
The Five Rules of the Good Steward
1. Your money is power. Is this purchase the most beneficial use for it?
This is probably the most complicated rule, but it’s also the most important. The reason it’s complicated is that the results are never the same for any two people, or even any one person from moment to moment. The reason it’s important is that it rules out most purchases before their ethics even becomes a problem. Do I really need to spend that $50 at the bookstore? Would the money be better saved, or donated to charity, or applied within my budget, or spent on a better value somewhere else? This test isn’t meant to rule out every single purchase we make for fun or pleasure, since of course there will always be something else we “should” be doing instead of those things, but it’s meant to put those purchases into their proper context, especially if you’re in the habit of spending outside of your priorities. Pleasure should always be one of your priorities, since humans can’t experience happiness without it, but in order to really enjoy it you don’t want to sacrifice something else that’s actually more important to you.
2. The first value of humanity is life. Is this purchase sustainable?
Eco-friendly is the new black, so this is getting less and less difficult to live by. This isn’t just about being “green,” although that’s a significant part of it. It wasn’t very long ago when our ancestors understood exactly where and how every item they owned was made. Of course, their markets were much smaller then, and it made their lives shorter and more difficult in many ways. We are blessed to live in a world that offers so much bounty. However, like all material goods, that bounty comes at a price. Unfortunately, the modern economy has drastically undervalued its goods in the interests of making quick profits, and the end result is that we will all suffer even greater consequences than our ancestors did if we do not balance the scales. The only way we can make this change in our culture is to demand it as consumers. It might be more expensive to purchase sustainable products in the short-term, yes, but the point here is that we pay the fair price now, so that we don’t have to pay for it with interest later.
3. The second value of humanity is freedom. Does this purchase do any harm?
The dictates of conscientious capitalism belong here. Is the product the result of slave labor? Were animals tortured to make it? Am I financing terrorism by purchasing it? Adversely, was it produced by a person or organization that works in opposition to these evils? It’s probably safe to say that most of the time we don’t even know the answers to these questions, unless we happen to feel so passionately about these causes that we do a lot of homework beforehand. If we as Americans are willing to believe that capitalism is not only the expression of freedom, however, but that capitalism is the precursor of freedom, we should be careful to put our money where our mouth. Butter, not bombs.
4. The third value of humanity is community. Is it local?
Put simply, don’t shit where you eat. The majority of the food we eat nowadays is anything but locally-produced. That salad you bought at the grocery down the street is the product of thousands of miles of transportation and refrigeration costs, and the result of a massive industrialized agricultural industry that all too often makes us sick instead of feeding us. Do you like your neighborhood? Would you like it to be better? In the event there is some sort of disruption to our national and international supply chains, would you like to maintain your quality of life? Then buy locally. Frequent locally-owned stores and purchase locally-made products. The circle of life flows much more smoothly when it begins and ends in the same place.
5. To give is to receive. Receiving is pretty swell, too.
Don’t hold anything back, and you will have everything you ever need. It’s not that material possessions are bad, or that God wants us all to take a vow of poverty. It’s the prioritization of those things over the things that truly matter which creates problems for humanity. We should be just as willing to give it all up as we are to welcome it all in. Then, happiness becomes inevitable.
Luke the Apostle relates a story in his Gospel where Jesus is asked by a certain ruler what he should do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies by asking him if he knows the commandments: do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, and honor your father and your mother. The ruler replies that he has kept all of these commandments from his youth. Jesus sees where the man’s heart really is, though. He gives the ruler a challenge. In order to inherit eternal life, he needs to do just one more thing – sell all he has, distribute it to the poor, and come be one of his disciples.
Of course, Jesus was homeless at the time, and being a disciple meant you’d have a rock for your pillow, too. The ruler declares this to be impossible. He asks Jesus if we are all supposed to become ascetics, or lose any hope of salvation. Jesus responds that as long as a person cares more about monetary wealth than spiritual wealth, the kingdom of heaven will be impossible for them to enter.
