Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director today in advance of our session for December, archived here so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about when I posted it. Plus a bonus footnote in which I explain more about why I find SecDef nominee Pete Hegseth’s white Christian nationalist “crusader” cosplay (which includes a Jerusalem cross tattoo) so annoying. Picture above shows a real Jerusalem cross2— a Greek cross with a smaller cross in each quadrant around it — above the entrance to the Franciscan St. Saviour Church in Jerusalem. See below for explanatory footnote.
12:54 PM (1 hour ago)
Hi Sister —
Between the holiday rush and all the drama in my world, from the international arena and the ongoing genocide I’m helping to finance in Gaza; and President-elect Trump’s antics; to the furry little territorial dramatics at home that comes from fostering two rescue cats the week before Christmas, I’ve got to confess I haven’t been in a very spiritual frame of mind. But in spite of (or maybe *because* of) all the drama, I’ve managed to do a fair amount of journaling.
Quite a bit of it has been prompted by the steady drumbeat of Trump’s announcements and “mean tweets.” Mostly he isn’t as blasphemous as when he’s hawking $3 bibles for $59.99, but it blows me away that two-thirds of white self-identified Christians voted for the man. And some of his cabinet picks, like Pete Hegseth for SecDef, keep rubbing my nose in their white Christian nationalism. I know I should have a more charitable attitude, but like I wrote back in November, he’s appropriating symbols that mean something to me. Like a Jerusalem cross1 I’ve worn around my neck ever since I bought one at an NGO in Bethlehem that sells crafts made by local artisans. (I’m probably telling you what you already know, but it’s a symbol for the Latin Patriarchate and the Franciscan shrines in the Holy Land.) I wrote:
The Jerusalem cross isn’t on the ADL’s list of hate symbols per se, but Hegseth proudly bears (and occasionally bares) the tat along with several tattoos that clearly are. And he claims the cross is “too extreme” for the “woke” National Guard. You might say, if you’re in the mood for a pun, he wears his extremism on his sleeve.
If you want to see Hegseth’s tat, link HERE (at 3:14) or HERE (to my blog).
Well, I’m going to keep wearing my little Franciscan cross from Bethlehem, but I want everybody to know I’m not advocating some kind of theocratic crusade. Nor am I a fan of Hegseth’s.
(Link here: https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/11/15/tat/ Nov. 15, “Hegseth’s Crusader tattoos: White supremacist dog whistles or ‘spiritual kitsch?’ Or a bit of both?”)
Anyway, my spiritual journey has gone off in two directions since the Nov. 5 election:
- Reading about Einstein, Spinoza and a Russian Orthodox author in Alaska who had some good things to say about panentheism (the “-en-” in the middle of the word is important) and the nature of God; and
- Coming to terms with the ongoing debacle of national politics, and puzzling out what people of faith can do about it.
So I’ll give you three excerpts below; I’ll include links but the quotes are there (I’ll try to keep them relatively brief).
1. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/11/27/einstein/ Nov. 27, “‘Is the universe friendly?’Depends on who you ask, but not exactly: Einstein on his (and Spinoza’s) God, science and religion.”
A passage from Wikipedia that quotes Einstein on his concept of God, which isn’t far from what I’ve figured out for myself growing up in a scientific community the the fundamentalist South and noticing the apparent disconnect between science and religion:
[…] the God of my understanding, to slightly misquote the 3rd Step of AA, is probably closest to another famous Einstein quote:
“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist … I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings”
Full disclosure: I don’t pretend to be a deep thinker: I’m quoting here from Wikipedia, not some philosophical treatise. (Links and ellipsis are Wikipedia’s.) But how do I get from Einstein’s God to a friendly universe?
Well, I don’t want to go down a philosophical rabbit hole here, but I’ve come to believe God is present in all creation, a belief associated with something called panentheism — which is a combination of Greek word roots meaning all-in-God. (It’s not the same thing as pantheism, I need to add, which flat-out equates God with the universe. The distinction is important because panentheism is compatible with Christian theology, especially in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in ways that pantheism is not.) I first came across the idea in an [Russian] Orthodox space, as a matter of fact.
Anyway, here I am in my 80s, still trying to reconcile science and religion. And still reading Einstein, who attended Catholic schools as a youngster and grew up to have a complicated relationship with organized religion as an adult, but who I think remained a lot truer to his Jewish roots than some of his published remarks would suggest.
2. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/12/15/magnificat/ Dec. 15, “Is the world about to turn? Seeking a ‘sustainable approach to living ethically’ in a dark Advent season
One snippet. We have a small-group discussion — called “Dwelling in the Word” — at my parish church after Sunday services, looking ahead to the Gospel reading for the coming week in the Common Lectionary. Our discussion of the pericope for Advent IV included the Song of Mary. Here’s what I took away from it:
Reading [the Magnificat] in a small group discussion in the year of the Lord 2024, we were more than aware of its potential. We were also aware that the proud and the mighty have been exalted, at least in 21st-century America, and a government has been elected that looks like it’s hellbent to send the hungry — instead of the rich — empty away.
