Month: August 2019

Doubt and Faith

by Steve Harsh, posted in Faith and Values, Faith Development

“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

The quote above has always been one of my favorites from Frederick Buechner. (It’s from his book, “Wishful Thinking.”) But of late I’m wondering if like most things one can have too much doubt. I know I’m way too old for a mid-life crisis, but the ants in my pants are feeling more like fire ants in recent days.

My preacher mentality means I usually feel that I need to offer a word of hope when I write about the stuff of life, but for today I just need to vent. I’m depressed about the whole state of the world. The fires in the Amazon, senseless gun violence, divisions in the fabric of society that are deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon—it all feels so hopeless to me. When we desperately need to come together to solve these huge problems we just choose up sides and fire salvos across a partisan chasm that is no more real than the imaginary lines we draw on our maps.

So maybe it’s an old age crisis? And I’m not talking about dying. I’m ok with whatever death means. But the crisis for me is about what kind of world are we leaving for our kids and grandkids? I’m not an end of the age, Second Coming guy. In fact I think Christians who are rooting for the Apocalypse and even encouraging it with conflict-producing radical pro-Israel Middle East policies are not only copping out of our stewardship of the earth responsibilities, they are making matters much worse.

When I reflect on my life and what I’ve done to leave the world a better place than I found it, I don’t like the picture I see. There was a time not too long ago when I felt differently. I thought we were making progress on huge social issues like racism, nuclear weapons, and climate change, but no more. Maybe this is just a pendulum swing and a temporary setback. I truly hope so. I know my time is not God’s time, and I do believe that the life force we call God is bigger than this little planet we occupy. On my worst days I wonder if given our human history of evil and destruction of each other and our world that maybe humankind has outlived its usefulness. What if the universe would be better off without us?

That’s not hopeful or “wishful thinking,” to use Buechner’s phrase. But maybe the key to his quote is the part that says doubt “keeps faith awake and moving.” It certainly does keep me awake at night, but does it keep me moving or does too much doubt paralyze me? Only if I surrender to it! Just moving for the sake of moving is exhausting and useless. But if doubt and big existential questions keep me moving deeper and force me to surrender to God instead of to my feeble human fears, then the ants are doing their job.

I feel like the father in Mark 9 who brought his son to Jesus for healing of a life-long affliction with seizures that threated to destroy him. So it is with the problems threatening to destroy our world. Like the father I lay our broken world at Jesus’ feet and say, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” And like the father. at least today, my best response is, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Fiddling Through the Storm

by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics

One of my favorite musicals has always been “Fiddler on the Roof.” Its theme of love conquering oppression never seems out of date and is all too relevant today. Some of its insights are so good I am tempted to call it the Gospel according to Tevye. I was in a discussion the other day about praying for President Trump, and all of us present agreed we should and he certainly needs it. His erratic and delusional Messianic references to himself since then only confirm that conclusion.

One of the first things that came to my mind about praying for the President is a line from Fiddler where Tevye says this prayer: “God bless and keep the czar—far away from us.” On a more serious note I think one of the best parts of Fiddler is the opening where the title and its metaphor for life are explained.

“Away above my head I see the strangest sight
A fiddler on the roof who’s up there day and night
He fiddles when it rains, he fiddles when it snows
I’ve never seen him rest, yet on and on he goes

{Refrain}
What does it mean, this fiddler on the roof?
Who fiddles every night and fiddles every noon
Why should he pick so curious a place
To play his little fiddler’s tune

An unexpected breeze could blow him to the ground
Yet after every storm, I see he’s still around
Whatever each day brings, this odd outlandish man
He plays his simple tune as sweetly as he can

{Refrain}

A fiddler on the roof, a most unlikely sight
It might not mean a thing, but then again it might!”

And then Tevye says, “A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask ‘Why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous?’ Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!”

Our traditions of love, compassion, hospitality and justice are under attack, but they are the solid rock and anchor we can cling to in each and every storm; and if we do we will still be around after the perils of this present age are no more.

“A Fiddler on the roof, a most unusual sight…. It may not mean a thing, but then again it might.”

*music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick

Holy Roller Coaster Whiplash

by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, prayer

Diana and I went with some family members recently to an amusement park-first time in years, and I had no intention of riding anything wilder than a Ferris Wheel. But you know how peer pressure is even at my advanced age. So I rode a couple of the “milder” coasters, and I use that term loosely. I opted out of things that went upside down but discovered that the old wooden coasters bang you around even more than some of the newer ones. One called the Blue Streak finished me off, and I was glad to find my head still attached to my body when it was done slamming me first one way and then the other.

That’s how I feel about consuming news in any form these days. We all know the stock market has had more dips and plunges in the last two weeks than most coasters, but trying to keep up with the shifting sands and contradictions coming from the White House has been equally disorienting.

In just two weeks we’ve had 3 mass shootings, on-again off-again Chinese tariffs, strange talk about buying Greenland and a cancelled state visit to Denmark. More EPA regulations have been shredded; background checks have been on the table again and off once more. The Emma Lazarus poem on Lady Liberty has been rewritten, as have rules now allowing the indefinite incarceration of migrant children, and the aforementioned stock market highs and lows.

With that entire dizzying blur of reality coming at me I need to pray. Yes, I know “thoughts and prayers” have become a pious platitude that sometimes excuses inaction, but like that seat belt holding me into the roller coaster I need a solid grounding in something bigger and stronger than my puny self before I can even begin to know how to put thoughts and prayers into action. So, let us pray:

O God, I feel you calling me to a higher place where things will make more sense than the crazy world I’m living in. I love that feeling of being embraced in your presence. I feel you near me in summer nights when even the crickets are chirping your glory. I sleep securely in the faith that you never rest from watching over your children. A new day dawns in all its splendor, but then we crest that first big hill and the bottom drops out. The news is about bullet proof backpacks for innocent children and others who are frightened, alone, bereft of parents and life necessities because they come from the wrong side of an imaginary line we humans have drawn to divide some of your children from others.

The roller coaster of life careens around corners where we look for active shooters, past free-falling retirement accounts, endangered species, and climate refugees. We grasp at anything to hang on to as we fly up another hill only to plunge again into the abyss of loneliness and insecurity. We dare to open our eyes long enough to catch a glimpse of sisters and brothers hungering for food and others fighting the demons of addiction. We want to reach out to them, but we’re too afraid for our own safety to let go and extend a hand.

Values like compassion and kindness that we have relied on forever seem to be no more. Everyone is too busy hanging on for dear life to pay attention to fellow passengers on the coaster. We are connected and share a common fate, and yet we feel isolated and alone, helpless and at the mercy of those who build and operate the ride. We are only passengers, out of control.

Some people seem to like the chaos, the adrenaline rush, but it is too much, too fast for me. My mind can’t make sense of the 24/7 news cycle that bombards me with yet more natural and unnatural disasters. When will it stop? I don’t know if I can take it much longer, Lord! Are you on the coaster with us? Does it look less frightening from your perspective, wherever you are?

And then this part of the ride is over. We jerk to a stop and emerge on wobbly legs back into the broken world we call home; and soon we are searching for another escape from whatever new catastrophe awaits if we dare turn on the news again.

I need a sabbatical, a place of respite from the daily drama of Breaking News. But the world is too much like the amusement park, all noise and lights. I can’t see the Milky Way because light pollution robs me of the awesomeness of the universe. Traffic noise, cell phone notifications, construction crews bulldozing yet more trees and paving over more of Mother Earth. Make it stop, Lord! I can’t hear your still small voice above the din, and I have never needed to hear it more.

Oh, let me find that inner stillness, that holiness of true communion with you that transcends my fear, that smooths out the highs and lows of life, and calms my troubled soul so I can let go of my security blankets and extend an open hand to my sisters and brothers.

I am still, and you are God; and that’s all I need to know. Amen

The Wedding Nazi and a Marriage Metaphor

by Steve Harsh, posted in Self-Help

Two young girls were talking about marriage one day, and one asked the other how many husbands they were allowed to have. Her friend said, “Sixteen. Four better, four worse, four rich and four poor.”

I remember some of the 200 plus weddings I’ve officiated better than others, but there is one that stands out in my mind for the wrong reasons. I performed that wedding as a visiting pastor in the bride’s church. Let me say up front that many churches have wedding coordinators that provide valuable assistance to the wedding party and make the officiant’s job much easier. They distribute flowers, help wedding party members and families know when to be seated, when to line up, when to process and generally provide hospitality.

One of the most helpful functions for a wedding coordinator, especially with a visiting pastor, is to help organize the wedding rehearsal. But not always. I normally begin my wedding rehearsals by introducing myself to the wedding party, offering a prayer and some general comments including a statement meant to reassure and relax everyone like this: “Weddings have lots of moving parts; so it’s very likely that at least a thing or two won’t go exactly as planned tomorrow, but that’s ok. The bride and groom will still be married even if one of us makes mistake.”

At the wedding in question I got only to the part of my speech where I said that it was likely something could go wrong when the wedding coordinator interrupted me and said very sternly, “Nothing will go wrong when I’m in charge.” I know she meant well, but that kind of expectation of perfection only added more stress for the wedding party. I was taken aback to say the least, and I don’t remember what I said to her, but here’s what I wish I had said.

“You know, weddings are like marriage itself. Both are complicated and can be stressful. We’re all fallible human beings, and we make mistakes. People from out of town get lost on the way to the church and are late. Sometimes a groomsman forgets his tux. I had one wedding when the flower girl’s parents thought the grandparents were bringing her and vice versa, and she was left home alone. She was ok, but we had to hold up the wedding till someone could go back and get her. Jesus even went to a wedding where they ran out of wine!

Marriage is messy too. If a bride and groom were exactly alike, one of them would be redundant. Intimacy is hard. Sharing a bathroom and a kitchen, not to mention a bedroom with a new partner can be dicey. No matter how much we love someone else there are times when they will disappoint us and we them. So when the wedding starts a few minutes late or the best man can’t find the wedding rings, or the ring bearer picks his nose, that’s just practice for real life. Marriages work best when we can laugh at our mistakes and forgive our partner’s. So let’s relax and enjoy this celebration no matter what surprises may occur tomorrow or in the next 50 years!”