In Leviticus 19: 9-10, when the Lord teaches Moses the commandments he is to deliver to the Israelites, he places giving a portion of one’s wealth to the poor in importance right after avoiding idolatry, keeping the Sabbath holy, and honoring one’s parents. In Malachi, the Lord compares the failure to pay tithes into the storehouse for the support of the poor to literally robbing God. Several thousand years later, the Lord instructs another prophet with the words, “if though lovest me thou shalt serve me and keep all my commandments. And behold, thou wilt remember the poor, and consecrate of thy properties for their support that which thou hast to impart unto them, with a covenant and a deed which cannot be broken.”
The Book of Mosiah records one of the greatest sermons ever delivered on the importance of giving.
“For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for the riches which we have of every kind?
“And now, if God, who has created you, on whom you are dependent for your lives and for all that ye have and are, doth grant unto you whatsoever ye ask that is right, in faith, believing that ye shall receive, O then, how ye ought to impart of the substance that ye have one with another.
“And if ye judge the man who putteth up his petition to you for your substance that he perish not, and condemn him, how much more just will be your condemnation for withholding your substance, which doth not belong to you but to God, to whom also your life belongeth; and yet ye put up no petition, nor repent of the thing which thou hast done.
“I say unto you, wo be unto that man, for his substance shall perish with him; and now, I say these things unto those who are rich as pertaining to the things of this world.
“And again, I say unto the poor, ye who have not and yet have sufficient, that ye remain from day to day; I mean all you who deny the beggar, because you have not; I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give.
“And now, if ye say this in your hearts ye remain guiltless, otherwise ye are condemned; and your condemnation is just for ye covet that which ye have not received.
“And behold, I say these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.”
Giving is not just a Christian idea. Like the Golden Rule, it is an imperative of every religion, everywhere. It is a part of nearly every moral or ethical system on Earth, even the ones that do not profess a belief in God. It is rooted in the communal, tribal way of life that human civilization springs from. Although some of us might be tempted from time to time into a greedy sense of callous superiority, just like the one warned against in Mosiah, for the most part human beings are a giving people who find charity both natural and rewarding.
Giving isn’t even a wholly selfless act. Often people who are habitually charitable describe how much more they get back in return, and it’s difficult to ignore the positive changes that charity can create for the communities we live in. The scriptures teach us that when we give, we are not only obeying a commandment, but we are opening our lives up to be filled with so much wealth, “that there shall not be room enough to receive it” (Malachi 3: 10).
My mother always paid her tithing, and I started tithing at an early age, primarily because we attended a church where tithing was taught as an important principle and where certain benefits of membership would not be available to us if we did not tithe. At first I would tithe out of the money my family gave me, or what I had earned from babysitting, but it became a steady 10% of my earnings once I started working regularly.
I learned from experience – including quite a few minor miracles over the years – that tithing was a good investment. As my mother used to say, “You can’t afford not to tithe.” God has given us quite a few commandments, and obeying most of them is a good idea even if you don’t believe in heaven or hell, but there is always a covenant relationship involved on some level that promises something rewarding in return for your obedience. God might rather us obey for the sake of doing God’s will, but when the negative reinforcement of eternal damnation doesn’t have any effect, he’s not above bribery to inspire us to do what is right. In my experience, some of these covenant relationships pay off better than others. Tithing is one of the winners.
My testimony aside, however, eventually I stopped attending church, and then of course I stopped paying my tithing. As Melissa Scott likes to put it, “you pay where you eat.” Tithing is meant to be paid into the Lord’s storehouse, and traditionally that means giving it to the temple or church to be distributed to the needy by the clergy. There are problems with this model, which is part of why I stopped participating in it.
It’s not that the money wasn’t being given to the poor. The LDS Church has some outstanding welfare programs, better even than most religious organizations. The problem was just as much my own extremism as their failures. I cannot justify spending millions upon millions of dollars to build temples, when there are still homeless families in our communities who need affordable housing. How could we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on printed Sunday School materials, when there are people who are going hungry?
