Painting

Yesterday I worked with some of the youth of my church to paint their classroom. Our youth program is really great, and one of the great things is that we let each cohort of youth decide how they want to paint their room. The idea is that this allows them to make the space theirs, to have a place that they want to come to because they see themselves in it. This also means that the room now has two black walls with multicolored splatter paint and two lime green walls with handprints and names. It's pretty awesome. I was thrilled at the amount of enthusiasm and participation we had and at the way the kids are already bonding through “war paint” on faces, paint in hair, and paint coating arms up to the elbow.

But the truth was, I was pretty nervous when I left the house yesterday morning. Nervous about not having ladders, nervous about whether the kids would get along, nervous about whether the parents would be satisfied with our supervision and scheduling and everything, nervous about a nagging anxiety in the back of my mind that turned out to be the fact that oh yeah, I don't have a key and the church is locked on Saturday morning.

I've written about this before, but what I've finally learned to do, though I still have to re-derive it every time, is turn my nervousness over to God – tell God flat-out that I want to do a good job but I think I might be in over my head, and I'm going to need Him to take what I have and make it enough. It doesn't make the nervousness completely go away, but it helps. The last time I wrote about this, I then spent most of the day sort of checking in with God every now and then. This time I talked to God and then dove in and was busy all day. I didn't think about God again until we said grace at lunchtime. But He was there: in the graciousness of the parishioner who unlocked the church for us, in the amazing leadership skill of my co-leader, in the joy and enthusiasm and efficiency of the kids, in the effectiveness of the paint remover fluid on the floors and walls, and in the excitement of the youth and appreciation of the parents as they showed off their work. It was a good day.

Love Wins

 I recently read “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. I thought it was pretty good and not really all that heretical. (Though I still don't know if the person who said it was heretical was being serious or not.) The basic idea of the book is the question of heaven and hell and of how they inform and are informed by our ideas about God. I'm going to explore some of the points he brought up, in whatever order I feel like.

The biggest idea is that ultimately, we get what we want. God's forgiveness is such that nothing we've done in our past needs to keep us from entering into joy. If we want to live into God's kingdom, He's not going to stop us (and I would argue quite the opposite). Likewise, if we want to be cruel and prideful and separate from God, He will allow us to make that choice. At least sort of, and this is one of the places where it gets complicated, because the claims are made both that God will let you go off your own way if you want to and that God will try every trick, so to speak, to get you to repent and return to Him. And I believe that both of these are true, and I also see them as possibly in conflict. How is God supposed to keep trying to get you to come back if He's also leaving you alone when you want left alone? The best I can figure is that God is aware of and responds to all our mixed desires, so maybe at the same time, a person's conscious thoughts can be saying “leave me alone” while the silent cry of their heart is “please rescue me,” and surely God is able to know about both of those and to act o that information. This is why I lean very strongly towards universalism. I have trouble imagining that anyone really truly wants to be alone in the dark.

At the same time, I do think that saying we get what we want might be an oversimplification. If what I want is specifically to dominate and exploit other people, I'm not ultimately going to be allowed to do that. I'm perfectly free to be the kind of person that would dominate and exploit other people, given the chance, but in the end, I think the chance to do that kind of thing won't be available. Bell sort of got at that idea too, with a description of how someone like that might be allowed into heaven but not allowed to do any of the cruel things they might want to do, so for them it would be a place of frustration and anger, even though it would be only their own twisted desires making it so (and presumably, help in overcoming those desires would be available through God's grace). That goes along with a sort of “natural consequences” idea I've heard from a friend. We've talked several times about the parable of the sheep and the goats, and they see it as maybe not so much Jesus saying “You go here; you go there,” but more of people sorting themselves out by the kind of people they've become through the way they've chosen to live; that the sheep-y place would seem best to the sheep-y people and the goat-y place would seem best to the goat-y people. And that makes some amount of sense to me, though it still seems to carry a sense of finality I'm not sure about; can a goat notice that this isn't such a great place and try to change things? Does God still hang out in goat-town to show the way home?

Part of my concern is that if it's up to me to make sure I'm not damned, I figure I'm pretty screwed. I don't think I'm a horrible person, but I don't trust myself to make the right choices even when I try to, let alone the times when I just don't try. If my ultimate fate depends on my being good enough, clever enough, compassionate enough, honest enough, or selfless enough, I'm in trouble. Any hope I have comes from believing that God will be there to catch me. This puts me in a strange position of believing both that our decisions don't determine our ultimate fate and that our decisions matter enormously, both to us and to the world. The sense I have is that, even though I think I'll ultimately be saved, I also expect that I'll be called to account for my choices, and I am definitely apprehensive about that. I've made enough mistakes that I don't think it'll be pleasant, but it's more like a dread of having a long walk in freezing rain to get home than of being thrown into a lake of fire. You don't enjoy it while it's going on, and when the wind chills you to the bone you might regret not wearing a warmer jacket, but you know it will end and you just have to endure.