Someone mentioned an Advent hymn by Roman Catholic liturgist Rory Cooney of Chicago’s northwest suburbs. It’s in our hymnal, so we got it out. It’s titled the “Canticle of the Turning,” and it’s basically an updated version of the Magnificat. […] In the context of what looks like a time of coming penury and oppression, it spanned the 2,000-plus years between 1st-century occupied Palestine and the present day. And in Cooney’s paraphrase, I could put myself in Mary’s shoes in a way I never had before:
Though I am small, my God, my all, you
Work great things in me
And your mercy will last from the Depths
Of the past to the end of the age to be.Am I being called to work great things in this new age that’s about to be visited upon us? Will God’s mercy last? Well, maybe not great things, but am I called to do what I can in my small way? If not to scatter the proud and fill the hungry with good things, at least to support the parish micro-pantry and the food bank downtown? Something to think about. And isn’t that, of course, what Dwelling in the Word is for? To give us something to think about so the words don’t fly over our head [as they did when I sang the Magnificat when I was a kid] as we go through the liturgy week after week?
3. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/12/20/weve-been-here-before/ Dec. 20, “‘We’ve been here before’: A voice of Black lived experience as an openly racist administration prepares to take power”
This last blog post excerpt was prompted by the discussion at December’s Zoom meeting of the Associates’ Anti-Racism Committee, an offshoot of SDART. We were asked, “How are you feeling about the future of our country?” and I thought one answer was especially powerful. Here’s the quote in context:
Anyway, there was a lot of wisdom shared in AARC’s Zoom session. A lot of self-reflection, a lot of hope and waiting to see what happens — after all, Advent is a time of waiting, self-examination and, above all, hope. Quite a bit of hard-won experience, too. One member spoke of visiting a group of older Black women soon after the election, who told her (and all of us):
“We’ve been here before’.”
Indeed we have. I don’t pretend to be any kind of hero of the Civil Rights movement, although, as what used to be called a white “Southern moderate,” I was one of its beneficiaries. Mostly I watched it from a safe distance. But I remember in the early 1960s admiring the courage of the Black kids — about my age at the time — who sat in at Woolworth’s and picketed Rich’s department store in Knoxville.
That led me into another question: How can people of faith respond to an incoming Trump 2.0 administration that has overwhelming support from white Christian voters yet seems antithetical to many of our values? I quoted from several articles I found, including one in America magazine by a local newspaper columnist from California titled “Dear Catholic Boomers: Don’t get too comfortable during Trump’s next four years.” She wrote:
[…] I considered unsubscribing from all pertinent podcasts and social media. I considered staying in my lovely safe home in a small town and abandoning all concern for anyone else. Then I remembered that I do not have that luxury.
I am a Catholic.
I am called—commanded, really—to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the prisoner and welcome the stranger. This call comes directly from Jesus Christ. See Matthew 25. It is non-negotiable.
To this, I wrote:
[…] it’s kind of a fill-in-the-blanks thing. Instead of “Catholic,” I might fill in the blank with “spiritual mutt” or “ecumenically minded Lutheran who’s read a little too much Zen.” The editors of Sojourners and Christian Century would fill it in differently, as would Julian DeShazier, the hip hop artist who pastors a church that answers to two mainline Protestant denominations.
Most faith traditions I’m aware of, in fact, have commandments like those in Matthew 25, which is soundly grounded, after all, in the Jewish law and the prophets. So other filled-in blanks could just as well read “I am Jewish,” “I am Muslim,” “I am Buddhist,” or any other religion. (Or none at all.) The commandments are non-negotiable.
I guess one of those non-negotiable commandments is developing a less judgmental attitude toward Trump and the white Christian nationalists who elected him.
See ya (over Zoom) at 6 p.m. Monday.
— Pete
Notes
1 Photo on the JPIC – Custody of the Holy Land Facebook page shows a group of Muslim women on a tour of St. Saviour Church, the Custody’s headquarters in Jerusalem, June 22, 2023. Established by St. Francis in 1217, the Custody (Custodia Terræ Sanctæ in Latin), now an NGO, oversees many of the Christian shrines in Israel and the occupied territories. “JPIC” refers to its stated mission of promoting Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation in the Holy Land. The pictures seem especially ironic in light of the virulent Islamophobia in Hegseth’s “crusader” rhetoric.
2 The Jerusalem cross is also part of the insignia of the Latin (Catholic) Patriarchate of Jerusalem, equivalent to an archdiocese. The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem also holds the office of grand prior of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, a chivalric group predating the Crusades that was established to protect Christian pilgrims; the Order’s primary aim now has been described (in John Burger, “Catholic order clarifies meaning of Jerusalem Cross,” Aletia, Nov. 22, 2024 https://aleteia.org/2024/11/22/catholic-order-clarifies-meaning-of-jerusalem-cross) as “to strengthen among its members the practice of Christian life, and to sustain and aid the charitable, cultural, and social works and institutions of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land.” When news of Hegseth’s tattoos got out, the French website Aletia carried a clarifying press release:
“The Jerusalem Cross is visible wherever the order serves, particularly when its 30,000 members gather in voluntary and generous support of the Church’s hundreds of hospitals, clinics, schools and social service works across Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Cyprus, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria — all of which serve the vulnerable and marginalized of all faiths. In fulfilling our mission in obedience to the call of the cross, the order advocates justice for all, peace, dialogue and stability and promotes the Holy Land as a laboratory of peace and conviviality,” said Deacon John Heyer, executive director of the New York-based Eastern Lieutenancy of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
Heyer also said pilgrims to the Holy Land often get a Jerusalem cross Tattoo “as an indelible reminder of their pilgrimage to the Holy City and of their faith in Christ.” At least Hegseth got that part right. He says he got the tat during a visit to Bethlehem in the occupied territories.
[Uplinked Dec. 29, 2024]
Ordinary Time 