It’s not that temples and lesson manuals are bad investments. They can enrich our spiritual lives. However, I’m not really sure that we need them to draw closer to God, the way other people need a roof over their head and food in their belly. I’ve found that the less we rely on physical means to draw closer to divinity, the easier it is for us to find that source. We often talked in the church about how strong the faith of our forebears was compared to our own. Perhaps that strength had something to do with the fact that they had to work for it. Volunteering to help those in need of help has probably done more for the salvation of my soul than all the hours I spent in the temple, and I enjoyed attending the temple a lot.
Some Christians will disagree with me, but I’ve read the Bible more than a few times, and the message I’ve gotten from Jesus is that he’d rather have us working to help the poor than sitting in a pew at church. We are called to be the “salt of the Earth,” but the salt doesn’t spread very much flavor when it stays in the shaker on the table. Churches were initially organized in the Roman Empire to give catechumens the opportunity to learn the basic teachings and practices of their faith in a safe environment. After this initial training, they were baptized, and unless they continued to be involved in the training of new believers, they went out into the world and busied themselves with living a Christian life. It was only after Christianity became both legal (and thus, fashionable) that it was desirable to be seen at church all that often.
In the words of Susan Ertz, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” The issue is a question of priorities. There is nothing wrong with worship, as long as you get some measure of spiritual nourishment out of it. However, is that what you’re really doing? Would your time and effort be better spent elsewhere? It’s probably better to go to church than spend your Sabbath in front of the television, but it’s certainly not better than volunteering at a shelter, or teaching a child to read, or cleaning up a park.
These are minor concerns in contrast with the real abuses, though. Americans live in a capitalist society, and Mormonism in particular is an American religion. Channeling the tithing through the church, and then to the poor, opens up the church to a serious temptation to be a “respecter of persons.” We tend to value people in this country depending upon the financial wealth they’ve accumulated, which is in direct opposition to the values of the Gospel. Priesthood callings are frequently given to the wealthiest men in the congregation. Having experienced the abuses of at least one of these Bishops for myself, I have trouble believing that their appointment was really the will of God so much as it was a guarantee for the church of greater access to their bank accounts.
Because the LDS Church has such effective welfare programs, many people join the church in order to receive its financial help. I find nothing really wrong with this, not just because I have no idea how sincere their testimony might actually be, but primarily because I’ve known so many Mormons who are members of the church for other, less than faithful reasons, such as the fact that they were born into it, and although they might not really believe much of it anymore it would be too socially difficult to be honest about it and leave. If I’m going to take their membership seriously, I’m certainly going to respect the membership of the poor who came to the church for help and were grateful to receive it.
Unfortunately, most welfare recipients aren’t greeted in this fashion by other members. During my membership, I was the daughter of a single mother, and we weren’t wealthy. There were many times when we could have gone to the church and asked for financial help and received it. Once, when it was a question of actually becoming homeless, we did receive some help for a couple months. For all the other years we were members, we paid our tithing and did not take from the storehouse, and yet I lost track of the number of times members of the priesthood and their wives outright stated or implied that we were attending the church only to live off *their* tithing donations. It was a ready way to dismiss our presence, and even our testimonies.
The final reason I decided to leave the LDS Church was another tithing issue, at least in part. The Mormons recently spent over $25 million dollars in California to prevent gay marriage from being legalized. Setting aside the hypocrisy of an organization that once protested over the government’s lack of authority to regulate marriage when it was their right to marry on the line, that was $25 million dollars that could have been spent on any number of problems of much more importance in light of the commandments given to us by Jesus Christ. How many starving children would that have fed, and for how long? How much medicine could it have distributed to the sick, or to prevent the spread of illness? How many slaves could it have freed? I have a hard time imagining that is where Jesus would have directed that money if he’d been the one writing the checks.
Last Christmas, I spent some time meditating, and I came to the realization that I still needed to tithe, even if I wasn’t tithing to a particular religious organization. The rationale Christ gave is still an issue for us – there are still needy people in the world, and I still have the means to help minimize their suffering. It would be morally wrong for me to do nothing under those circumstances. Besides, I grew up on cartoons, which means I’ve always wanted to save the world. Who really needs convincing once that kind of power is put into their hands?
