Revolution? What revolution?

It's now official. The current economic crisis has proved once and for all that the Woodstock Generation failed miserably. The Age of Aquarius has devolved into a barnyard cockfight. A generation that prided itself on creating an era of peace and enlightenment raised a generation of greedy kids that built an economy on shuck and jive.

Consider this written by my friend Jim McCann on Facebook (and used here totally without his permission):

The financial people are born of the "get mine" and "in your face" generation...The media, reality TV, sports. Decorum is frowned upon and even just winning is not good enough...It is considered not only ethical to win by any means necessary, it is celebrated. Those who are the most callous are the most admired...This has been magnified in a Wall St setting to the point that the system has followed its logical path and cannibalized itself.

It use to be that a child of a very wealthy family was encouraged to study, travel abroad, even to enter academia in order to give back...Now that "man of letters" is considered a slacker.
4 years ago it was the oil companies who "ran the government" now it is the "bankers" and neither is totally accurate...Many, many interests hold our system hostage.

Just look at how people have accepted torture as a "cost of doing business." We have no morals anymore. Aggression is king.

A sad commentary that is too true. Who is to blame for this? Well, we raised them. What were we teaching them? What lessons did they learn by watching us?

Of course, there were pockets of good parenting: My daughter, for instance. (Insert your own child here).

As one of the very few church-goers in my group of friends, I've got to say I think Jim hit the point when he wrote "We have no morals anymore." Maybe we Boomers were too quick to dismiss religion as hypocrisy and superstition. Maybe there was something valuable in those churches and synagogues after all.

God By The Book

I'm writing this post in a room of my church (Trinity Presbyterian in Santa Cruz, Ca) as I wait for the start of our monthly book club meeting. This month we read The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. This has been a hit of a book that has had a long run atop the best sellers list. This is remarkable for a listing from the religious lit genre.

I don't intend this post to be a book review so I won't go into much detail about the book. To oversimplify the plot, it's about a man who has a crisis of faith following the murder of his young daughter. His faith is restored after spending a weekend in a remote cabin with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit that took the forms of (in order) a black woman, a Jewish carpenter and an Asian woman. Read it yourself -- or one of the hundreds of reviews on the web -- if you want to know more. I didn't care much for the book itself. The writing is clumsy, the plot unbelievable and silly in places. Some of the long passages with no action and only dialog literally put me to sleep.

The theology, however, is complicated. There is an exploration of the triune God and the relationship between the Trinity and man that I found interesting.

And that theology has set off a battle between fundamentalists who say the author's views are not biblically sound and even "dangerous", and the "emergent" church movement on the other side who have a much less literal relationship with scripture.

I tend to side with the loose constructionists in this debate. I'm much more interested in finding meaning in the teachings that help me get through the various crises of daily life than I am getting a road map to salvation. As a young man, I was agnostic, just this side of atheist. I had a hard time rationalizing some of the events depicted in the Bible. The message I heard from organized religion was there was an approved set of beliefs. It was an "either/or" proposition. Take or leave, buddy.

I left it.

Through some personal circumstances I had religion put back before me a few years ago. This time I had better guides who told me thinking was allowed. Someone said, "God gave you a brain, he expects you to use it." As I opened my mind to new possibilities and allowed myself interpret the Bible in my own way, I was able to find myself in its pages.

If your inclined to read The Shack enjoy it for what is not what someone else wants it to be.