Pilgrim's Progress II- God and the Unitarians

I wanted to go to church in the original church that was attended by John Winthrop, Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson, and it still stands in Boston. It's Unitarian now, which I figured would be pretty good, since I attended UU churches for about 10 years before finally finally leaving them for the Presbyterians because I couldn't stand the way they sing.

I have not been in a UU church in a while, and it was interesting to be back in there. I remember always being antsy and frustrated in the pews, and I remember thinking that it was because the sermons were more like lectures, and the lectures were rarely to my liking.

This week's sermon was for Thanksgiving. It started with the minister inveighing us to keep gratitude journals. OK, I realize this is a common practice, often recommended by therapists, and that it's good for people and whatever. I don't love it, it's not giving me anything new to work with, kind of some lazy ministering. But OK. Gratitude journal.

Then he assumes "some of you are thinking, Hey, Stephen, my life is rough. Things aren't going so good. I just don't have that much to be grateful for right now."

"Well," he answers our unspoken protest "listen to the words of a 14 year old girl,"

I do not remember the quotation, so I will paraphrase. It was something like "You got to always be grateful even when things are bad."

"That girl's name," he said "Was Anne Frank."

Oh, seriously? There are so many...you know what. Finish your sermon.

"So don't tell me 'I'm too depressed to be grateful.' If Anne Frank, with all that she went through can say that, then certainly you can find something to be grateful for."

Ugh.

Yeah. You're right, Reverend Stephen. I was suffering from a chemical imbalance until I realized that the important thing is that my race isn't being systematically murdered. Now I'm walking on the sunny side of the street. Happy Thanksgiving.

Here's the thing about Unitarian sermons like this. Unitarianism is non-doctrinal, except that you can't both be non-doctrinal and preach. So what they end up preaching is American Theology.

American Theology starts (in that very church!) with the Puritan ideas about predestination and visible saints:

God saves some people and not others and the only way to know who God picked is who has material wealth and the only way to know if you are saved is to see if you prosper and the only way to prosper is to have faith in god and work hard, and if you aren't prospering you probably aren't working hard enough and it's probably because you are not saved.

Then it takes the God part out.

Now it reads:

In life there are winners and losers, and the only way to know who is a winner is to look at material wealth and the only way be a winner is to have faith in yourself and prosper and the only way to prosper is to work hard, and if you aren't prospering you probably aren't working hard enough and it is probably because you are a loser. 

Removing God from Puritan theology takes a harsh reality tempered by God's saving grace and leaves a harsh reality.

Look, I don't think America needs the Christian God. Like Roger Williams, I think that God belongs safely behind the wall of separation where he can't get political muck on Him.

But I kind of think churches need God. Not because The One Anthropomorphic Dad will keep us all in line, but because without God, you can basically do secular materialism (which is fine, atheists, you guys do that, it's just not a church) or you can do Bootstrapian Platitudinalism, which is a religion I just made up to encompass the American Theology of Self Reliance.

At least with the nutso randomness of Calvinism, it wasn't your own fault. God in his providence made some rich, some poor some saved and some dammed. What're you going to do?

But in Bootstrapian Platitudinalism, God may have made us unequal, but we are equally responsible for dealing with our lot. The worst sin of a Calvinist is to lose his faith in God, but the worst sin of an American is to lose his faith in himself.

And that's different. Because God is omnipotent. It's hard to lose your faith in an omnipotent being if you assume that He knows what He is up to, and what may seem like His making a mistake is just you not understanding the bigger picture. A belief like that might bring you comfort.

But you are not omnipotent. In American Theology it is total heresy to lose faith in yourself, or your dream or to think that obstacles are real. A belief like that might bring you comfort up to a point. And it might make you insane.  Unlike with God, if you lose faith in yourself, it might be because you were wrong. Or because you are legitimately incapable. Or because you face a actual obstacle.

The purpose of a religious or spiritual life, is at it's core, to reconcile that you are alive, and that also you will suffer and you will die. Submission, a facet of faith that Americans hate, is nothing more than this. There is a limit to what you know, there is a limit to what you can control. One day, you will die.

American Theology expects people to bootstrap their way out of suffering. That's why when we fail or hurt or are weak or sick we get angry with ourselves. That's what allows us not only to criticize those who are poor or lost or weak, but to blame them. They are the visible damned, the outcome proves what they deserved all along.