The problem at that point was not whether to tithe, but how to tithe. I had to find a new storehouse. In the spirit of “pay where you eat,” I decided to start locally. I’d been hearing a lot about Charlie Strobel and the Campus for Human Development at that time, particularly Room in the Inn. Metro had recently passed the anti-panhandling laws downtown, and working there and riding the bus at night through Vine Hill on the way to law school had given me some opportunity to observe the homelessness problem in Nashville firsthand.
The Nashville Scene ran an article on the panhandling laws that quoted a common reaction by people who didn’t want to give to beggars because, “there’s plenty of legitimate places they can get help.” Father Strobel’s response was that the demand for services to the homeless in Nashville far exceeded the charities’ capacity to provide them, and that they haven’t received any increase in donations from people saying, “I’m giving to you instead of giving to the panhandlers.” I thanked him for the call to repentance, and wrote him a check.
Once I started looking, I found storehouses everywhere. I eventually decided to balance out my local focus with some global charities as well, primarily for practical reasons. Since I had taken on the responsibility of essentially being the Lord’s financial manager, and since I was going to be receiving such high dividends back in return, I wanted to make sure the investment was put in a place where it would earn the highest payoff.
Fifty dollars in Afghanistan or the Congo changes a lot more lives than it does in Tennessee. You’ve watched Charlie Wilson’s War. How would our lives be different today if we’d just built a couple schools? Heifer International was already one of my favorite charities, so I started including them in my monthly tithe. More recently, I decided I was ready for a more personal commitment, so I became a sponsor through Women for Women International.
Muhammad Yusuf, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on “social business,” once called charity the “trickle-down” method of solving social problems. Giving money here and there might make us feel good, and it might even help, especially in immediate, short-term emergencies, but it doesn’t really help anyone in the long run. Furthermore, it disassociates the giver from the receiver.
This not only cheats you out of some of the value of this kind of exchange, but it doesn’t exactly follow the teachings of Christ. Jesus had a habit of “dining with sinners.” His tale of the Good Samaritan is a hands-on way of helping. It is meant to teach us that simply giving cash every now and then isn’t the point of giving. The idea is to tear down the boundaries that separate us and inspire us to engage in thoughts of superiority. He taught us principles of compassion and community, of truly loving one’s neighbor, at least enough to get out there and help them with your heart and your hands as well as your wallet.
This Christmas, I’ve decided I need to take this kind of tithing more seriously. The definition is ten percent of your income or increase. In our society, this usually comes in the form of currency, and so we give our cash. I’ve been wondering lately, though, what would happen if everyone started tithing their time instead, or at least including their time as a portion of their giving? What if I dedicated ten percent of my working hours every month to helping others? How might that change the world? How would I change from the experience?
My religious zealotry may run deep, but I got it honest. My great-grandfather was a founding Elder and pastor of West Nashville Heights Church of Christ. I was his first great-grandchild, born on his birthday. Another great-grandfather, who attended St. John’s United Methodist, preached to the convicts every week at the old Nashville prison. My grandfather told me stories of his aunt, who read the Bible on her knees for an hour every night. I come from an American hodge-podge of Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other assorted religious kooks. My interest was inevitable.
When I was a baby, I became very sick with an extremely rare disease. I spent my first two years in Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. It looked like leukemia, but the tests kept coming back negative. I was slowly starving to death. Finally, the doctors came to my parents one day and told them to prepare for my passing within the next 72 hours. “We’re sending off another sample for one last round of tests, but we have no reason to believe the results will be any different than before. She won’t survive for longer than that in her present condition.” I was their first and only child, and of course my mother did not take it well. My father called his father to come to the hospital, but before my grandfather left, he called his Methodist preacher to meet him there, too.
