Unpacking Ideas

My simple conclusion as a Christian was this: The policies that our Church endorses publicly ought to look a bit like the Jesus we read about in the Gospel of Luke (or Matthew, or Mark, or John). The policies we endorse as people of faith ought to protect our widows, care for our orphans, and welcome strangers in our land.

I have hope. Sure, the log is huge, and I might be blind to the crud about me I have ignored for so long. But the dark shadow of Lent will receive the bright side of Easter. This is the power I mentioned earlier. Think about this. It’s hard to honestly examine myself, especially given all my flaws and limits. But the tough truth-telling of honest self-examination washes (think spiritual Windex!) the window, safely revealing more about myself, and safely revealing more about a loving who God already knows everything anyway!

For the children, let’s consider that our lingering resistance to comprehensive immigration reform might need to be questioned. Can we doubt our old ideas about immigrants and immigration reform long enough to have this better conversation and get a bit closer to a rational, more biblical policy that cares for all of our children?

I think effective immigration reform belongs in the middle. For me as a Christian, immigration reform makes perfect sense. And there’s good news. A middle-way approach to how we respond to our immigration crisis is being embraced by an ever-growing centrist group of religious leaders.

Of course, we can practice honest nostalgia at many levels. Personally, as a community, as a church, as a nation. The natural human tendency to filter out the bad and remember only the good is the same at any level. In short, I tend to prefer comfortable, though not always accurate, memories whether they are about me, my family, my community or congregation, or my country.

I like to remember rosy, but Janis Ian warned me. Be careful how you remember. Guard your nostalgia. Websters Dictionary defines nostalgia as a “wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to some past period or irrecoverable condition.” Irrecoverable or never there? Do we have a tendency to shine up (or modify) our memories to make them easier to carry around?

Nostalgia. Longing for an idealized past. Hmmm. It’s not that I want to be in the eleventh grade again. But I remember moments, comfortable moments. Jack Bogut in the morning while getting ready for school. Mom making oatmeal for Dad. Bogut and Farkleberry Tarts. Listening to Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hearing so many of those songs for the first time. Here’s one. Where were you when you first heard Dave Loggins’ Please Come to Boston? — the 1974 conversational ballad about a wandering singer. I was a junior in high school in 1974 and would not have admitted to listening to, much less enjoying, such a song.

On the Pine Ridge Reservation (and other Native American reservations) things are different. Let’s look at one example: Shannon County, SD, located entirely on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Over 85 percent of its residents are Native American (highest density in the U.S.). Based on per-capita income Shannon County is the second poorest count in the U.S. The child poverty rate in Shannon County is 52 percent. Over half of the families in this county are living below the federal poverty level with children in their home. So, tell me, how are their children?

A Nobel Laureate is a special person, selected from a short list of nominations in their category from all over the world. To be chosen as the recipient is amazing, making their mothers very proud I’m sure. To be chosen twice is extraordinary. Double winners are rare.

Who are these people? Beyond their technical prowess, I wonder about their everyday lives, their thoughts, their work ethic. I wonder about their opinions, especially about a topic outside their area of expertise. Like the chemist Paul Boyer and his opinions on children. Boyer won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I wonder about the circumstances that provoked him to say, “If we fail to teach our children the skills they need to think clearly, they will march behind whatever guru wears the shiniest cloak.”

In my world fundamentalism — religious and political — lurks all around me, so I readily grabbed at doubt as a convenient handle for my reaction against the extreme that I tend to notice daily. I read the entire book but came away with what I needed — a fresh approach to help me counter the purveyors of hollow certitude around me. Also, it seemed to me, regardless of which perpective we carry, when we enter the dance of a conversation in hopes of a healthy “turn about” of ideas, it is the overabundance of certitude that more often smothers the music for one or both dancers.

If my willingness to doubt permits me to welcome additional, even oppositional ideas, then at the very least my original idea has an opportunity to be compared, tested and perhaps strengthened. At the very most, my idea grows creatively into much more than I considered possible or available before.