Ownership

Given the political fights going on right now, it's probably not too surprising that I've been thinking a lot about economics lately. There are debates about whether socialism is more Christian than capitalism, over who should pay how much in taxes and who should get how much in government services, over whether people should have to give up money they've earned to support the common good. I have opinions on all of that, but in trying to articulate where I stand, I've wound up going back to a much more basic problem: our entire concept of ownership is on shaky ground.

For concrete marketplace transactions, the idea of ownership seems pretty simple. You own the clothes you're wearing because you exchanged money for them, or because someone else did so on your behalf, or else someone who had what society understands to be a legitimate claim on them transferred that claim to you, freely or in exchange for a different claim. (This is already more complicated than I anticipated). The difficulty as I see it, comes when we look a bit deeper than that. Anything tangible that you own comes from the earth, whether as nonliving materials, living organisms, or land itself. Obviously, none of us made the earth or have the capacity to do so. So where do the grounds for claiming ownership of anything come from? Of course this thinking isn't new to me – there have been societies where the concept of land ownership didn't exist, but I still want to explore it in more detail. Even leaving land aside, what grounds can someone have for saying that they own natural resources? All I can see is the claim of having gotten there first, and that doesn't seem like much of a claim, especially when we're talking about claiming more than a person can use at one moment.

For example, let's imagine that there are only two people plopped down into a newly created world. Their territory is what they can explore on foot. Suppose one of them comes across some berry bushes in his wanderings, bushes that neither of the people knew about before. Would it be fair for him to claim that all the berries belong to him since he found them first? It seems to me that the other person could argue that he has just as much right to the berries and that they belong equally to both of them because neither of them made anything here – they're both just finding stuff and making use of it.

Adding more people doesn't seem to change the situation. If there are eight people instead of just two, it still seems like the berries belong equally to everyone. And there's no reason it seems that it would be different with a nonliving resource like oil. Actually, I take that back – it is different because then you have the question of mining and its effects. Maybe half the people in our society of eight want the oil – and are prepared to share it eight ways – and are interested in drilling a well to get it. But the other half find more value in the landscape as it is and don't want the changes that drilling for oil would bring to it, and are prepared to forgo the oil – but they only get the benefit of forgoing it – that is, the unchanged environment – if everyone does so. Is it right for some people to prevent others from gaining access to a resource because they don't want to change the landscape? On the other hand, is it right for some people to force change in the landscape to get a resource that not everyone wants a share in? I have my own leanings, but it seems to me that there's no clear logical answer here. In either case, some people get what they want from a system they didn't make, and some don't, and there's no way to do both.

So where does God come into this? Not to steal is one of the Ten Commandments, so that indicates some sense of ownership as reasonable – or at least just as necessary to the ancient Hebrews as it is to us. But at the same time, the Old Testament also talks about forgiving debts every 50 years and returning land to its original owners. This seems to indicate a desire not to let inequality grow too much; wealth can't be amassed indefinitely, and there's a limit to how much later generations will suffer for their ancestor's bad luck or poor decisions. There's also talk of being compassionate with those who are in your debt – not keeping their only cloak as collateral during the night when they need it. It seems to indicate that ownership is fine as a practical construct, a way of deciding who gets to make the final decision in case of conflict, but also seems to show that it's not to be taken too far.

In the Gospels, of course, but also in the prophets and elsewhere in the Old Testament, there's talk about caring for the poor and making sure everyone's needs are met, doing justice for the widow and the orphan. If widows and orphans at that time were people with no legal standing, who had to rely on common decency to get by, I wonder who are today's “widows and orphans.” People who come, perhaps illegally, to do hard seasonal work in the fields? People whose family structures don't fit into our system of social convention, so they have no help or sympathy if those they've joined their lives with fall on hard times? People who earn too much to qualify for food stamps but not enough to afford more education to change their position?

Ownership in some sense means power – power to control the fate of that which you own, and power to exchange that control for other forms of control. But try as I might, I can't find grounds for one person having more control that another, nor can I imagine how to create a system that can't be abused to one's own advantage. The only thing for it is to love our neighbors.