The Alewife

Religion in life by Dave Schmelzer

Dennis & Callahan & the big questions

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 Rindge Ave.]

All-pro Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor died this morning—as I write this—after being shot during an apparent home invasion burglary yesterday. 

He was 24 and leaves behind an 18-month-old daughter.  And he had what some would regard as a rough past—probation for brandishing a gun, an arrest for drunken driving, a number of fines for on the field incidents, including spitting in the face of another player during a playoff game. 

This morning’s Dennis & Callahan show on WEEI—the top-rated sports station in the country, they tell us—majored on the story, as well they might. 

WEEI's Gerry Callahan and John Dennis

For what it’s worth, I’m part of WEEI’s huge ratings.  Sports talk seems sane and grounding to me.  So much of popular culture seems to be one long and fruitless argument over culture wars.  Sports talk, by contrast, seems pragmatic and largely ideology-free, as it talks at endless length about unresolvable sports controversies.  Should the Red Sox mortgage their future to trade for Johan Santana?  Well…there are pros and cons.  Are the Patriots running up the score this year and should we care?  Well…yes and no.  And there we have the comforting grist of sports talk—earthy guys loudly arguing about sports issues that have no answers and, at heart, no stakes.  It’s male comfort food and I’m all for more of that.

Dennis & Callahan, the morning drive-time hosts, are particularly good at arguing about controversial subjects with larger social ramifications.  They take even bolder, more-strongly-stated stands than all the other bold, overstating hosts out there.  So this morning’s topic was about how to regard the other issues at stake in Taylor’s murder: the folks he hung out with , the trouble he’d found over the years, and what that said about the NFL.  The NFL has had a rough year on those fronts, with Michael Vick’s dogfighting indictment and Pacman Jones’ legal troubles both getting them long (or indefinite) suspensions and, in Vick’s case, likely jail time.

But the conversation got derailed almost immediately as callers prefaced their comments by saying, “My thoughts and prayers go out to Taylor’s family.”  Suddenly the topic was whether this sentiment was hypocritical and pointless.  Did anyone really pray under such circumstances?  And who cared about one’s “thoughts going out” to people in tragedy? 

Dave Schmelzer

Their loud and unyielding condemnation of these sentimentalities brought in an ocean of disagreement but also some support—encapsulated for me by one caller who, as an atheist, thanked them for standing up for people like him, and by another who agreed with them by saying that he didn’t care at all about Sean Taylor either (since Taylor was a thug whose own behavior put his young daughter at risk) and it was about time someone stood up and said what was obvious but not politically correct.

How about you?  Are those sentiments meaningful or hypocritical?

Religion in Life by Dave Schmelzer

Want happiness? Try the second best thing

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 Rindge Ave.]

Here’s the second-most helpful thing I’ve ever learned about human happiness. The first-most helpful thing ties into our connection with God, but as a pastor you knew I’d say that, so we’ll skip to number two. The second-most helpful thing I’ve ever learned about human happiness is the one-to-ten scale. Here’s how it works.

Every day, we react to things, because things happen (or things that we wished would happen don’t happen). You could make the case that paying attention to our reactions is the road to a life that works. And that the one-to-ten scale is the key to how to do this.
Some years back I was asked to develop a new division in an organization, something the folks up top desperately wanted, but hadn’t been able to pull off. I did, and it boomed.

One of the team leaders I was supervising ran into trouble. I weighed in. He didn’t like my approach and went over my head to complain. My immediate superior, without speaking to me, rebuked me and told me to make things right with the man who’d complained about me. I went ballistic.

On a scale of one to 10, my reaction was, let’s just say, a 10. I planned out my exit strategy. Over lunch a few days later, I fulminated about this to a wise older friend in the organization. He listened thoughtfully and said, “It seems like this has really tapped into something for you.”

Dave Schmelzer

Now I erupted at him: “Tapped into something in me? Yes, it’s tapped into that part of me that hates to be betrayed by people I’ve done a favor for!”

But he kept going. “Look, you and I both know how the dynamics of this place work. Your boss freaked out that someone was mad and quickly tried to quiet things down.

“He does things like that, and, sure, it’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world.
“You’ll push back a bit, meet with him and his supervisor; he’ll back down, and then you all will figure out what to do next.”

I did just what he described and things went exactly as he said. Yet it had been decades since I’d been that mad. My friend’s point? I’d reacted at a level 10 to, say, a level three offense. Yes, it had been annoying and, yes, they’d wronged me. But it wasn’t an ultimate wrong and it was relatively easy to fix.

So what was interesting wasn’t what had been done to me, but the substantial gap a reasonable observer would suggest between the degree of the offense and the volume of my response. What had this tapped into in me?

Religion in life

Vote Conversationalist!

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 Rindge Ave.]

It’s hard to believe that the first presidential primary is only three and a half months away—feeling, as it does, that the election itself must have already happened, given its nonstop coverage.

Surely I know more about Barack Obama at this stage of the game than I ever did about Gerald Ford.

