From the Rector

This prayer was read over Michigan Public Radio twice: on the day before, and immediately preceding their broadcast of the first game of the Wolverine’s 1998-99 season. They lost the game, and the next one too…

Most merciful God,
Forgive us for what we are about to do;

For our blood-curdling cries,
Lord, have mercy;
For our lust for violence,
Lord, have mercy;
For our emulation of military conquest,
Lord, have mercy;
For our favor to the strong,
Lord, have mercy;
For our scorn upon the weak,
Lord, have mercy;
For the vengeance which we seek
upon enemies whom we oppose for the most arbitrary of reasons,
Lord, have mercy.

We acknowledge and bewail our mortal sins and weaknesses;
We are troubled by these dark comparisons:
the football stadium and the coliseum;
the fans and the pagan mobs;
the star athletes and the demigods;
the linebackers and the gladiators;
the cheerleaders and the furies;
the commentators and the chorus;
the corporations and the slave owners.

We can only hope that you see, as we do,
that this is only a game;
and that you haven’t lost your sense of humor.
Despite appearances to the contrary, our heart remains faithful to you.
Even as we glory in the spectacle of our football enemies
being pounded into the dust, we will strive to remember you.

God, be with those who will taste dirt this day.
Heal those who will be injured;
Console the losers with gratitude for the privilege of having played;
Ennoble the victors with gentle reminders of their mortality;
And show your favor toward all contestants
Who this day will shed their blood and break their bones
for our trivial sakes,

AMEN.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

For WUOM – Commentary Submitted August 17, 1997

On the radio the other day, I heard this scientist say that a volcano she was studying had a “warped sense of humor.”

She was talking about the big one in Hawaii, which she had been working on for years and which had just recently swallowed a bunch of her scientific equipment.

So the volcano has a sense of humor! It was refreshing to hear a scientist express this most primitive and unscientific aspect of the human imagination, the anthropomorphic tendency.

An image flashed in my mind of the scientist holding hands with a Hawaiian priest from the ancient of days, both standing before the superheated, ravening crater. Deprived of her instruments of measurement, the scientist finds her voice in the metaphorical language of poets and priests.

As a priest myself, I suddenly felt hopeful that the false divisions between science and religion might yet be overcome.

We all do it, of course. We all talk about inanimate objects as if they had personalities: my computer is temperamental; my Honda Civic is loyal; my house has a soul.

But when religious people indulge the same impulse by talking about God, they’re often dismissed by folks who seem to think poetic speech should be limited to cars and household appliances. I speak of my God as a loving Mother, and the critic says, “Oh, you’re just anthropomorphizing,” as if that were an ultimate put-down.

But it’s really a kind of put-down of the ultimate, proving only that the critic has been to college. I mean, of course I was anthropomorphizing! What better way to describe a relationship as passionate and complex as my relationship to the highest power?

There’s nothing wrong with a little anthropomorphic speech — because it makes new ways of relating to our world possible. Whether it’s volcanoes or Vishnu, Jeeps or Jehovah, it allows us to love what we would otherwise merely observe.

But of course, it’s dangerous, too. After all, it’s one thing to speak of a volcano’s sense of humor; it’s another thing to believe that throwing a virgin into its crater will appease its wrath. Religious people are always confusing the metaphorical and the literal, and the heartbreak of that confusion, found wherever fundamentalists of any faith rise to power, is enough to turn a lot of us away from religion forever.

And so we cast off the childhood Bible stories as if they were fairy tales; and while we might, once in a while, imagine that our cars have personalities, we never allow ourselves the same luxury with respect to the ground and abyss of our being; until we become alienated from an entire universe of ultimate meanings and transcendent truths.

That’s too bad; because anthropomorphic language helps us enter into a relationship with the ultimate; a relationship that can transform our lives and lift our hearts and cure what ails us; a relationship that is only possible when we entertain the primitive hunch that the universe, even more than our car or our favorite armchair, has a soul.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Originally delivered as Radio Commentary: Michigan Radio Recording on February 10, 1998

I’m looking for a word.
It’s on the tip of my tongue; maybe if I talk out loud it will come to me.

What is the word for that peculiar kind of blindness that affects powerful people?

Like, for example, the ways in which powerful armies march out to meet what they think is a weaker adversary, only to learn through catastrophe that their arrogance blinded them to the enemy’s superior resources.

I know there must be a good word for this condition; a word with the nuance of power and arrogance and shortsightedness.