When my grandfather explained the situation to his preacher in the lobby of the hospital before they went up to my room, the preacher asked if I’d been baptized. My grandfather told him I had not, because my mother went to Church of Christ and they didn’t believe in infant baptism. “We need to baptize the child,” the preacher told my grandfather, “or we’re condemning her soul to hell.” My grandfather was a religious man. He’d been saved at St. John’s during high school, around the same time he fell in love with my grandmother there. He prayed, he read his Bible every day, and every visitor to his home was subjected to some sort of religious discussion. That day, he literally hauled the preacher out of the lobby by his collar, and never returned to church again.
That night, my grandfather never stopped praying beside me. In the very early morning, the doctors rushed back into my room. “We finally know what she has!,” they told my family, “But there’s a problem. Nobody manufactures the medicine necessary to treat it. She’ll need three pills a day for the rest of her life, but it will cost $300 a pill to manufacture it.” My grandfather took out his checkbook. “Give me a figure,” he told them.
It turns out that night, in a medical lab in Buffaloe, New York, a medical student working nights as a lab technician had processed the tests the doctors had ordered. They came up negative, as expected. He went back to reading a medical journal. I don’t know why he decided to read that particular journal, but in it was an article about a pancreatic enzyme difficiency that was usually found in twins. There were five recorded cases of the disease, and only one of the patients had ever survived. She’d been born twenty years ago in Switzerland. Something in his head must have clicked. He looked at my file. He looked back at the article. He ran the test. It was positive.
The doctors figured out a less expensive way to get the medication I needed, and at the age of two years I quickly went from weighing a little over eight pounds, to being a normal, thriving kid. I hated taking that medicine, but I hated even more how sick I would become when I avoided taking it. The medicine was some serious stuff and had some dangerous side effects, but it kept me alive, so there wasn’t much choice.
A year or so after I left the hospital, my parents split up. My mother consulted her pastor at length about the decision. Finally, he advised her there was nothing left she could do to save her marriage. She felt like she had made the right decision, until the preacher proceeded to give a sermon on the sanctity of marriage every Sunday for the next six months. She left Church of Christ, but made sure I still attended with our extended family.
Just before my seventh birthday, Mom was struggling with her faith. She prayed to God to send her some reassurance that He was really there. The very next day, Mormon missionaries knocked on her door. After she visited the church and heard the Prophet speak she converted, and I decided to go to church with her. When my aunts sat me down on their sofa and asked me, “Amber, why do you want to join that church, don’t you love Jesus anymore?,” I replied, “Of course I love Jesus! I’m joining his church!”
The day before my baptism at age eight, the missionaries sat me down for another talk. They told me I would receive a special priesthood blessing for my confirmation that day. It would give me the Gift of the Holy Ghost. “You can receive other gifts in the blessing, too,” one Elder told me, “and if there’s anything at all you want to ask God, if you need something special, or you have a special question you want to ask him, pray about it tonight and ask him to give it to you in the blessing. Don’t tell anybody else about it, just ask God, that way if he gives it to you in the blessing, you’ll know it’s from Him.”
I thought about it. I didn’t really have any questions for God. I felt pretty sure I understood the universe at that point. However, there was one thing I really wanted, and that was to not have to take my medicine anymore. So, I said my private prayer, and I waited for the next day. Patriarch Blair laid his hands on my head, pronounced my name and his priesthood authority, conveyed the Gift of the Holy Ghost to me, and said, “the Lord has heard your sincere and righteous prayer, Amber. He wants you to know that when you rise from this blessing, your body will be restored to its full and complete form, and He wants you to always remember this as a witness of how much he loves you and all his children.”
I refused to keep taking my medicine after that, and since my mother was a believer, she let me do it. I didn’t get sick. When my pediatrician heard about this at my next checkup, he herded us over to Vanderbilt. The doctors ran their tests. Not only was there no sign of the disease, but there was no sign I’d ever been on the medication. They were dumbfounded, and wanted to keep me for more tests. My pediatrician, who wasn’t quite so dumbfounded, told us to go home, with the instruction that at the first sign I was getting sick again, we were to come see him immediately.