Dave Schmelzer

As a pastor, times like this remind me of my long-standing love of Billy Graham. You might not share that love. And I’m not sure my love comes uniquely from what he did for a living.

Rather, I love him for quotes like this one, from the recent book on him called The Preacher and the Presidents.
(Graham) carried the (presidential) families through times of loss—literal and political; several wanted him to be with them during their last nights in the White House. Richard

Nixon collapsed in Graham’s arms at his mother’s funeral in 1967. Bill Clinton took him to sit at the bedside of a dying friend in 1989. Graham was the first person outside the family whom Nancy Reagan called when her husband died in 2004. Last month, (Lyndon) Johnson’s daughters Lynda and Luci reached out to him as their mother was dying.

How many other people do you know who’ve been good friends both with Richard Nixon and Hilary Clinton? Graham explains that surprising open-heartedness by saying:

“Politics has always been ugly to me, and yet I accept that as a fact of life. The emphasis I tried to leave was love, not…my own love for them, but that they needed to have love for the people who were opposed to them.”

It seems surprising that the message of love of their political enemies is what would endear him to eleven different presidents. But it hits home with me.

I’m often asked about the political stance of our church, which seems understandable—and, perhaps for that reason, doubly frustrating when I won’t answer it.

Everything might seem attractive enough up front to me, the visitor, but if I stick with this thing, will I find myself picketing the homes of abortionists—or sweatshop CEOs? What’s your political stance?

I wonder if the best way to describe our political orientation is to say that we seem to be conversationalists. We evidently love to chat. A frequent question we’re asked by people checking us out from both sides of the ideological spectrum, for instance, is about our position on gay marriage.

Our answer is that we don’t seem to be a position-paper bunch. But we do have thoughtful people who love to talk about questions like that and we’d love to hear what’s on the heart of the person asking and would be happy to share anything and everything over a cup of coffee. Got any time this week?

Now, clearly, some folks really did just want a position paper, and our conversationalist answer has given them all the information they need.

But you’d be surprised how many people take us up on our offer and get, in the best sense, more than they bargained for. I meet a sizable handful of people who tell me about the gifts those conversations turned out to be—when they thought that all they wanted was to know if we met their litmus test.

William Wilberforce—who famously led the anti-slavery fight in the English Parliament—was known for loving his political enemies, for talking with them, for caring about them even as he fought the fight he felt he had to.

He’s one of the few politicians I’m aware of who, while right at the center of a lightning-rod issue, was beloved enough by his political enemies that they lined up to eulogize him.

My dream is to have friends who campaign for the Green Party and others who campaign for Mitt Romney. (And, hang on, I’ve attained my dream!) It seems to me that this dream serves three purposes: one personal, one civic, and one spiritual.

On the personal front: this is just flat fun. Banding together around a common hatred of the idiots on the other side gets thin, to me at least.

On the civic side: well, where else does this happen? Where else can thoughtful dialogue happen unless it starts with you and me?

Don’t we, in fact, have common problems that might best be solved by an approach other than waiting for the next election and hoping the bad guys lose?

And on the spiritual side, I’d love to leave you with another thought from the redoubtable Reverend Graham as he speaks to his own theological camp, the evangelicals.

As other evangelical leaders emerged to play more muscular roles in politics in the late 1970s, Graham tried to warn them about the dangers they faced. In 1981 he declared that “Evangelicals can’t be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to stand in the middle, to preach to all the people, right and left. I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.”

By all means, form and hold strong political opinions (as we all seem to do whether directed to or not). But can I urge you as this next election draws (glacially) near: Vote Conversationalist!

Religion in Life

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 Rindge Ave.]

Summer movies & ultimate reality

I’ve had a series of existential moments at the movies this summer.

So many movies have given me a rush that I’ve started kicking around if that rush actually tells me something about how we’re wired. But, of course, maybe it’s just me.

When you saw Ratatouille, were you like me? Were you swept up from the first moment of the short animated feature they started with, kept at least interested by the engaging and quirky story that unfolded (a rat who’s a master chef—who on earth came up with that idea?), and then blown away by where they took it?
Suddenly we’re watching a parable about the filmmakers themselves, about the creation of an artist. Why was this such a rush?

This summer that rush has come from an eclectic brew. Irish street musicians in Once. Cross-dressing singing and dancing obese people (among others) in Hairspray. Our favorite tormented assassin in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Your tastes, of course, might be a long way from mine. But I wonder if we share a few things in common whenever we feel that rush of a good movie.

I wonder if that rush most commonly comes from seeing a movie made with passion and artistry about a central character that suddenly finds out who they are in the big scheme of things. The rat’s a master chef! The pudgy girl is a singing and dancing superstar! The assassin will bring down the evil government agency!
Some folks have a theory about this. They argue that there’s been a central myth that we can find in all cultures throughout history, so central that they contend it speaks to your deepest desires for where your life might head.

They call it “the hero’s journey.” It’s a little quirkier than you might think. Here’s one take at what it might look like in, say, The Lord of the Rings.

The classic hero myth involves a “reluctant hero” who lives in what, to him or her, is the ordinary world, the world that’s everything he or she knows. Little does he (I’ll go with “he” because the character we’ll track with is male) know that that world is actually in dire jeopardy, and that he’ll be called upon to take tremendous risks to battle that threat and return with the special gift that will heal this ordinary world of his.

Religion in Life by Dave Schmelzer

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 Rindge Ave.]

Does God actually do anything?

There’s the man who had a faith in God for decades, but who only recently began to wonder if that God actually did things.

He’s newly in a church that talks about answered prayers and even some not-infrequent noteworthy physical healings. He’s skeptical.

Then—inevitably?—it becomes relevant to him. He badly injures his left arm and elbow on a Saturday. Beyond being painful, he can’t use the arm.

That Sunday, he hears a sermon about faith, which succeeds in stirring some fresh faith in him. Then a stranger says it’s his impression that God would especially like to heal someone’s injured arm.

Specifically his left arm. The man’s wife jabs him in that same painful left arm, and he asks the stranger to pray for him.

Dave Schmelzer

Next, he’s exclaiming “Look at this! Look at this!” to anyone who will listen, raising and lowering his left arm, flapping his elbow.

In the West, we have two fundamental divides about faith. There’s the one between faith and atheism—still heavily one-sided (ninety percent or more, in all surveys, choose faith) but with atheism gaining fast, at the very least on the New York Times bestseller list.

Within the pro-faith camp, there’s the divide between a God who does stuff and a God who, by and large, doesn’t.

Life and Religion by Dave Schmelzer

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of North Cambridge's Vineyard Church located at 170 RindgeAve.]

Or maybe you're just 'Stage 3'

Here’s something from my world that will seem like less than a news flash to many of you. Churches aren’t doing well in what some sociologists call “center cities.” Center cities are not necessarily urban centers, but are places where secular, university culture holds sway—Cambridge, yes, but also lower Manhattan or
Northampton, both places where friends of mine are starting new churches.

It’s not just that churches are doing poorly in such places; they’re doing hideously poorly. A 1995 survey claimed that a whopping two percent of Cantabridgians were in a church on the average weekend, as compared to 35 percent to 40 percent nationwide.

My friends in Manhattan say the number in their neighborhood is closer to 0.5 percent--dramatically less that what we can prove at the moment in, say, China.

Dave Schmelzer

Now you may have a persuasive interpretation for this: to wit, what do you expect in areas where most people have this thing called an education? Religion, you point out, is from an era of superstition (namely any era in human history except the last four hundred years in the West). People with even a hint of a scientific worldview have moved on!

Sure. On the other hand, maybe it’s something else. You might remember the late, great psychologist M. Scott Peck, who wrote the biggest-selling book of the 1980s, “The Road Less Traveled.” In a later book, he proposed a four-stage theory of human spiritual and emotional development.

If we were perfectly emotionally healthy, all of us would progress to his final stage by our early twenties. But trauma tends to stall all of us out. His theory, he hopes, might give some perspective on why we all distrust whole swaths of the rest of the world.

His Stage 1 you might call criminal. This corresponds to the toddler years. The average toddler doesn’t do so well in caring for you. As they tantrum over a toy denied, not many will stop and say, “But this isn’t the most important thing on earth. And I haven’t asked once how you’re doing, Daddy? Has it been a good day?”
Peck says there are two primary settings for people stuck in Stage 1: jail (for obvious reasons) and the boardroom, where high-functioning Stage 1 folks can often be quite ruthless and successful.

His Stage 2 you might call rules-based. This shows up at about age six or seven. Now the child comes to care what Mommy and Daddy want them to do and they start to judge their criminal younger siblings. The best settings, said Peck, for those of us stuck in Stage 2 are the military (often a key transitional institution for those moving out of Stage 1) and, gulp, churches.

Peck argues that perhaps 90 percent or more of churches function this way. They help people sort out the rules of life. He’s at pains not to judge this, saying that this is the very heart of our country, that Stage 2 churches customarily develop good citizens and good parents, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But there’s a Stage 3, which you might call rebellious and which, as you’d imagine, corresponds to the teenage years. The healthy teen will invariably begin to ask what’s behind all these rules they’re being fed.

Often the best answer they get will be quit being such a smart aleck, and thus begins their war with all things Stage 2.
Universities are the best settings for Stage 3, filled, as they are, with 18 to 21-year-olds. Complaints from conservative quarters that universities are monolithically liberal, on this theory, just recognize what will always be true. They’re Stage 3.

You might guess that, along these lines, the Republican Party would fall pretty neatly into Stage 2. The Democratic Party, perhaps not as obviously, would be a hybrid of Stage 3 and Stage 1, which might also address the differing, but equally violent, forms of contempt each party feels for the other. Stage 2 sees Stage 3 as lawbreakers, as libertines!

Note how, in some circles, the word “liberal” is something so obviously bad that you don’t even have to say why it’s bad.

The reverse contempt Stage 3 feels for Stage 2 might be summarized in the thousands of anti-Bush bumper stickers you’ll see in Cambridge, which dismiss him as beneath their criticism—much like their own parents, perhaps?

Religion in life by Dave Schmelzer

The most intimidating word - starts with a 'J'

[Dave is the senior pastor of the Vineyard Church at 171 Rindge Ave.]

I recently participated in a panel discussion on social justice at a conference of about 1,400 people. My presence, on the one hand, seemed to make a statement about how pathetically we all were doing with social justice, because our church—while making ever-more efforts in this area—still strikes me as on the front end of this conversation.

Dave Schmelzer

As—if I may say—are we all. Three things seem true about most of our responses to justice issues.

(1) We’re all for it! Very few of us are openly rooting for injustice, and we all recognize that the world needs plenty of help, so the more justice the better.

(2) We’re eager for someone else to do it! We do, after all, have jobs (or studies or whatever). We may have families. We have other interests. So, unless we personally are right in the thick of the injustice in question (I just spent a couple weeks in the West Bank and in Palestinian camps—people I met there don’t feel so removed from the world of injustice as many an American does), it’s hard to picture what we could do.

(3) We will promise one key form of support—we’ll heartily judge folks we think perpetrate injustice or the lazy slobs who don’t help out when they clearly could!

Friends of mine are about to return to their home country of Liberia. Liberia, like so many post-conflict African countries, is a mess. Here are a few recent comments from the BBC about Liberia:

“Around 250,000 people were killed in Liberia’s civil war (about 8% of the population, equivalent to 50,000 or so people killed in just the city of Boston) and many thousands more fled the fighting.

The conflict left the country in economic ruin and overrun with weapons. The capital remains without main electricity and running water. Corruption is rife and unemployment and illiteracy are endemic. The UN maintains some 15,000 soldiers in Liberia. It is one of the organization’s most expensive peacekeeping operations.”

Warlords and boy soldiers are everywhere. My friends are taking their family there to continue work in microfinance (the dad has just finished his studies at MIT on the subject) to offer some economic hope, start a bank and a university and, we hope, a church.

Another friend of mine has just raised two million dollars in seed money to empower local African entrepreneurs to kickstart the economies of the poorest African countries. (He’ll start in Mozambique and work his way north, if all goes well.) His stated goal: to revitalize the economies of each country in question.

Here at home, more and more folks I know are finding their way into making friends in nearby housing projects. Initially, this raised suspicion from some local officials, as many of these visiting folks are in churches.

Was their goal some kind of craven proselytizing of people when they’re in need? Best as I can tell, this concern has vanished in the face of actual friendship being offered.

We recently heard from an official at another nearby project to the effect of, “Hey, why do they get all your attention? Can you throw a little love our way?”

How do you respond to the kind of craziness (or “ambition”—I guess it depends on your perspective) of my friends?

I’ll tell you how I respond: it intimidates the heck out of me!

I’ve got a job that takes its share of hours! I’ve got five kids!

I’ve got a few outside projects! My job already involves taking notice of and caring about a fair amount of people, many of them strangers! I’ve—

Then, in the midst of full bellyaching about this, I have to step out of the way of my wife as she heads off to one of these projects to make some friends there as she teaches English as a second language.

Evidently there’s something in us that hankers not just for justice to exist, but for us to participate to some degree in bringing it about.

For some of us, the initial way in is by way of our money (hello, of all people, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett). For others like my friends moving to Liberia, it envelops our whole lives.

But, whatever form it takes, I’m believing for a first step for you and for me.

Religion in Life by Dave Schmelzer

Three cheers for itty-bitty peacemaking

[AMMAN, JORDAN] I've prayed with lots of unexpected people over the last few days. The staff of an Al Jazeera bureau, for instance. Three different Shiite leaders, one protected by lots of men with machine guns.

An ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem rabbi. A Palestinian cabinet minister and his family. A Jerusalem businessman fresh off a meeting with Nancy Pelosi and her entourage.

I've prayed with the imam of a Palestinian refugee camp, with an apocalyptic Jewish leader, with a man who'd lost his entire family to one bomb in last July's war in Lebanon, and with an Arab Christian who struck me as a modern-day Gandhi or Martin Luther King (he'd been beaten by soldiers just that previous Friday).

While everyone we met was eager to expound upon his or her political grievance (and the suffering here is often - to a Westerner- unimaginable), prayer was a surprising common ground.

Religion in life by Dave Schmeltzer

Does anybody remember Jesus' Tomb? Anybody?

This morning, the Discovery Channel announced two things: (1) that The Lost Tomb of Jesus—the shocking expose they aired in which Titanic director James Cameron breathlessly announced that almost certainly he and his friends had found the tomb for Jesus, his son and his wife (Mary Magdalene) and, therefore, that Christianity and the New Testament were now firmly refuted—was their best-rated show of the past year, and (2) that they wouldn’t re-air it and had no further comments about it.

This seemed like a new record for how fast one could both heavily promote the latest shocking finding about Jesus and then cut it loose.

Dave Schmelzer

Have you noticed how fast and furious these exposes are loudly arriving and quietly departing?

We had, of course, the granddaddy of them all with "The Da Vinci Code," which—in book form—began by saying that every scandalous theological claim it would make was FACT, only to be cut loose by the loudest secular voices in the country including Harpers, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Then its author, Dan Brown, was sued by the authors of the quarter-century old book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” who claimed he stole his shocking allegations from them, so perhaps the material wasn’t as fresh as had been claimed.

Then this last year we had the astounding and scandalous arrival of The Gospel of Judas, this freshly unearthed “new gospel” that would challenge all of our understandings of who Jesus was and what he came to do.

I got a call from our local NPR affiliate that week asking if they could record our Sunday service as, surely, I’d be using the time to help our people cope with this devastating refutation of their beliefs.

When I said I didn’t have any plans to bring it up, the reporter was surprised.
How could this be avoided?

I asked the reporter if she’d noticed how—usually right around Easter—every single year the major newsmagazines had new features announcing “astounding new information” about who Jesus really was.

Did that make her suspicious?

Was this information truly only discovered at Eastertime each year?

Or perhaps was there continuing interest in Jesus and therefore continuing economic incentive to create conflict around him.

A column by Dave Schmelzer

Maybe Jesus Lives Next Door

When my wife and I lived in San Francisco, we had a shy and alarming neighbor.  He was a young, slight, Chinese-American man named Marty. 

I think I intimidated Marty.  I’m big and loud—my guess is that that package was just too much for him, so when I’d greet him, he’d usually avert his eyes as he mumbled hi and made his way into his apartment. 

But Grace would have better luck with him, so she was the one who decided to do something when, night after night, we heard his racking coughs.  And when we noticed the Meals on Wheels service that would leave a dinner on his doorstep each night.  And when we noticed the sores that seemed to be multiplying on his face and arms.

Dave Schmelzer

Correctly reading that Marty would not respond well to a direct question, even from her, Grace slipped a note under his door that said, in effect, “Given the thin walls of our apartment building, we’ve noticed that it seems like you haven’t been feeling well and we just wanted to say that we care.”  She baked him banana bread.

The next time he saw her, he thanked her for the note and the bread, and he soon invited her in to talk. 

Yes, he had AIDS. 

Yes, it was late-stage. 

No, his parents wouldn’t visit him. 

Over the next few months, Marty and Grace had many long talks.  He let her pray with him, a first in his experience.  He asked her advice.  He took her to his favorite Chinese restaurant.  He told her a fair number of chilling, personal stories.  He wrote her appreciative notes.  And then he died.

Many of my friends and I have been thinking more about our neighbors these days.  It’s struck us that we and most everyone we know tends to fill up our lives with whomever we can—friends and family, maybe one or two close workmates.  We’re grateful for all of those people!

But we’ve also found ourselves haunted by an extended metaphor Jesus, in so many words, seemed to draw.  Picture an island.  It’s your island and the people who live there are all those folks we just mentioned—friends and family.  Picture, then, a moat around the island.  Over the moat is everyone else on earth. 

Call these “optional people.”  You don’t have to relate in any depth to any of them if you’d rather not.  No one’s making you meet that person two doors down, and it’s not as if you’re not already plenty busy, thank you very much.  In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to suggest that—while of course we love everyone on our island, much of the real grist of life comes as we cross the moat.  But almost no one does that.

This has so gripped some of my friends that they’re doing strange things.  One decided to invite a hundred neighbors over for breakfast.  By the end of the morning, there were endless stories of people being shocked at who was living right next to them—fascinating, accomplished people.  And also people who could use some help—say, women who didn’t feel all that safe walking home from the T at night.  Before the breakfast was over, plans had been made to address that, and there was clamor for more of these gatherings.

I know probably a dozen stories from the last month of friends who discovered and decided to address some need that someone “over their moat” had.  Like the couple whose neighbors were raising disabled kids and who hadn’t had a date together in years—my friends gave them a gift certificate to a pricey restaurant and free babysitting for the evening. 

Or the man who discovered that the friendly guy down the street actually desperately wanted to find one American who would sponsor him as he tried to get citizenship. 
 

A column by Dave Schmelzer

The problem with pleasure

Why is sex fun?  Why does food taste good?  Why do we see colors or smell fresh-brewed coffee? 

None of these things have to bring pleasure.  Some lower animals and cells manage to reproduce with no fun involved.  Nutrition doesn’t require taste, much less tastiness.  Color-blind people can still make their way in the world.

Pleasure is actually a bigger (and more pleasurable) problem than we give it credit for.  We tend to look at why bad things happen to good people, of why our lives so often feel hard, and fair enough.

Dave Schmelzer

But I wonder if we’d be served by flipping the question around for a moment and feeling the wonder of why we exist at all, and why each day brings such a stream of astounding and fun things—if we have the ability to notice them. 

Religion in life by Dave Schmeltzer

Let’s Talk About Race

Are you in as many conversations about race as I am?  If you’re white, most likely not, both because I’m a pastor of a multi-racial church and I’m actually heading up a national taskforce on ethnic diversity for the 630 churches in my little denomination.  And also because most white people never talk about race.  On the other hand, if you’re anything like my minority-culture friends, you likely talk about this way more than I do.

Dave Schmeltzer

I hear the most amazing stories.  For instance, here’s one that’s about both race and gender.  I’m lucky enough to have administrative help both for my work and even for some personal things (all the better for my organization to get more hours out of me, I presume).  One of my recent administrators was a dynamic young woman from an immigrant family. 

As I walked into our administrative offices awhile back, everyone burst out laughing.  I discovered this was because I’d walked in just as my wonderful assistant had gotten off the phone having—you heard this right—pretended to be me. 

Now this is a young Asian woman and I’m a middle-aged white man (let me clarify: an early middle-aged white man).  So while I had some ethical concerns, what I mostly wanted to know was how on earth she’d pulled it off—and, I suppose, why she felt she’d needed to. 

It turned out she’d pulled it off just fine, thank you very much.  And she needed to because she’d discovered that companies often wouldn’t respond to her at all when she was herself, but if she’d call back as a white man, she’d get immediate results.  As they say, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Here’s another story that might grab you.

A column by Dave Schmelzer

It's been five years since the Sept. 11 attacks

Of course you remember where you were when you heard that one of the Twin Towers had been hit by a plane, and then that the other tower was hit, and then that they both fell. 

You know someone, or you know someone who knows someone, who was on one of the planes.  You know half a dozen people who were at work near the Towers and then had an unbelievably harrowing journey home. 

Dave Schmelzer

You remember how you felt about the big questions in those few days later.  Maybe you, if just for a moment, pondered if this was some sort of sign of the end.  When our president—in a more-popular season—called for days of prayer, for churches to stay open, maybe you dropped in for a prayer or a service. 

For most of us, it seemed to make sense. 

There were endless articles in those next few months about how attendance at religious services was booming, and then endless more in the next few months about how the boom didn’t last.  And that—arguably—is fine. 

Those services met a need in a moment of common crisis.  The crisis faded.  Folks moved on.

But I wonder if you discovered something then that it would be a shame for you to lose.  And that’s that faith—whatever your faith may be—is meant to be done with other people.  You are, of course, more than welcome to pursue a private faith. 

But I’ll tell you from survey after survey and from endless personal experience that your private faith won’t get you the same level of good stuff that you could be enjoying with a shared faith.  You’re just flat cheating yourself. 

Here’s a 9/11 story that comes to mind on this theme. 

A column by Dave Schmelzer

Why Are You So Darn Creative?

I pastor a church chock-full of artists.  You can’t throw a rock into the congregation and not hit someone working on a book or an album or a watercolor or a quilt or a fusion restaurant or an organic garden. 

I was a playwright before I was a pastor.  Our first hire after me was a singer/songwriter, theatre director and award-winning playwright.  Our next hire had been a TV actress.  Half a dozen folks in the last few years have released CDs.  Two just opened for Jason Mraz.  One provided the cover for a Grisham book.  One just sang the national anthem at Fenway.

And yet there’s a dark side.  In less than a news flash, let me be the first to tell you that artists tend to be more miserable than the average Joe or Jane.  Years back, when I first started down my road of professional creativity, a helpful friend passed on a “happiness survey” of fifty great American novelists.  As I recall, not one rose above… oh, something like “near-suicidal.”  Artists are more prone to divorce and substance abuse.

So we have this paradox.  As humans, we have a mysteriously strong creative urge which, more often than not, depresses us and ruins our closest relationships (as any student of Picasso, say, would understand only too well).  That would seem to be the opposite of what we should expect from natural selection.

A column by Dave Schmelzer

It seems self-evident to me that my happiness has been suppressed by evil powerbrokers. They may be hard to spot, but you and I both know that they’re there.

And it seems self-evident to me—as, I’m sure it does to all right-thinking people—that my happiness is closely tied to copious sex with plentiful nymphets. (A happiness, incidentally, denied me by those same EPBs [evil powerbrokers] who’ve spent millennia convincing my wife and those curiously-hesitant nymphets that this clearly sacred free sex is somehow a bad idea).

Dave Schmelzer

Jesus himself was all for it! (If, yes, not so clearly in those specious books of the Bible…or even, technically, in those wacky Gnostic gospels that came out maybe a century afterwards and have recently been tied to this argument, whose Jesus is not so much libidinous as…frankly, weird). And the Bible…don’t get me started!

All that morality/shmorality spun out by the original spin masters of the Church—those uber-EPBs who shamelessly leveraged their so-called “persecuted” status in the first two centuries (all that thrown-to-the-lions grandstanding—give it a rest!) in service of their repressive story of this murdered and resurrected messiah who offered some kind of recharged life and connection to God and others.

As if! Where’s the sex appeal in that? Seems more like a cold shower to me!

It’s fun to think that secret super-villains run the world and have always run the world. And it’s fun to see life as a quest to get in on the secret—both to take down The Man and to reap the rewards that the secret itself offers. Gnostic secrets are sort of like winning the lottery—not only do I win, but you don’t! It’s fun to feel vaguely victimized and suspicious and low-level hacked-off. I cycle through all of these things.

But what if the actual life that you and I actually want turns out not to be found in shadowy catacombs but in bright open spaces?

What if the deepest truths in life are not cryptograms but can be seen not only by looking out your window but also by talking to that new friend you just met in the café who’s excited about that faith they’ve just discovered or rediscovered?

Faith inspired by the New Testament is often criticized for being evangelistic, for wanting to let other people in on the ongoing party that—who knew?—actually seems to be happening even as we speak. But couldn’t we actually see that as a good thing?

That the faith discovered there was never meant to be elitist or exclusive but offered to everybody, to people we like and people we don’t, to people like us and people we can’t relate to at all.

Isn’t it the periodic re-interest in Gnostic faith that runs the risk of being elitist and anti-human?

In its take on ultimate truth, only a very few will ever get it and they’re sworn to secrecy while the rest of the world burns.

And, truth be told, in the middle of my periodic forays into suspicion of the EPBs and search for secrets, I don’t find myself very happy.

Instead, I find my pleasures in smugness and indignation, which soon can feel like thin gruel to my soul.

What if, as CS Lewis wrote, in those moments I’m settling for mud pies in the slums when infinite joy is being offered to me?

Who knows? Despite its loopy take on nefarious spiritual cover-ups, I may see The Da Vinci Code. And I may well have a great time with its ominous twists and shocking murders by people allegedly Of The Cloth. And, certainly, the mind reels at the possibilities of those sacred sex moments.

But as I leave the theater, I hope I’ll take a deep breath of fresh air, have a laugh, and return to my preferred work of finding the kind of richness of life and soul that a living God seems so—dare I say?—openly eager to offer.

A column by Dave Schmelzer

Who Needs Emotions?

Ladies and Gentlemen, you’re reading the words of the only known person provoked to debilitating sobbing by watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

It got so bad that I had to pull over to the center divider on the freeway, trying to pull myself together before a nightstick rapped on my window and I’d be forced to say, tears rolling down my face, “It’s all right, officer.  I just saw Terminator 2.”

You’d be shocked at how many people I talk to who—as was true with me—can pinpoint the moment they shut down their emotions.  How many people tell me they can’t remember the last time they cried.

Dave Schmelzer

How many people who’ve come to distrust people calling them “even-keeled.”  How many people who’ve realized they no longer want to live their lives, in the words of Pink Floyd, comfortably numb.

The people I talk to about this stuff mostly have experienced some kind of bullying or derision or abuse that made it unsafe to feel.  And since these are all smart people, they’ve gotten plenty of reinforcement in this defense mechanism by going to years and years of school.  They’re not emotionally hollow!  They’re rational!

A column by Dave Schmelzer, the senior pastor of Vineyard Christian Fellowship

Science v. Faith: Deathsport 2006

I sat in on a fascinating conversation recently with a bunch of biologists as they debated the merits of Intelligent Design.  ID—a theistic alternative to strict evolutionary teaching—has, you’ll recall, been much in the news in the wake of a Kansas School board’s decision to include it in a high school science curriculum, a decision then overturned in court.

You’ll be shocked to learn that Intelligent Design wasn’t popular with these evolutionary biologists.  But once that newsflash had passed there was a ton said that was extraordinarily interesting.

Dave Schmelzer

For instance, the biologist sitting next to me was horrified to report that something like sixty percent of Americans actually lobbied for teaching ID in schools even though only about two-thirds of these same people believed it to be true. 

Who were these yahoos?

A column by Dave Schmelzer

"Let's talk about sex"

So when you talk about sex with your friends, what do you talk about?  My line of work limits the possibilities, so I end up in endless conversations about the challenges of living in an over-sexed society. 

Of course there’s the ocean of free internet porn, but there are the billboards and mainstream magazines and Victoria’s Secret shows on CBS.  (CBS!  The Murder She Wrote network!  Matlock!  60 Minutes!  If these guys are running lingerie shows, you’ve gotta think that Fox… well, we just won’t go there.)      

A column by Dave Schmelzer

"Proving yet again that Boston is the Center of the World"

[Dave Schmelzer is the senior pastor of Vineyard Christian Fellowship at 170 Rindge Ave.]

Here’s a story I bet you didn’t hear about.

On Sept. 22, 2001, 11 days after 9/11, 20,000 or so folks gathered at Government Center to pray for Boston.

That was the day that John Ashcroft let us know that Boston had been targeted for a terrorist attack, particularly—ahem—directed towards large crowds.

I have a vivid memory of walking to the prayer gathering at about six that morning and seeing the Herald’s headline: “HUB LOCKS DOWN.”

All, evidently, except for one idiot going to the most likely terrorist target in Boston history.

What do you think about prayer? Maybe you think it’s (a) a wonderful symbol of the human spirit, (b) a placebo for folks who need that sort of thing, (c) a powerful means to see things change or, (d) well, God knows what you think.

I will say I hear some great stories. Today, for instance, I heard about the mother of a friend.
We’d prayed for this woman a couple of weeks ago after hearing that her breast cancer had metastasized and would require in-home hospice care from my friend, who began preparing for that.

Read Dave Schmelzer

 

Check out Dave Schmelzer's column "Proving yet again that Boston is the Center of the World" in the January edition of The Alewife.

A column by Dave Schmelzer

God Help Us, It’s the Holidays Again

God help us, it’s the holidays again, that strange secular/religious/materialistic hybrid that most of us hate/endure/secretly kind of like.  While enduring the malls and packed airports and rush shipping charges with everyone else, I’m struck by something odd but interesting about the religious side of things that has really helped me and might help you. 

Almost everyone in my circle, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, mistrusts religion, sees it as the source of lots that’s bad in the world.  And yet tons of these people feel a huge need for God, are extremely into their faith community, pray a ton, like the Bible just fine, often get together with a few other people weekly or thereabouts to try to help each other in this stuff.  Hmm…

Some of my friends think they’ve figured this out.  They regard the great religions of the world as being cultures every bit as much as they are faith systems. 

So, for instance, we all know plenty of Lutherans or Jews or Catholics or Muslims who don’t practice their faith but also don’t cut themselves off from their heritage. 

On the other hand, I’m told that, in Calcutta alone, there are over a million “Hindus who follow Jesus,” who are rejected by local Christians—as, if they wanted to follow Jesus, why not join in with Christianity, whatever the social costs in terms of their culture or caste? But they’re not rejected by local Hindus because they’ve stayed in the culture. 

Having spent a little time in the Middle East, I’m friends with a handful of “Muslims who follow Jesus” who have by no means left Muslim culture for a Christian one.  (You’ll recall that, in Lebanon, for one example, Christians and Muslims spent a decade or so killing each other.)

So in that sense I suppose I’m a secularist who follows Jesus, since my background was secular/atheist and, to this day, that feels like my world.  I’m baffled at the thought of “Christian fiction” rather than just fiction. 

Christian jargon (or pop music) seems alien to me.  Even the idea of seeing this as a Christian nation is challenging for me, as my whole experience and upbringing seemed to be in a secular nation. 

But my friends who grew up in Christianity by and large see a different America.  That’s what cultures do.

Awhile back, a man asked to meet with me.  He’d grown up in a different faith tradition which was very important to him.  “I was born it, and I’ll die it!” was his opening statement. 

He’d been dragged to our church by his girlfriend at the time, who’d decided to revisit the faith of her youth and had visited us.  It had affected her to the point that she said she wouldn’t sleep with him anymore unless he agreed to come once to our church (a powerful strategy, I think you’ll agree).  In exasperation, he did visit.  But he kept returning on his own, which scared him. 
I asked why he’d kept coming back, and he said he had a huge anger problem, to the point that he’d go out some nights looking for fights. 

Since he’d been with us and had taken some suggestions I’d made, that problem seemed to be gone, which felt miraculous.  So, to come back to the heart of things, was I going to try to make him a Christian if he stuck around?  Because, just in case I’d missed it, he’d die first.

I told him—I think sincerely, but you be the judge—that I didn’t care if he ever became a Christian, that I, of all people, actually had very little investment in Christianity. 

After a pause, he asked if that was some sort of strange tactic.  I said I thought I meant what I’d said, but I had a question for him. 

A column by Dave Schmelzer

Read Dave's column on the Holiday Season in the current edition of The Alewife--on the streets now!

Sign Up Today for a Free Satellite TV System with DISH NETWORK

A column by Dave Schmelzer

The Land Perpetual Outrage 

One of my favorite editorial page moments ever came recently when the Globe ran a typically scathing anti-Bush editorial, only to be greeted with several letters outraged that the editorial writer hadn’t eviscerated Bush still more. 

We, my friends, live in the Land of the Perpetually Outraged. 

I associate our city with the “If you aren’t completely appalled, you haven’t been paying attention” bumper sticker, and that is so me.  I face the invitation to outrage hourly.  Every newspaper, every conversation, every traffic encounter fuels that flame. 

And yet I’m in a line of work where people find their way to me looking for a happier life, all of whom face a tension.  On the one hand, we do in fact care about all those things that outrage us. 

We can’t seem to drop the idea of a world that’s better than the one currently being ruined by all the idiots out there.  (Okay, I’m ranting.  I got sucked back in!)  On the other hand, we have the suspicion that perpetual outrage and overflowing joy can’t coexist and, forced to choose, we’d prefer the second (if perhaps with a sneaking suspicion that we were selling out).

So we feel stuck.

Our church has some international partnerships, and one of those is in Lebanon.  I was sitting in on a gripping gathering in Beirut a few years back that I think of at these moments.  It was made up primarily of students at the American University there who had the chance to hear from a visiting Norwegian member of parliament. 

Read Dave Schmelzer

The senior pastor of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of  Cambridge at 15  Norte Dame  Ave. , Dave Schmelzer , joins The  Alewife as a columnist.

In addtion to his pastoral vocation, Schmelzer published novelist and poet, and two of his plays have been produced on the West Coast.