Advent: The Path – Day One

The future doesn’t look to bright to me. The warnings in scientific literature tell us the natural world is undergoing a catastrophic change (and yes, it’s our fault). The historical warnings of a massive world conflict are coming louder and faster every day. Politically, the powers of representative democracy are fading as totalitarianism makes real gains across the globe.

I need a little Christmas. However.

On Sunday, Molly, our priest at St. Andrews Episcopal Church, welcomed us to the Advent season by reminding us to pay attention to the darkness. Both to the literal darkness of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but also the darknesses of exploitation, pollution, inequality, sexism, homophobia, and more. Often the season of Advent leading up to Christmas is focused on happy things and nostalgia. We diminish the power and message of Christmas when we only focus on the sweet and sparkly.

Therefore, this Christmas season I will be exploring the darkness around and within me. Each day I will be working my way through a darkness and my relationship with it.

Yup, real joy stuff here.

Yet, not unlike dealing with an addiction, I need to take honest stock of the situation AS IT IS at the same time I begin to kick at the darkness hoping to make holes for the light.

The only way out is . . . you know.

And thus a short assessment of the general dark around/within me:

The world I inhabit is enslaved to many ideologies that are either controlled, or significantly influenced, by economic systems. Value, today, is applied almost entirely via monetary language. Everything is a resource. Everything can be bought and sold. Everything has “value” aka a price. Yet, as far as I can see, this waking nightmare of unregulated Capitalism is succeeding in creating only two things: a Heaven for a tiny fraction of the human population and a Hell for everyone else (regardless of nationality).

Viewing everything through a matrix of economic value is one very hollow way of viewing the world. My worldview had been this way for most of my life. It’s easy to understand why my worldview was an economic one, most of my life I have been influenced by Conservative Christian Evangelicalism (either directly or indirectly) and they only see things through economic lenses. For example, our sin is a debt to be paid and the price for our souls was set and met by God, but it is on US to do the right thing and accept this transaction, which most of us never even wanted, or be tortured for eternity in a hell made by the same loving God who paid the price for our sins (because God is so perfect He literally just can’t with you).

You will never encounter a more fearful, materialistic, and empty religion than Conservative American Nationalistic Evangelicalism (I would pit them against Scientology any day).

I was a hollow person, serving a hollow idol version of Jesus and hoping that all my wish fulfillment would happen once I died having been, for the most part, a model employee following all the rules. It’s as if I hope heaven is a vacation I can enjoy once I receive my bonus check for sacrificing most of my family, friends, and sanity to the job.

Sidenote: There is something inherently evil in thinking the afterlife is specifically for ME and my enjoyment. Right? 

I need a revaluation of my values. One where my ego is NOT front and center. One where people matter more than objects and time with my child is not “spent” but shared. The path out of toxicity begins here, in the ugly truth: I am the enemy. The darkness I want to see changed out there is in here. The work isn’t easy, but it is life-giving.

This Advent, I will be sweeping the cobwebs from the neglected corners of my person, hoping to greet Christmas with honesty and step into the new year following a different path than the destructive one I, and we, have been walking.

Where Your Treasure Is

Why is monetary value the main metric used to determine success in America? Why do the economy, profitability, and materialism stop us from making moral decisions? When did I begin to internalize the lies of my colonizer culture?

I used to be wiser when I was a foolish teen, determined to live a life of purpose and substance, rather than chasing the tail of the Conqueror Worm. My twenties and early thirties have been plagued by the idea that my life’s value should be based on my: earnings, fame, position, and buying power. Trying to find my value, or any REAL substance to viewing the world through the cold lenses of Global Economics, almost killed me.

Today I know I need to learn. I need to root out and destroy the colonizer narratives in my mind which keep me from seeing the world as sacred, or at the very least, blessed. Reducing everything in life to dollars and cents strips it of any deeper, fuller meaning. I have been turning my attention away from the marketplace, its priests, and the endless scramble for more at the expense of other people’s lives, not to mention the life of this planet. I am beginning to read and listen to voices much wiser than myself, and who are not a part of my toxic culture.

The voices of those who have been crying in the American wilderness are my new school. I have begun reading books by American Indian authors about their history and culture. I am listening to The New Jim Crow about how our legal/prison system functions to trap mostly male African Americans into a life with no escape and no freedom. I read accounts of refugees and migrant workers who only want to provide a life free from fear or hunger for them and their families. I am learning how my passive silence is an active vote for the status quo. It is time for me to repent.

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¹⁹ “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” –Matthew 6:19-21 

Jesus said to his disciples, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” He was teaching about how hoarding physical things, and obsessing about them, limits our freedom and ability to love. When I treasure fame above all else, my heart can only focus on how I don’t HAVE any fame and how I can GET that fame. When my treasure is my bank account, my heart will think FIRST about money and the economy rather than justice, or grace, or mercy. Where my treasure is, that becomes my worldview. And it is a sad worldview indeed that only sees things in terms of something imaginary like money.

Churches I grew up in would only focus on the “treasures in heaven” section of the teaching and completely lose the point. To them the “good works” we do as Christians here will furnish our mansions in heaven with all the best stuff heaven has to offer. It was a very vague layaway plan and still focused on a materialistic vision for heaven and faith. How exactly did one “store up treasures in heaven”? Did converting someone equal a new heavenly couch or King-of-Kings-sized bed? Would I earn more treasure in heaven if I supported one political party over the other? What if Jesus, or more precisely Matthew’s recollection of Jesus, wasn’t talking about LITERAL treasure?

Thank the Lord I moved beyond this closed, transactional understanding of faith years ago. In my exit from a toxic, Nationalistic version of Christianity have found many vibrant, open, and socially-conscious communities of faith to join. I have learned to call the way I was taught to view the world as evil. The good things of this good earth are sacred and need to be protected, and so should human life, dignity, and livelihood.

Jesus speaks a lot about the Kingdom of Heaven in all four Gospels. It elevates the poor, the broken, the marginalized, and the forgotten. It is a realm of grace where “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” The apostle Paul rightly described the people and hierarchy of this Kingdom as being radically egalitarian, “There is no more Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one through faith in Christ Jesus.” It wasn’t about materialism at all. Heaven, and its treasures, is a counter-narrative to the grasping, groping, blind-greediness of our corporate Imperial impulses.

For readers who have tasted and found that the “living” water of many churches is poisoned with evil, I get it. So let me phrase “the Kingdom of God” in another way, the things that mattered most to you when you were a child, those are the things we need to protect, uphold, nourish, and celebrate: friendships, pets, good food, good sleep, a safe home, family, wonder, joy, laughter, helping, conversing, imagining, dancing, sharing, cooperation, exploring, and more.

Heaven isn’t a McMansion in the sky. Heaven is wherever we experience love, grace, and peace. Love, grace, and peace are impossible to monetize without distorting them. My heavenly treasures are those things that cannot be stolen or destroyed: the love I share with my family and friends, the grace I receive from other people, and the peace I experience during the quiet valleys of silence during a great conversation. Slowly, ever so slowly, I am returning to a place of right thinking and banishing the colonizer mantra of “money and things first” from the central pillar of my psyche.

I know this is the right path to take and I know it means standing with people who are suffering. But, that is where my treasure is, and, thankfully, so is my heart.