That good old Greek word, hubris, fits pretty well; but not quite. My dictionary defines the word with nice irony by quoting McGeorge Bundy: “There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.” Hubris is defined as “excessive pride, wanton violence.”

I always associate “hubris” with the Greek tragic heroes who met their dooms by thinking they could determine their fates. It surprises me that neither of my two really good dictionaries mentions tragedy in their definitions.

But the word I’m looking for not only communicates the tragic consequences for the person who is blinded by power, but also and maybe even more for the people who bear the consequences of their blindness. For example, let’s look at ourselves for a minute — what do we call it when we ignore the well-documented studies that found that over a million people in Iraq died as a direct result of the economic sanctions imposed since the end of the Gulf War. Over a million people — more than 600,000 of whom were children — dead through starvation and disease that could have been prevented.

What word describes our blindness to this tragedy?

Or another example: in the final days of the Persian Gulf war, US warplanes bombed and strafed a 60-mile convoy of civilians and Iraqi soldiers who were in full retreat, killing tens of thousands in a clear violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. Isn’t there a word for the way in which we notice Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses, but are blind to our own?

The Pentagon has a nice term for what happens when mothers and babies are blown to bits by our bombs — they call it “collateral damage.” But what is the word for the way we prefer euphemisms over truth?

What is the word for our failure to take seriously the fact that the people of Iraq have over a million good reasons to hate us? What is the word for our inability to understand that the more we punish them, the more they will hate us, and someday they will find a way to get revenge?

What is the word for our failure to see that maybe if we treated the people of Iraq like human beings; maybe if we applied our unequalled power to the task of feeding their children, then maybe they might not hate us so much, and we could stop killing them.

What is the word? It’s a word that says guilt, and shame, and blood in the dirt. It’s a word full of weeping and hunger and sleepless nights.

It still isn’t coming to me; I guess for lack of a better word, I’ll just call it “sin.”

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Originally delivered as Radio Commentary: Michigan Radio Recording on November 18, 1998

It’s 4:30 in the morning in November and I am listening to a wind storm blowing through my neighborhood.

It’s 4:30 in the morning in November and the wind is rattling my windows like a spirit of death rattling keys.

It’s 4:30 in the morning in November and I am feeling the draftiness of this old house and I’m thinking maybe I need to weatherproof these windows.

I am thinking that I need to keep the world from getting inside my house.

I’m thinking about global warming and the hurricane they had in Nicaragua and I’m thinking the hurricane has come to Ann Arbor.

I’m thinking about the children in a tiny village in Nicaragua that I played with last Spring and about how a lot of them are dead now.

I’m thinking about the all the money and relief supplies we’re sending to Latin America to save lives and I’m thinking about the Contras we paid to kill the same people we are now trying to save.

I’m thinking about the weather getting worse every year and meanwhile we keep driving our SUV’s and pretending we aren’t responsible.

I’m thinking about the article in Harper’s magazine I read three years ago, which said that the ten hottest years in recorded human history have all occured since 1980, and I’m thinking about how hurricanes are only going to get worse and I’m glad I’m living in the Midwest but what about tornadoes?

I’m thinking about my basement and whether it’s dry this morning and I’m thinking about the closet in the basement where maybe I should start storing up some canned goods because the wind is blowing away the farmland.

I’m thinking about Al Gore and how they called him Ozone Al and I’m wondering if the Senate will ever ratify the international agreement on global warming.

I’m thinking maybe I should do less thinking and more praying. So now I’m praying…

and I’m thinking I should write my senator.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Radio Commentary for Michigan Public Radio

Lately, my wife has been insisting, in her sweet but unrelenting way, that I accept the fact that I am going to die.

I don’t appreciate this.

Of course I know and accept the inevitability of my physical death — I can almost handle that — but she thinks it is time, now that I have turned 40, to take a step further: to accept the probability that mine will be a complete and total oblivion; annihilation; the disappearance of every trace; a cosmic and eternal anonymity. This is what I am being asked to accept.

Now my wife will gamely smile and say that all she wants me to do is go through my old boxes in the basement and throw out the stuff I don’t need anymore. You see, she’s cleaning out the place and says it’s time to say goodbye to the term papers from college; the files from projects I worked on fifteen years ago; the old journals that once influenced my thinking.

But what she is really asking me to do is admit that we will never find any of my future biographers at our door, asking to mine the riches of these boxes for the sake of posterity.