No one else in my family was very impressed with this healing, other than my grandfather. When I explained to him why I wasn’t taking my medicine anymore, he read me a passage out of the Old Testament, 1 Kings 17:21-24, where Elijah heals the son of a widow. She tells him after her son is healed, “Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” After he read me the scripture, my grandfather added, “I was worried when your mother started taking you to that church, but now I know it’s where God wants you to be.” I never once questioned my grandfather’s words until my early twenties. I read my scriptures and kept the commandments when my friends were doing everything they could to violate them. I was zealous in not just my devotion, but in my hunger to experience more of my faith. God was not just an idea for me, He was a real person, a present Father and a friend. “You’re going to marry a prophet one day,” my friends would tell me.
Of course, it was not to last. If nagging doubts won’t get you, the behavior of other believers will. Some of us manage to go through life without giving them both serious consideration, but I could never fully embrace dogmatism. For my crises of faith, it eventually came down to covenants. “Wickedness never was happiness,” promises the Book of Mormon, and we were encouraged to memorize the passage in high school seminary classes. God uses a system of negative and positive reinforcement, as a parent often does with a child. If we are bad and break the commandments, we are punished. If we are good and keep the commandments, we are rewarded.
The problems multiply exponentially. Mass murderers, rapists, and child pornographers not only get away with their crimes, they profit from them, while the good and righteous folks struggle to feed their children. ”I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV). God as an omnipotent judge must be responsible for the suffering of the innocent as well as the punishment of the wicked, and sometimes the dispensation of disease and destruction blurs the lines for who is in which category.
The apologists point out that we are all sinners, that we cannot know The Plan, that the suffering of the righteous is redemptive, that it will all be made right in the end. However, any parent will tell you that a reward system which is inconsistent and cannot be anticipated is meaningless to the disciplined. No wonder God’s earthly children abandon their chores and mock His capriciousness to their friends. We could attribute the good to God and leave the bad to the devil, but that does nothing for the omnipotence of God, nor does it really solve the problem.
For those of us who’ve experienced God as something more than a sadistic taskmaster, it’s still not easy to dismiss the idea as a farce. There is clearly something both transcendent and immanent that is better than that, but what is it? A special gene in our DNA that makes us hallucinate? An imbalance of chemicals in our brain? A psychosis of some combination or variety? Could it be that we have some desire or capacity that is unique to a percentage of our species, and if that is the case, is it something that is even desirable in evolutionary terms?
The intellectual masturbation involved in those questions is extraordinarily entertaining, but ultimately the insights we might reach from it still leave us unwilling to doubt our own sanity or deny our own experiences. If sanity is a willingness to admit you might be crazy, it’s also a willingness to trust your own senses, thoughts, emotions, and instincts. To do otherwise would be completely debilitating. If that paradox is to work we must be honest, even more with ourselves than with other people. God turns into something very ugly without that truth.
So what does a beautiful God look like? Omnipresence is a popular quality, but not necessarily in an intelligent sense. I find nothing comforting about the idea of always being watched. It’s a necessary trait for a Taskmaster, but I tend to envision omnipresence as a natural extension of, “ye are gods, and children of the Most High.” Some creation myths suggest that God created the universe because He was lonely, and maybe a little bored. He was limited insofar as existence was limited in its variety. Extending himself into all of creation provides a marvelously wide range of experience for God to play in. Judaism’s first definition of a monotheistic God was “I AM THAT I AM.” Definitions of God ultimately fail, because there is nothing in existence that is excluded from divinity.
This quality naturally leads to omnipotence and omniscience, but not necessarily in the way we typically think of them. Traditionally we discuss these qualities in terms of the exertion of will. Again, the Taskmaster makes his appearance. God has stated in scripture that He wants things on Earth as they are in Heaven, so clearly he has an agenda. If He is all-knowing and all-powerful, it would seem that achieving this agenda would be a simple thing. Why stack the deck against yourself by creating rules in opposition to your plans? Was he so bored he wanted a challenge? Is He so callous to suffering he didn’t care what costs came at his amusement?