But truly, no matter how great your faith, you cannot bootstrap your way out of death. It doesn't matter how positive you are. All the gratitude journals in the world will never give you control over your fate. At some point, you will have to submit.

A valuable faith allows you to practice that. Submission, sometimes, is unavoidable. Sometimes it is good to try out.

Our American faith that tells you that you are in control of everything, and that what you don't have is only that you haven't worked sufficiently to take. It's not just false, it's false in a way that allows you to embrace your puritan birthright of self-hatred and anxiety.

I do not want to hear that shit in church. I like the church that tells me I have to submit, because that is true. We can quibble over what metaphor I'm submitting to. Nature? Guan Yin? White Jesus? I only care as much as I care about aesthetics. It's just practice, anyway.

If you're telling me I can control my destiny with a gratitude journal, you don't belong in a pulpit, you belong on a talk show. And that's true for all the Positivity Prophets and anyone else who is carrying the message that you are responsible for your happiness and have the power to remove your own suffering. It's a dirty lie.

There's not any heaven, actually, that is not a place, that would be totally inefficient. And there's no hell either, with all the chairs on fire and whatnot. You cannot be a happy person all the time. Anne Frank was sad sometimes, because her life was shitty. The fact that she was happy sometimes too is not a stick for you to beat yourself with when you are sad. It's the actual beautiful truth of being a person. That joy and sadness are both part of the thing, and are both OK responses.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Pilgrim's Progress

I am back from my Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Boston to visit John Winthrop's grave and other historical sites that have to do with the Puritans. Why am I so obsessed with these people? I do not really know. It certainly started with A Model of Christian Charity. I love me some utopian endeavors.  

Winthrop's acceptance of inherent inequality:

GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.

tied up with the Calvinist Puritans' belief that God had selected the heavenbound and hellbound before their birth cemented our very American idea that some have to lose and some have to win. It was never equality, always equality of opportunity.

Winthrop believed that although God had already made God's decision about whom to save, and it was never possible to really know who was among the chosen, it was possible to guess. And you could guess by who acted right and whom God was blessing with prosperity. Weber points out in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that this idea, too, is so painfully American. Material success isn't just evidence of hard work, it's evidence of worthiness.

And they left us, as further legacy, their anxiety. Their constant of worry about the state of their souls with work as the only balm. I'm just so fascinated by their weird theology, and how much of it is still ours.

Unlike the truly off version of them that shows up in the Thanksgiving myth, these were vibrant, passionate and crazy people. People who were super odd in England, not because they "wanted freedom," they actually pretty much hated freedom, but because they thought the Pope was the antichrist!

They thought that God was going to bring his wrath down on England because it's official church refused to quit standing for such Catholicky abominations as the wearing of clerical vestments, a communion table at the front, rather than the middle of the church and stained glass windows! And for this, they were willing to abandon everything. Everything!

I can't even wrap my head around how shitty going to Plymouth or Boston must have been for these people. I'm not even going to talk about the horrific disgustingness of their boats. New England, I can tell you from my research, is COLD. They arrived in Boston in FEBRUARY! They ate stale bread and dried peas every day! They slept in holes in the ground until they could get their houses built. Half of them died. They recently found a skeleton of a pilgrim girl and she had HUMAN TEETH MARKS on her arm bone. It was seriously not fun to colonize America.

The more I read about these crazy people, the more clear it is that we are their true heirs. Maybe that is why I can't get enough of them. They just believed and also did everything on such a grand, nutso scale, the kind of crazy endeavor that could only be sustained by serious belief, and also serious fear.

 For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God.

I love the language of "being made a story." It's the kind of threat that only a truly anxious person could hold out to truly anxious people. We have to be good, because if we don't everyone will see that we are not good, and they will say that we are not good. Don't. Embarrass. God.

Their surface crazy is so familiar to me because it's so outsized in it's scale- both in their completely impossible standards for themselves:

Now the only way to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.

And in the ridiculous stakes they ascribed to failure. It's American, and also it's personal. They were manic people who reveled in the presence of god with total, passionate rapture. They drove themselves insane with self recrimination over even the smallest mistakes, fearing that each was a sign that they'd never been saved in the first place.

Their doctrinal belief that people are inherently broken, that we can only be made whole by god, and that god is withholding and arbitrary about whom he saves creates a national character not all that different from a bout of anxious depression.

Winthrop kept a spiritual journal, which is so deeply endearing and humanizing I can hardly stand it. He consistently makes plans and rules for himself designed to improve his character, and continuously breaks the rules and falls back to patterns of "pleasure seeking, temptation and sloth." He wants so badly to be a godly person, but he can never make it stick. He picks on every little thing, then goes to church, hears a good sermon, sets up a new lofty plan, and then before you know it, he's back to his old ways. At one point he complains that he can't stop eating, and makes a rule that he'll only eat two dishes at any meal. Then he breaks it. If he's not America's, he's certainly my spiritual ancestor.

Reading these journal entries really changes the way I look at Model of Christian Charity. He's as much writing to the colonists about how they must behave in the new country as he's giving himself another shot. A new program, a new set of rules with a familiar warning. He takes what he's been doing in his own crazy head, and makes a WHOLE COUNTRY out of it.

He spent the rest of his life trying to keep himself, and all the other settlers on track. And we've spent the life of our country the same way. Aiming too high, falling short, aiming high again. You have to love him (and us) for the stupidity of it and for the devotion.

Chris' Assignment #2: Write three conversations, two eavesdropped and one made up

#1

Jersey Bangs: Do you have a drink list?

Sommelier: We have a wine list. 

#2

30 Year old Bro 1: I heard 17.

30 Year old Bro 2: Right! 17! You're 17 you're not a victim! Are you kidding me?! 

30 Year old Bro 1: You're a hero!

30 Year old Bro 2: Right!

#3

Batman: Jason, there's a drawer in the office.

Jason: Should I count it?

Batman: Yes.

Jason: I'm gonna do a bagel first. Is that OK, Batman?

Batman: Yes

Memento Maury

Feng and Maury

I really want a good, university quality anatomical skeleton like they have in physical therapy offices, but they are really, really expensive. The pop-up Halloween store on Walnut Street was having a half off sale on all Halloween decorations, and I was able to get a pretty good, life sized skeleton with articulated joints for only $20. I was exuberant carrying him back to my office, and then on my lap in MK’s car as we drove to Target for “cheap candy day,” which is a holiday that Andrew invented. The skeleton is called Maury.

A few days ago, I found a comic I had drawn of myself doing daily tasks and running into different skeletons who were saying things like “you have lots of debt!” “She is probably mad at you.” I’d forgotten about the comic, but it’s true that I often use skeletons to represent depression or anxiety, and it’s strange that I always want them, or pictures of them, around, because I do not like depression and anxiety at all.

Of course, skeletons remind us of death, but I am either too young or too lucky to spend much time being anxious about death. It’s abstract. And I like the macabre giggle that comes with the realization that everyone has a scary skeleton inside them at all times. Our bodies are haunted closets, or pyramid pits or abandoned pirate ships.  They’re burial grounds in which are interred creepy skeletal hands and grinning skulls.

Anxiety lives in the bones with depression.  Fear is a ghost that flits through your heart, and nervousness sits in your stomach. You can have sadness in your lips or the flesh of your face. But depression is in the spongy marrow of your skeleton. Like alcoholics have the wisdom to know that they can only become sober drunks, depressed people know that we can feel joy but not be happy.  

Faith, too, sits in the bones. It’s not the passing brain-fancy of a conviction or the heart-knowledge of a belief. Faith is down in the marrow and wrapped in hard calcium, its protective case defining the body and protecting the heart, stomach and mind.  These things, even the terrible ones can be loved and sat with, but not extracted.

Teeth are the only bones that come out where we can see them. I love taking my wisdom teeth out of the envelope that I keep them in and looking at them, and I like having Maury and my other, smaller skeletons around. It gives me a grim but lovely pleasure to embrace that my anxiousness and depression are foundational. This knowledge and the incongruent joy that springs from it combine to make what I know to be faith.

When I got Maury home, I put him in the living room to try to scare John, although, predictably, this was a terrible failure. Andrew asked if I was going to keep him in the living room, and I said that no, I was going to put him in my room, and Andrew giggled and said that he was struck with the image of me curled up in my bed with my arms around the skeleton.

But to me, that’s kind of an ideal image of myself: comfortable with the immutable, if unpleasant aspects of my life.  Embracing them.  The whole thing making a weird hilarious picture.  I’ll aspire to that.