“You want to throw away my corpus?!” I shriek, clutching the cardboard box containing every note, doodle and dream I had between the ages of 18 and 22. “Do you have any idea what you’re asking? Someday this will be valuable! Look,” I beg, pulling out a file marked “Psychology and Religion, 1977.” “Look at this term paper — my critique of Freud’s theory of religion! Someday someone will recognize its brilliance!”

My wife takes the five-page paper and flips to the last page. “B+,” she says. “What’s it say here: `Some good insights, but on the whole unconvincing and only marginally relevant.’”

“That professor never liked me!” I stammer.

“Yeah right,” she says, and hands back the paper while she does this thing with her eyebrows that always makes me feel small. “Honey,” she says, “you’re a priest. I should think you’d be more worried about getting into heaven than getting into print!”

“This is no time to talk theology!” I cry. She returns to the kitchen and starts pounding boneless chicken breasts into flat, defeated patties.

So now my sad, undervalued boxes have found sanctuary in my office. They are huddled in the corner like frightened sheep. They are my most loyal friends. They have followed me through the best and the worst years of my vanishing youth; they have been moved so many times their corners are slumped and droopy; they have been stacked and dropped so many times they look like paper sacks. But they are safe now; my destiny for the moment preserved.

Some rainy day, I might open them and marvel again at the dizzy heights my mind has attained, tragically unbeknownst to the rest of humankind.

Meanwhile, I will simply write about them, adding these words to the pile of words that is my legacy; scrawling yet another message and casting it, in its bottle, upon the seas of oblivion.

But first I must put out of my mind my wife’s taunting words as she watched me carry my boxes away: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Commentary for Michigan Radio November, 1997

I read somewhere that 70% of Generation X’ers believe there is no such thing as absolute truth.

So the other day I was speaking to a group of students and I said, “So is it true — that you don’t believe in truth?”

I don’t know; I thought it was kind of funny — but all I got was blank stares.

Considering what absolute truths give rise to these days — fanaticism, terrorism, suicide cults — truth is handled like a hazardous material — and maybe that’s a good thing. But for those of us who still dare to pray or worship, it’s also a little troubling. Do we say our creeds with our fingers crossed? Do we end our prayers with a “Whatever” instead of an “Amen?”

Most definitions of the term “absolute truth” include ideas like “beyond doubt,” “not relative.” But I think absolute truth has less to do with its degree of certainty than with our degree of commitment to it. I mean, I am certain that if I get hit in the head with a brick, it’s gonna hurt; but it hardly deserves the term “absolute truth”. On the other hand, I might say that the presence of God is an absolute truth for me, even if I’m not 100% certain of it — because I’m willing to devote my life to its possibility.

An absolute truth is something worthy of devotion; something with the power to overthrow the tyranny of our own self hood.

It is our deification of the self that leads us to treat the idea of absolute truth as a kind of heresy; our worship is in the temple of the self; our culture is a cult of consumption, feeding our hungry gods with the stuff of shopping malls and mail order catalogues. Starved for meaning, we gorge on the empty calories of self-fulfillment.

And now the holidays approach; the annual orgy of consumption begins; and our souls again go hungry.

30 years ago, the percentage of college students who thought it was important to find a meaningful philosophy of life was 83% — that number now is 43%; meanwhile the desire to make a lot of money has risen from 43% to 78%. Making money is the single highest goal of today’s college students. And the suicide rate among teenagers and young adults has tripled during the same period. Any coincidence?

To use Victor Frankl’s terms, our will to meaning has given way to a will to power and a will to pleasure. We are suspicious of truths that threaten our pleasure or power; and when we do search for meaning we turn inward, feeding on our own yearnings, free from the constraints that our wisdom traditions might impose.

This is why universities are in a way like houses of worship — places of spiritual nurture; because despite our post modern objections, universities continue to promote dialogue and debate — impossible without a belief in something which, for lack of a better word, we might call truth.

Universities, when true to their mission, dare to challenge the supremacy of the self, offering in its place the sobering but liberating possibility that our selves are but specks of dust; our cravings and desires only cogs in a cultural selling machine that offers us everything we need… except the elements of a life worth living: love, meaning, and truth.

Cardinal Newman once said that “A University is… an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry or a mint, or a treadmill.”

The University fulfills its mission when it embraces its spiritual calling; whether we be seeking the truth; or simply collecting the facts, the truth will out; saving us, in the end, from our selves.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Radio commentary for the Great Lakes Radio Consortium June 16, 1999

Host intro: Surveys show that Sport Utility Vehicles remain a popular choice among car buyers. But if you drive a small car, or if you are worried about air pollution, you may not be happy with the increasing numbers of SUVs on the road. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Matthew Lawrence agrees, but he thinks SUVs are, on a deeper level, a spiritual problem:

I have a friend who is an animist — he believes that the world is filled with spirits that inhabit stones, trees and flowers.