I think of omnipotence and omniscience as secondary and subsequent to omnipresence. You must be all-knowing and all-powerful if you are composed of all that exists, but it doesn’t require that your power extends beyond the limitations of existence to a supernatural force that can play outside the lines of a natural order. Perhaps people want a supernatural God because it’s reassuring. Life on our little planet can be terribly cruel, and it helps to think you’ve got an ally who can make it all better. It’s certainly not reassuring, however, when that ally doesn’t come through with any help. Maybe I don’t need a pony for Christmas, but I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of why God wouldn’t use divine intercession to prevent the Holocaust. We are responsible for creating the world we live in, not God, but a God who is capable but unwilling to help is certainly not the God that Jesus worshipped.
What sort of Deity worthy of the designation falls within this definition? It’s certainly not Biblical. I appreciate liberal scriptural interpretation as much as the next Presbyterian, but I’ve studied the scriptures enough to understand that they do not communicate a twenty-first century viewpoint on theology. We can quibble all we want on how literally or seriously we should take the Bible, but there’s no question that as a document it’s not representative of my understanding of the nature of God.
Faith, according to Tillich, is a choosing. Far from being merely “the furniture of the mind,” by definition a belief in God necessitates action. The experience of God is not just the stuff of faith, but the life of faith. Only the truly miserly can long sustain their dogmatism without it. It necessitates a love of God so profound that you are willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of that Beloved. It’s this love that’s always attracted me to God, particularly as expressed through Jesus Christ. That is probably true of most believers, and of all mystics and gnostics.
I’m fully aware that this might be a coping mechanism. I’ve never had a man in my life, not a father, not a husband, not even a serious boyfriend to depend on for affection. There was my grandfather, but in some ways he was so close to God in my perception and so fully absent most of the time that I may have identified them together on some level, especially in my experience of God as my Father. Human beings have a need not just to receive love, but to give it, too. The Catholic nuns who speak of their relationship with God in terms of a passionate marriage are openly mocked for their chastity. The common wisdom is that those who can’t find a husband and don’t have the courage to face their loneliness turn to the convent for consolation. If they are undesireable in the marketplace of desire, God provides a necessary outlet to sublimate their sexual frustration.
God-love demands an absolute loyalty and obedience to His dictates – “if you love me, keep my commandments.” That’s not to say I celebrate a divine origin for all the ancient commandments, or that I’m always perfect at keeping them. I have problems with slavery, stoning, and the condemnation of homosexuals, for instance. There are times when I absolutely despise my neighbors. “Charity never faileth,” but I do. One of the reasons I like Jesus so much is that he seemed to get the God-love right. Even if his story is a complete fabrication, it’s generally a great example of how God should be lived.
The interesting thing about God-as-love is that you step outside the bounds of textual analysis and the repetition of creeds to get to know God for yourself. This is a dangerous thing for churches, because it tends to melt away the accumulated bullshit and eliminate intermediaries. You can’t truly love someone by reading their blog and following their Facebook updates (ahem). It might serve to feed an infatuation, but it’s certainly not a relationship. Unfortunately, most of us have more of a stalking relationship with God than a loving relationship. I actually enjoy studying the Bible a lot, but it does not provide the basis for my faith, because that is called idolatry. The Bible itself is very insistent that’s something we should avoid.
I think it’s obvious at this point that I am not an atheist. Then again, that might be unfair. Perhaps I’ve just moved the goalposts of faith so far out that I’ve rendered atheism moot. After all, atheists love and give and receive. They are often better Christians than the believers. When Christ spoke of Judgment Day, he indicated that many of the people who went about spreading religion in his name wouldn’t be recognized as his true disciples, because they didn’t “do the will of God,” which of course is love. The inverse of this statement suggests that those who have lived godly lives without ever professing a belief in Jesus Christ might yet be greeted warmly at the pearly gates. A belief in God as mere “insurance” might not get the believers as far, as the lives of the unfaithful will deliver them.
I remember watching this movie for the first time in Seminary. Martin Sheen plays the fourth Magi, who spends his life seeking the King of Kings to give him his gifts. Watch and see how it ends.
It’s been a long couple of days, so here’s another short entry. It’s a good one, though, because it has a clip from my favorite Christmas movie. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. It always puts me in a good mood.