My friend also drives one of those enormous 4-wheel drive SUVs.

It’s not unusual for my friend to be hurtling down the freeway at 90 miles an hour while musing upon the beauty of creation.

I was thinking this was kind of strange so I did a little research on SUVs. Did you know that because of two loopholes in the federal regulations, SUVs pollute as much as three times the average car, and burn 33% more gas per mile? I also found out that the EPA is right now thinking about closing those loopholes.

So I went to my friend; I said, “Isn’t there some kind of contradiction between your automobile of choice and your piety of choice? I mean, here you are spewing hydrocarbons by the pound — don’t your tree spirits have a problem with that?”

Well, he didn’t like this. He said, “Hey listen, the tree spirits don’t need protection — I do. I’m not dying on a highway in Michigan. The way people drive these days — it’s crazy.”

Well, if it’s protection he needs, he’s got it. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, if my friend were to get so caught up in his revery with the tree spirits that he missed a red light and hit my Honda Civic, I would be 47 times more likely to die than he. In collisions of any kind between an SUV and a passenger car, 81% of the people who are killed are in cars.

The fact that my friend is more likely to kill than be killed doesn’t seem to cloud his sunny spiritual disposition. I only pray that, if there are spirits that animate the stones, there are also spirits inside our concrete highways, speaking words of peace to my friend’s restless soul.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology

Commentary: WUOM Radio The Rev. Matthew Lawrence May 19, 1998 Canterbury House, Ann Arbor

When my wife and I told our friends in Boston that we were moving to Ann Arbor, a lot of them said, “Oh, you’ll like it there. It’s a really liberal town.”

The idea of moving to a “liberal town” made us inwardly cringe. Not because we’re not liberals; it was just that we didn’t want to be thought of as liberals.

But actually, the word “liberal” is a perfectly good word. It comes from the Latin, “liber,” meaning free. For 500 years, liberalism has been about freedom: freedom from ignorance, from prejudice; from government repression. Liberals are committed to free speech and open minds; they favor nonviolent methods of social change — dialogue and education — because in an open society, the best ideas win.

Liberals also protect minorities against the tyranny of the majority, because sometimes majority rule can become mob rule.

So why do liberals hate being called liberals? Well, speaking as one, I think I can say this: it’s because the radicals are always making us feel guilty. You see, deep down, we know that the radicals are ideologically more pure than the rest of us. We liberals live in a guilty world of compromise: we drive our internal combustion engines to the postoffice to drop-off a check to the Sierra Club. Radicals ride bicycles to the food coop to buy Nicaraguan coffee.

Radicals have always made us feel guilty.

But all that changed for me on May 9 of this year, when I personally witnessed a whole bunch of good Ann Arbor liberals get violently assaulted by radicals bent on mob rule.

Now in case you haven’t heard about this, let me briefly summarize. 38 Ku Klux Klan members came to Ann Arbor on May 9 for what they called a recruiting rally; a violent gang of over 200 so-called radicals marched out to meet them, ready to rumble; and between them stood over a hundred regular citizens of Ann Arbor wearing yellow T-shirts that said Peace Team.

They were young and old, Christian and Jewish and Bahai and pagan, black and white and brown and yellow and gay and straight. They represented a variety of political persuasions as well — a lot of them hate being called liberals — but on that day they were liberals in the noblest tradition of the word: committed to freedom; protective of the rights of the minority ; standing for peace against mob rule.

And this time it was the so-called radicals who were the mob. I call them radicals because their ideology is classic communism. But their tactics give radicals a bad name; a better name would be “thugs.”

Fearlessly modelling nonviolent resistance to mob rule, the Peace Team members placed themselves between the Klan and the militants. They were beaten, they were kicked, they were cursed, they were spit on, they were sexually groped; and still they held their ground. It was only when the Peace Teams were about to be trampled that they asked for the police to intervene.

But it was in the next few moments, after the whole crowd fell back from the pepper spray, that the word “liberal” was redefined in my mind. Having already endured agonizing punishment, the Peace Teams chose to make their stand again. Again the mob attacked, and again, the liberals held their ground.

It was at that moment that I learned a new meaning for the term “liberal.” On May 9th, the liberals were heroic.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology