Scouting Teaches Values?

The state of Florida, in its ongoing determination to be socially irresponsible, particularly when it involves anything remotely connected to taxation, has created a whole series of specialty auto tags. For a mere $30 extra above the cost of a state-issued tag with its rather pale orange plugging the citrus industry, individualist drivers in a hyperindividualist culture can express their individuality. They do this by placing tags on their vehicles which express the identities they've purchased from an array of consumerist options. These range from one's alma mater to anti-abortion "Choose Life" tags to the inevitable environmentalist tags appearing on the backs of environmentally destructive Hummers and SUVs. This purchased identity of the individualist can then join the thousands of other individuals on clogged expressways who are similarly disposed to display their individuality.

One of the options available to Florida drivers today is one which praises the Boy Scouts of America. "Scouting Teaches Values" the tags proclaim. But what kind of values?

SCENE ONE:

The building contractor originally scheduled to repair our home from Hurricane Charley had long run boy scout troops out of his home. For years his trailers bearing canoes, tenting and other equipment had been parked along our residential street making passage nearly impossible. After weekend and vacation time scouting events were passed, we would pick up candy wrappers, citrus fruit which had been used as ammo and drink cans from our streetside yard. Even so, wanting to be good neighbors, we had regularly participated in food drives and bought the luminaries the scouts created for Christmas Eve.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, our builder decided he could make more money in a shorter period of time than our house reconstruction offered him. So, after a year of slow repairs, promises ("You're just going to love it when I'm done") and interminable waiting during which hope turned to despair, our contractor/scout master left town for Mississippi and the quick buck. In the process, he left our home with 2/3 of its roof removed, open to the elements where the remaining undamaged flooring and walls quickly became more damage to be removed and replaced.

The night he finally came back to town, we demanded to see him, to simply ask if he was going to finish the project. Sixteen months into the repairs, he simply said, "I just don't see how I can finish it" to which he added, "I appreciate your being so nice about this." I didn't know whether to feel relieved, angry or despondent. But I will never forget the image burned into my memory as he left that night. On the tag on his van was the fleur-de-lis of the Boy Scouts of America and the specialty tag proclaiming, "Scouting Teaches Values."

SCENE TWO:

On my return home from visiting my father yesterday, I got back on the Florida Turnpike (I NEVER call it the Ronald Reagan Expressway and I never confuse National Airport in DC for Reagan International) headed south toward Orlando. After about 15 miles or so, a large green SUV in the left, passing lane had parked itself there, holding up a long line of traffic behind him and me. After a few minutes of hoping the man would catch a clue and pull to the right, I flashed my lights at him. No response. Finally the car in the right lane began to pass the man. I pulled to the right and passed him on the right.

His wife, sitting in the driver's seat, looked over at me just as I passed, shaking my head and comparing the driver, presumably her husband, to a rather detestable part of the human anatomy. It had not been my intent for either of them to see my assessment of the driver. But from the events that occurred next, I assume that at least the passenger - if not both of them - did.

Passing the SUV, I finally managed to return to the left passing lane. Suddenly. this SUV, which had been holding up traffic for five miles, its driver stodgily refusing to speed up or move out of the pass lane, roared into the right lane, cutting off cars which had followed me to get past the SUV. Given my own speed of 75 mph, the SUV must have been going 85 when the driver pulled up just to my right and shot me a bird. But before he slowed down to the speed limit, I caught a glimpse of his tag once more: "Scouting Teaches Values."

SCENE THREE:

A few years ago, I agreed to give my brother and sister-in-law a night out by taking their boys to their scouting meeting. It was supposed to be a hamburger dinner at MacDonalds kind of outing of two local packs, one a full scouting troop, the other the up and coming Cub Scouts. But after supper, the scout master got out a book with pictures and began to tell the Christmas story from his own Southern Baptist perspective. "Jesus had to be born so he could die for our sins," he droned to the antsy group of boys from homes in this affluent suburb north of Orlando representing a number of Asian traditions as well as Judaism.

Turning to a page with a depiction of the manger scene, he began trying to engage the boys: "So, who's at the manger?" The first couple of boys gave innocuous answers: "Shepherds." "Sheep." Good, the man would proclaim, rewarding them for the obvious and expected answers. But things began to go haywire when they reached the child sitting next to my younger nephew. "Who else is at the manger?" the leader asked. "Tyler," the child said. "Tyler?" the puzzled leader asked to which the child pointed to a tow-headed boy with mischief written all over his face and responded, "Tyler. Tyler was there." "No, I don't think Tyler was there," the chagrinned leader continued, turning next to my nephew. "So who else is at the manger?" Knowing my nephew to be capable of just about anything, I caught my breath: "Tyler's butt!" he said. At this point all the boys began to roar with laughter - all except Tyler and the leader whose face had turned a brilliant shade of scarlet. Trying to regain his momentum, he moved on to my older nephew, "So, JD, who else was at the manger?" at which point this gifted middle school student launched into a dissertation on how it was not Christmas, it was actually Advent and he didn't understand why we were doing this in the first place. At that point, the book slammed closed and the leader moved on to talk about upcoming events for the pack.

At a basic level, I felt sorry for the man. He had bitten off way more than he could chew, probably with the best of intentions. But it was his obliviousness to the group, his perceived need to impose his religious views on them and all in the name of values and under the aegis of the Boy Scouts of America that I found more than a little irritating. He deserved what he got that night but I doubt he got the message. Indeed, I wondered if he could. "Scouting Teaches Values."

SCENE FOUR:

June 28, 2000, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision upholding the Boy Scouts of America in their policy of excluding homosexuals as leaders. The Scouts also exclude agnostics and atheists from leadership. In its ruling SCOTUS overturned a New Jersey statute which prohibited discrimination based upon sexual orientation. The BSA policies apply not just to scout leaders but to scouts themselves.

Not surprisingly, the Irving, Texas based Boy Scouts sounded an awful lot like Bible Belt fundamentalists when they defended their discriminatory policies:

• "A homosexual is not a role model for traditional family values," says Scout spokesman Gregg Shields. (Newsweek, 8/17/98).
  
• "We also think that men who are promiscuous and those with DWI convictions do not make good role models," said Gregg Shields, spokesman for the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America in Irving, Texas. (Kansas City Star, 3/21/01). Note the assumption that gay men are necessarily promiscuous. Note also the structure of this argument is essentially the same as the evangelical Protestant appropriation of Paul's epistles which, taken completely out of context, list homosexuality along with murder as sins of equal value.
• Shields, like a good fundamentalist, also interprets the Scout's oath, in which Scouts pledge to keep physically strong, mentally awake and "morally straight," in a literalist, acontextual manner like that of religious fundamentalists. "The Boy Scouts of America have always taught traditional American values. An avowed homosexual is not a role model for those values," said Gregg Shields, a spokesman at the group's national headquarters near Dallas. (Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7/22/01) Like chicken in which parts is parts, straight is straight, for the Boy Scouts.

Every group which expresses ideals and offers them as normative for the culture around them runs the risk of appearing hypocritical when they fall short of their own ideals. Just ask any college sophomore who can spell out with detail and specificity the hypocrisy they observe around them in the world. It's easy to see the examples in the scenarios above as the exceptions to the rule, the bad apple which should not spoil the whole barrel.

But when one looks at the pattern of overt and blatant discrimination, of the self-deception in legitimizing raw human bigotry by dressing it up as "traditional family values," it's hard not to wonder if this is not so much the exception as the rule. That becomes even more plausible when one looks at comparable groups to the Boy Scouts: "The Girls Scouts of America, the YMCA, 4-H clubs, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Jewish community groups, don't exclude gays." (USA Today, 10/10/00) Canada's Boy Scouts permit gay troops. (Toronto Globe and Mail, 6/19/00). So what is it the US Boy Scouts know that everyone else doesn't?

A good friend responded to the Boy Scout's defense of its homophobic policies by sending his uniform and merit badges earned attaining his Eagle Scout status back to the BSA with a letter explaining why he'd done that. My friend is gay but more importantly he felt his own values of tolerance, valuation of diversity and human dignity - values he felt he had learned in part from the Boy Scouts of America - were simply incompatible with those demonstrated by today's incarnation of the American Boy Scouts. It's probably not suprising that he never heard a word from the Scouts. Apparently one of the values Scouting teaches is denial and avoidance of anything which might draw the foregone conclusions of the tribe into question.

Increasingly I see the Boy Scouts as one of the last bastions of patriarchy along with all its less desirable traits: focus on power and status within hierarchy, aversion to critical thinking and social responsibility, tribal self-understanding, demonization of the other outside the tribal bounds. Scouting, as practiced by the Boy Scouts of America, might well be teaching values. But somehow, I wonder if these are values a responsible parent truly want their boys to learn.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.

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Thoughts on an Unrepentant Prophet

A friend on Future Faiths Forum, one of the lists on
which I participate, sent in a couple of quotes
by the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin of New York's
Riverside Church. Coffin was an amazing prophetic
figure in a mainline Christianity known more for its
obsessions over genital contact and social respectability
through observance of middle class morality than for
anything particularly related to the Kingdom of G_d.

Here are the quotes and some musings on their content:

"Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it.
Hope resists, hopelessness adapts."
William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006) pastor, Riverside Church


I think Coffin was onto something when he spoke about
hope and criticism. In a film I show in my classes,
Faces of the Enemy one of the speakers talking
about the Reformation said that the presumption of
the reformer who criticized the Roman Catholic
Church was that things could be better and
thus we had the obligation to try to make them so.
I see many social activists in the same light. They
see the potential of a society and in their critique
insists that a people live into that potential.

Inevitably they are seen as assailants and malcontents
by those who cannot see a larger picture than the
immediate construction of reality. These are folks
who confuse patriotism with an uncritical support
of policy regardless of its deleterious effects on
others and its contradictions vis-à-vis one's own
stated principles. These are folks who cannot distinguish
critique for purposes of betterment of a society from
bashing for purposes of denigrating its current leadership.
The author of Proverbs observed that without a vision
the people perish. Rarely were such words more on target
than in today's America.

But I wonder if it's simply hopelessness that prompts
the rationalization and adaptation to destructive
social constructions that Coffin talks about. I am
strongly informed by the work of M. Scott Peck whose
book The Road Less Traveled speaks of the force of
entropy, declining to one's lowest level of functioning
if no energy is exerted to counteract that trend.
Peck assessed the causes of entropy as laziness,
fear of the unknown (the devil you know v. the devil
you don't know) and the aversion to any kind of
suffering. He called entropy "original sin." That's
the only definition of that concept that's ever made
sense to me.

So, I guess I wonder if what Coffin calls
hopelessness is not so much a lack of hope as
lack of will to exert the energy, endure the pain
and face the unknown that he called entropy. In
other words, it's not that human beings are incapable
of doing the right thing or even that we don't know
what it is. We simply choose to avoid it when we
can get by with it. Little wonder, then, that prophets
are stoned. They blow the cover of the entropist,
they explode the rationalizations and call the
adapters on the lives they lead vis-a-vis the
principles they say they believe.

"It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos,
"Let justice roll down like mighty waters,'
and quite another to work out the irrigation system.
Clearly there is more certainty in the recognition of wrongs
than there is in the prescription for their cure.
William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006) pastor, Riverside Church


Truer words were never spoken. And here's where the
entropy is really felt. To critique a system
means to recognize two things: one, it has the
potential to be better, to be more closely
approximating of its ideal; but, two, that to
create a more perfect union, to move closer to
that ideal will require the ability to conceptualize
with a wide angle lens, to figure out ways to
actualize that vision and then to muster the hard
work to get there. Frankly, I feel weary even as
I write these things. Doing them is even more
exhaustive.

On the other hand, it is unreasonable to expect
the prophetic voice of the critic to also have
all the answers for fixing that which they decry.
Indeed, to demand that critics have an answer
as a condition of listening to their critique
is a prime example of the entropic qualities
Peck decries. In both the critiqued construction
and the replacement construction, the masses
have remained uninvolved. They've not had to
exert any energy, face an unknown or endure the
pain required to recreate their society.

It is not reasonable to expect one critic or
even a handful to provide the replacement for
the current way of being a people. It took years
and countless souls to create the current version
of society which is not working. It will take more
than a small group of prophetic voices to make
the necessary changes.

In the meantime, do we have the luxury of
simply blowing off the task of dealing with
global warming? or the grinding, death dealing
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq? or the
slow but sure build to the attacks on Iran?
or the genocide in Darfur and Timor? That a
problem is huge and difficult does not mean
we are somehow excused from dealing with it.
Rationalization and adaptation in the face
of crises like these are not viable options
for people of good faith. Indeed, they are not
viable options for a people who value their
ongoing existence.

Without a vision the people perish.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

May Day March: Si, se puede!

I marched with 20,000 marchers in Orlando yesterday in the day without immigrants. It was the largest march in Orlando history. It was matched by similar marches in Homestead (agricultural district south of Miami), Sarasota, Deland (small city just north of here) and Pensacola. It was an incredible day, bright sunshine, blue skies, warm temperatures and a sea of brown faces clad in white tee-shirts. There were young men and women holding American flags, mothers pushing strollers, children holding parents' hands, elderly people, construction workers, bank tellers, union officials, and a gaggle of us Gringo marchers there to support their efforts. I arrived home three hours later sunburned, exhausted but exhilarated as I listened to the evening news and was informed that I was one of over a million Americans who had been in the streets for justice this May Day.

A few observations:

• The largest single group of marchers here in Orlando, as measured by crowd response to questions about places of origin from the organizers over the PA system, was from Puerto Rico. In other words, US citizens. While the local CBS affiliate initially reported that the streets were filled with "illegal aliens," (which brought a chuckle from this fifth generation Floridian who's Gringo to the bone), in fact the majority were at least documented if not citizens.
• The announcements were tri-lingual - Spanish, English and Haitian Creole. What was most interesting was hearing the chants glide effortlessly from one language to another - "Si, se puede! Yes, we can!" These are people whose ability to learn and grow expose their detractors' resistance to do the same. The presence of such diverse cultures has made this place a desirable place to live for those of us who are not so fearful that we must surround ourselves with like-minded, like-situated and like-appearing peoples.
• The presence of religion took two forms: 1. fundamentalist Protestant sects passing out Spanish editions of their comic book style tracts and holding banners which seemed to equate one's immigration status with sinfulness and the need to repent, 2. Roman Catholic religious orders and Catholic Workers who have a presence among the farmworkers here. Noticeably missing: all mainline Protestant churches, including those who have "Hispanic ministry" like the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida. So much for putting one's money - and one's official presence - where one's mouth is.
• The smugness of the counter-demonstrators provided a stark contrast to the exuberant passion of the marchers:

1. "This is my country! Go home!" Translation: Somehow I have come to speak for the whole country which I presume to be mine to speak for. It's all about me.
2. "My mother was a legal alien. What's your problem?" Translation: I got mine, screw you.
3. "What's that? I can't understand you?" Translation: I'm a monolingual philistine (and to whose surprise the crowd immediately translated their chant - "Yes, we can!").
4. My response to the counter-demonstrators whose tiny flags were dwarfed by the sea of American flags among the marchers: "Shame on you!"
   

I had questioned my motives for going to the march debating with myself the night before whether I should even go. I'm not an immigrant though I'm clearly the descendant of immigrants, some of whom faced major discrimination when they came (Irish, German). I'm not Latino or Haitian though many of my students are and I teach Latin American Humanities. Was I presuming to be the great white liberal, doing something good for some poor souls whom I presume need my help and from whom I will demand to be duly appreciated? But within moments of arriving at the T.D. Waterhouse Center, where million dollar NBA players are watched from corporate skyboxes flowing with champagne and the people filling the parking lot clean their toilets and stock their bars, I knew why I was there.

Justice and dignity were the two main words I saw over and over. Protestations against unjust characterizations of immigrants as criminals and terrorists screamed from some of the signs. Demands that the value of the work immigrants provide be recognized was featured in other signs (Who built your house?). These are all themes I recognize implicitly. As a gay man who has lost jobs, been denied jobs and been treated with less than human dignity because of his sexual orientation, I understand these concerns immediately, personally and viscerally. But more importantly, as a man who has spent his life working for justice and human dignity from special ed classrooms of public schools to courtrooms of juvenile justice as public defender to observing cease-fires and elections in Central America, this is simply one more chapter in a story that is much larger than me. I thought back to previous marches down the streets of Orlando in which I had participated to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ongoing struggle for African-American civil rights and to several Gay Pride parades in which I had marched or stood curbside with banners which proudly - but debatably - read "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You." Yesterday's march was just the latest chapter but undoubtedly not the last.

Justice. Dignity. Human rights. Seeing the image of G-d on every human face and throughout the good creation. Those are concerns worth fighting for. They are, in the words of Princeton ethicist Cornell West, causes larger than oneself worth devoting one's life to.

For those who watched with dismay or perhaps even fear as the streets of America were swollen with a mere fraction of its immigrant population: This is your wake up call. The sleeping giant has awoken. They now have your attention. But this is just the beginning.

Get used to the idea that your nation is a nation of immigrants. And here's a poorly kept secret for those of you who are history challenged: we always have been. Immigration laws, which didn't come into existence until after WWI, have always been based in the fears of the WASP majority that they were losing dominance of this country. It's why the first immigration laws were passed in the wake of the wave of eastern and southern European immigrants who brought their own languages other than English which lasted exactly one generation and their own religions (Roman Catholicism, Judaism) which didn't ever go away.

Immigration laws always exist in geo-political contexts. That's why the more recent laws allowed the collateral damage (translation: human victims) of our foreign policy mistakes in Cuba and southeast Asia to flee across our borders while making the path of more recent victims of that policy from El Salvador and Guatemala (where we sided with the right wing victors) difficult if not impossible to traverse. Immigration laws are the essence of social construction - they exist at the will of the power majority and often tyrannize the less powerful minorities within their power. They are the manifestations of the deepest fears of the power holders, using human beings to mark social boundaries of power, privilege and status. Indeed, national borders themselves are classic examples of social constructions. Point to the line between Arizona and Mexico from space. Or from that vantage point, explain why the tiny Rio Grande is a border while the more logical choice of the Mississippi is not.

While an orderly pattern of immigration is undoubtedly needed if for no other reasons than to prevent infrastructure collapse if not to prevent terrorist attacks, we need to constantly remember that immigration policy exists in a specific context. If we want to understand immigration patterns and why they occur as they do, we must be willing to look at the larger picture in which immigration occurs. That context includes ourselves and lives of privilege we lead in America. I am not opposed to someone objecting to uncontrolled immigration and porous borders so long as they do not speak with their mouths full of immigrant produced food sitting in homes that immigrant labor built and maintain and whose cheap labor made all of it affordable. But what I am not willing to take seriously - even for one second - is a confused notion that somehow a human being can be reduced to an immigration status. Regardless of how we may see them, no human being is illegal. And if we are not willing to see that, there are many, many more marchers ready to come to our streets to make that lesson clear. "Si, se puede." Yes, we can.

One last thought. Cultural diversity spurs creativity and syncretic generativity. The immigration struggles in America offer Americans an opportunity to become a stronger people, a better nation. The immigrants are here. They have come seeking the same dreams of prosperity Americans enjoy, the dreams beamed around the world via satellite and piped into every home able to afford a TV. Immigrants have fueled a standard of living unsurpassed in history, albeit one built on the backs of near-slave labor. Among the slogans repeated over and over in the march yesterday was this one: "El pueblo, unido, jamas seran vencido." A united people can never be defeated. Abraham Lincoln recognized this truth in his use of Jesus' words that "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Can we Americans learn to embrace the other who lives within our borders, to see them as fully human, to afford them the dignity such recognition requires, and only then to talk about immigration? I suspect our ability to do so will determine whether this great house we have built will continue to stand or fall from internal dissension. Yesterday's march gives me hope. The immigrants have spoken. Now the ball is in our court.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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People of Faith Who Produced a Book

Back in October, the American Anglican Council published yet another of its blustery self-aggrandizing statements about being the "real" Episcopal Church as opposed to us queer-loving, revisionist, heretical Episcopalians who are slowly but surely moving past the homophobic past of our tradition to join the 21st CE. The AAC article entitled "American Anglican Council Condemns Via Media’s Planned Coup of Biblically Faithful Dioceses" spoke of churches being "faithful" to the Bible, a concept I find increasingly nonsensical and foreign to my understanding of what it means to be a Christian generally.

In the past few weeks I've been reading Robert Price's Deconstructing Jesus as well as Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Both make the point, repeatedly and convincingly, that the Bible reflects the winners in the internecine struggles of the early church, faint echoes of the losing traditions remaining within the Bible the winners eventually sculpted to fit their developing theology as well as in time capsules from the dissenters such as the Nag Hamadi scrolls of Egypt's once flourishing Thomasine community.

What has struck me in response to these scholars whose biblical scholarship and attentiveness to detail (I think one must have a bit of propensity for anal retentiveness to be a biblical scholar) have proven both overwhelming as well as compelling is that any notion of Christians being a "people of the book" is at best an overstatement, at worst an ahistorical naïve assertion. The reality is that Christians - regardless of their understandings of what that self-designation means - aren't people of a book. At best we are people shaped by a book of our own making at the same time we are the heirs of the people who produced that book. The book is one of the many products of the faith community. At most what we are is people of a faith tradition whose many artifacts include a book which has reflexively and dialectically impacted the self-understanding of that tradition (per Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy).

The AAC polemic was published in the local Diocese of Central Florida Via Media listserv, a group who seeks to prevent the secession of the diocese into the clutches of the fundamentalist Anglican churches of Africa who will be more than happy to take American money in return for validating American homophobia. I attach my own polemic in response to theirs, polemics, after all, meaning words of war. As with all polemics, asbestos wear is strongly suggested:

In our discussions of what a symbol means, I sometimes point toward the flag we have been required to display in our classrooms at UCF and say "Some people argue against flag burning by saying that people died for that flag. If that's really the case, I say people who would die for a piece of cloth ought to. We need to weed out the gene pool of people like that." I then quickly add, "But that's not really what they mean, is it?" From there we are able to discuss how symbols point beyond themselves to something incapable of being reduced to words.

I feel similarly when I hear people talking about being faithful to a book, even a book as important to us as the Christian Bible. If people want to leave the Episcopal Church because it isn't faithful to a book, let them. We need to weed out the ecclesial gene pool of limited, rigid faiths like those.

The Bible is an artifact. It is the product of a faith community and reflects that community's experience of the divine. Clearly it also has a dialectical impact on that experience - our experiences are impacted by its contents and the understandings thereof. But, the notion that a church has to somehow be faithful to one of its own products is analogous to Levis-Strauss saying it must be faithful to the original designs in their blue jeans. It loses sight of the cause/effect, creator/created relationship.

I believe an approach to scripture which evidences a hermeneutic (a means of reading and understanding) of generosity is valuable. The men and women of our faith's history made good faith attempts to render their experience of the divine as best they could given the nderstandings of reality they held at the time. We should appreciate their work and their vision by reading and considering it as generously - and as critically - as possible.

Being faithful to scripture means being willing to read it with an accounting for what we know about the universe today, and with a spirit of gratitude for the G-d from whom all being springs. We do not honor that G-d by engaging in intellectual dishonesty and thus defiling the gift of critical reason. And we do not evince a true generosity toward our forebears by requiring the artifacts of their faith to bind us to worldviews and cosmologies that they themselves would not hold were they living in our world today. While I believe we must show our forebears the respect and gratitude they are due, we do not do that by providing them with an absolute veto over our faith understandings today. They had the first words on these subjects, albeit important words, but not the final word. That remains our responsibility, even when we attempt to avoid it through cop-out attempts like being "biblically faithful."

Harry Coverston,Orlando

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

• If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
• Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Next Year, I Want a Merry Christmas


On Christmas morning, I found myself driving up the Florida Turnpike toward Ocala and my sister's house where I would be the chef for the day's Christmas dinner. The car was loaded with groceries filling the car with hints of vegetables, fruits and cheeses, promises of wine and deserts. On the car's radio, the St. Olaf's choirs sang Christmas music, much of it music I had myself sung in days gone by in Cathedral choirs. As I looked out across the fog-draped rolling hills of Lake County, I found myself weeping, my mind racing to many happy Christmas Pasts, returning again and again to the dull pain of Christmas Present. And I heard myself exclaim, "Next year, I want a Merry Christmas."

It's not that I don't have much to be grateful for. I have a wonderful, loving partner of 31 years, a beautiful man who grows more beautiful as he ages, a man who understands me better than anyone else and who loves me anyway. We have a house full of animal babies to love, a beagle of 17 years (10-12 is the life expectancy of a beagle), an incredibly affectionate dachshund and two very beautiful cats who periodically deign to be loved and for whose benefit our household is maintained. We have a rental house that is safe, warm and in our own neighborhood as we await our house's reconstruction to be completed. And I work with people I admire and respect, people who share my own curiosity about life and who value intelligent, sometimes impassioned discussion about things that matter. My entire immediate family lives within a hour an a half of me and I live in a beautiful, vibrant city evolving into something potentially dynamic, a city whose oak-lined brick streets and lakes are the home of many memories and many friends from my life-long love affair with Orlando.

All things considered, I am a fortunate man. And I consider myself blessed, not in any smug, self-serving manner that sees G-d as having blessed me (with the accompanying implication that I somehow am G-d's chosen) but simply the realization that my fortune is at least in part due to nothing I have done or could have done to procure it. This in a world where the vast majority of its people live in nowhere close to the comfort level I experience daily.

At some level, I suppose what I am about to say may sound a little like a spoiled child voicing a sense of entitlement. But, having one's basic levels of Maslow's hierarchy met is not enough for the self-actualized human being. And, indeed, not all of the basic levels of the hierarchy are, in fact, secured in my life at this turn of the year into 2006 CE.

The first thing I see each morning as I look out my front window is my own home, still standing in ruins 16 months after Hurricane Charley dropped three tons of our stately old oak tree through the house and into the neighbor's house. Stripped down to the studs of its roof and its walls, windows missing or leaning against walls awaiting replacement in new concrete lined (and hurricane code meeting) spaces, even the flooring itself missing, it is a sad sight. While we entertain visions of a beautiful new home with cathedral ceilings and windows, new tile floors, gleaming stainless steel kitchen appliances, and a new deck and fencing to replace that lost in the storm, that vision has been so slow to materialize that we have both wondered at times if it will ever really happen. Our contractor has proven almost inept at managing his contracts, his lucre often overpowering his judgment on how much work he can actually accomplish, his skills in meeting schedules almost pathologically poor. To change contractors now probably would mean at least 3 months longer wait.

Our insurance moneys for rent and storage space expire March 1. There is much uncertainty about our home, whether and when we may be able to reclaim it. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas, in New Coverleigh, our reclaimed and resurrected home.

My mother was not able to be with us Christmas Day. She is in a rehab center in Ocala where she is learning to walk again after a broken hip. While we took her Christmas dinner, it just wasn't the same. St. Marge has overcome so much in her life - loss of her mother, being farmed out to relatives, tubular pregnancy, cancer, pancreatitis, stroke. Every new event knocks her for a loop. At 79 pounds soaking wet, she is a lean, mean feisty machine. But I wonder which new knock may be more than even a saint can handle. In the meantime, I just want my Mother to come home. And I want her to be at the party when we reopen our new home. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

The situation at my job became steadily more chaotic as the end of the year approached. Increasingly pressed to demonstrate with empirical evidence that our students are learning in our classes, we've spent more and more time on the Leave No Child's Behind approach I call Pavlovian Learning - data regurgitated upon command, comprehension, context and understanding of its significance optional. Then came news that the Gordon Rule, the 6000 word minimum writing requirement was to be abolished for our humanities courses. Up to now, we've had a club to hold over students' heads to require them to learn to write at college level and to complete written assignments in our classes. With that gone, students will be able to assert with impunity that courses which require writing assignments demand too much. And, of course, the consumer is always right, right?

There is more. With the requirement to grade all the writing gone, the university can now pump our already overflowing classes (45 per section) to 75 a section. The days of me knowing my students are probably gone. The days of talking head lecturing have arrived. (I have more to say about this but it will have to wait for another post.) If this were not enough, the text book publisher has dropped a new edition on us mid-year without notice (I found out when my students said their texts weren't being taken back for refunds because a new edition would be replacing it) and the webct on-line operations I spent a summer term learning (and the next summer struggling to improvise the flakey program) are about to undergo radical change as well. In short, there are few aspects of my job that are stable and predictable at this point. Time will tell how well I deal with those changes. Next year, I pray for a Merry Christmas.

This year my dear cousin, Ansel, lost his battle with self-medication. His bright, zany, compassionate voice no longer rings on the other end of my voice mail, often through the haze of self-induced alcoholic stupor. I miss him. His 49 years on this plane were far too few. Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

This year I have held my breath as our aging beagle has become increasingly gaunt and teetery. Charlie Beagle will not be with us much longer. I also came home last April to my beloved dachshund nearly paralyzed in the back from a ruptured disc. Some $3000+ surgery (and several sleepless nights) later, Julian is his unabashedly joyful self once more, albeit a 10 year old dachshund with a back that must be guarded from jumping onto and off furniture. I doubt Charlie will be with us another Christmas. However merry it may be, it will be all the less so with his absence. Nonetheless, next year, I still want a Merry Christmas.

I write this missive on the eve of a new year. As I watched the sun setting into pools of grey and tan this night amidst skeletal swamp maples awaiting the burst of new growth and scarlet blossoms just weeks away now, I was only too happy to let go of what has largely been a very trying and painful 2005. I am a creature of hope, an optimist by nature, always looking for new births and new starts. I have great hopes for this coming year - a return to our home after nearly two years exile, a mother recovering from debilitating health crises, a return to equilibrium in whatever form it might be able to take these days of scarce dollars and empty empirical approaches to "accountability" in higher education. I savor each moment with my teetery, nearly deaf and blind hound dog, knowing soon I shall have to let go of my beloved companion. Even so, I await 2006 with hope, a guarded optimism and a goal: Next year, I want a Merry Christmas.

Happy New Years, everyone!

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
https://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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Saving the World? We do it all the time!

A member of another list made a comment about saving the world, a topic painfully familiar to me and no doubt to others. Here is the comment followed by my response to it. I'm putting it on my blog so others may consider it but perhaps more importantly, so I can remind myself when I'm feeling particularly useless and my life efforts of little value that what each of us contributes to saving the world, tikkun olam, is essential.

I used to think I could change the world -- that didn't last long. But being able to save a dog from a death sentence somehow justified my existence. since then, they've done so much more to save me . . .


Of course we can change the world. Everything we do has an impact on it. Generosity toward animals challenges cultural values of materialism (which sees animals as things to be used and discarded) and anthropocentrism (human beings as the focus of the universe). Displaying compassion toward other living things teaches a living lesson about the value of compassion. As the existentialists teach us, we live in an often irrational universe yet we are called to make rational choices which have consequences not only for our own lives but for the entire world. It is an enormous responsibility.

I, too, become discouraged with the direction the world is currently taking, particularly in our corner of it here in the US. I want to be able to fix humanity, to stop our warring, deepen our superficiality, broaden our community, open our eyes to the wonder of an incredibly beautiful universe beginning with the forest in the path of the next freeway construction or with my neighbor whose language and culture I do not share. There are days I grieve over the mediocrity for which we are willing to settle. And there are days when I burn with anger at the hateful and destructive ways we treat each other and our good creation.

One of the ideas the medieval church emphasized was the notion of vocation, calling. The middle ages saw the universe as static, thus the place where one found him/herself was where G-d intended for them to be. Martin Luther expanded that notion to value every place on the social ladder one might fall. If one's calling was to shovel manure in the stables, such work was necessary for a functioning society and thus glorified G_d as much as the monk whose vocation it was to pray in the local abbey. (This was one of poor Martin's more noble moments!)

With the rise of the Enlightenment period and the Romantic response to it, the notion of the individual came sharply into focus. No more were roles assigned to human beings, we were called to find our own paths, to follow our own yearnings, to discern and live into our own callings to become fully human.

No one of us is responsible for the whole world and no one of us is capable of fixing it. But each of us is called to a little corner of that repair, the concept of tikkun olam found in Jewish thought. Each of us is responsible for our part. You rescue animals. Others adopts unwanted children. And the rest of us engage our own vocations when we are being responsible.

All of our callings are essential to the whole. None of us is dispensable.

I am only one, but still one.I can’t do everything, but I can do something.Just because I can’t do everything doesn’t mean I won't do the something I can do
Edward Hale, (1822–1909).
Author, The Man without a Country.


Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!
Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978)
US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value simply do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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The Broken Hearts of Brokeback Mountain

In years past, I have spent many a Saturday morning in local parks by the side of lakes, Book of Common Prayer and lections in hand, meditating on my Franciscan vocation and its implications for my life. I cherish the memories of those times when living under a Third Order Rule of Life was so important to me even as I struggle with what today I experience as the onus of that rule in my midlife.

This past Saturday, I awoke with the realization that the lake again called me. But this time my life was not demanding the Daily Office. Rather, it was calling me to examine a ragged edged hole in my soul that had arisen seemingly out of the blue in the advent of a new film due out in December. And so, amidst the unlikely combination of brazen male hustlers, yuppie joggers glistening with sweat and a couple getting married by the lakeshore, I found a hollow of a cypress tree on the banks of Lake Eola in our downtown park where I perched myself for a couple of hours of reading, meditating and weeping.

Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx from a collection in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. While I do not doubt this movie will end up being superficially billed as "the gay cowboy movie," it is much more than that. As a woman Episcopal priest from Wyoming said on an internet list on which the book was discussed, "It's a love story." It is, indeed, that. And as such, it should prove to be universally relevant to anyone who will actually go see the film. But it is also much, much more than a mere love story.

I am uncertain how I first became aware of the impending movie. I'm guessing someone mentioned it on one of the many internet lists on which I participate. A short google search later and I had located the trailer for the film, produced by the famous Ang Lee of Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger fame. On the very first viewing of the trailer, I dissolved into a mass of blithering, salty tears. Like a singed moth drawn to flame, I found myself watching the trailer over and over during the ensuing week with the same result each time. I felt a sense of dark sadness settling over me. It was that sadness, and the puzzlement as to what power this story seemed to hold over me that awoke me last Saturday morning and drove me into the park, my new copy of Close Range in one hand, my Starbucks grande in the other.

The characters in Lee's film are well chosen for the parts, as it turns out. Heath Ledger does a good job of portraying the detached, silent partner brutalized by his father and then orphaned at 14 when his parents went off the only curve on the highway to town. Jake Gyllenhaal's casting as the more optimistic, sensitive would-be rodeo star appears perfect, his sensitive face able to catch the pain and the ecstasy of this story magnificently. They are beautiful young men, no doubt far more beautiful than the men whose true story they bring to the screen. But their portrayals, courageous in a Hollywood still marked by homophobia and fear of the religious right, will also no doubt allow audiences to enter into the story itself with all of its subplots in a way that perhaps less attractive though more realistic casting might have provided.

So what is the power Brokeback Mountain holds over me? Why did I erupt into not just weeping but deep sobbing as I watched the trailer over the last week, now almost afraid to see the whole movie for fear of embarrassing myself in public? Someone on the list suggested I read the short story and perhaps it would help me see the "inner processes" for which Proulx is apparently famous. That prediction proved accurate.

In Proulx's story, several themes emerge. First, neither of the men feel they have much value in the world, not to others but, most of all, not to themselves. Ennis, the orphaned cowboy whose dreams of graduating high school died in ninth grade with the broke down truck that constituted the totality of his parents' legacy to him, seeks a sense of value from living into conventional expectations. He seeks out manual labor odd jobs, marries a woman he doesn't love, becoming a father of two girls. Jack, the product of a rigid patriarchal family complete with its demanding, stern "stud duck" patriarch, sought value in a short-lived and ill-fated rodeo career and a loveless marriage to a moderately wealthy heiress. Neither had found what they were looking for - until they found each other.

It's funny how radically your life can change when you suddenly encounter your very soul in the face - and heart - of another. For the first time in your life, you can dare to believe in yourself, believe you have value, believe you have a right - and maybe even a reason - to live. And when you find that key, when you've had that life-altering conversion experience, you cannot go back. And you cannot let go.

The result is an intense, white hot love born of desperation. It's not just an everyday, ordinary "falling in love." What's at stake here is your very being. In a life where there is nothing else, to lose that love is to lose everything. And so the young men explode into each other's arms, not knowing what to call what they felt, not knowing how to deal with this volatile commodity they experience in each other's presence, but knowing that while they couldn't let go, the very fact of their love for each other meant their lives were in danger.

That's the third theme that Proulx develops so well. These are men who are vulnerable, threatened by a world that not only does not value them, it is unlikely to countenance what they value most. And so it is not surprising that this story will not have a happy ending.

As I put down Proulx's book Saturday, wiping my cheeks and rubbing my reddened eyes, I knew why this story had caught me. I have known only too well the feelings of doubting my value as a human being, of wondering if I had a right - much less a reason - to live. My wrists bear the evidence of those doubts, scars self-inflicted by razor blades and knives over many years of self-loathing. I also know the mercurial feeling of having someone come into my life who suddenly caused me to feel I could be valuable and the simultaneous despair of knowing that love could never be borne to fruition.

But what my meditation with Brokeback Mountain helped me to recognize this past weekend was how vulnerable I had been so many times in my life and how frightened I had been in the face of that danger. I was taken back to my first two years teaching in Inverness, Florida, beginning in 1976 (about the same time this story was occurring). I was fresh out of college (though not yet out of the closet), idealistically determined to save a world not at all interested in being saved. Almost immediately I committed the Socratic sin of causing the children of the city to question conventional authority in the name of wisdom and the hemlock came quickly and surely.

I could rarely admit to myself then how frightened I really was. The late night phone calls with deathly silence on the other end, the verbal homophobic assaults by former students in the grocery stores, the mud splattered all over me at the local beach, the nights when the pick up trucks would stop in front of my house with shotguns pointed out the windows, the days I would come home to broken beer bottles and citrus fruit smashed in my driveway in attempts to injure my dogs on the screen porch, events long repressed and forgotten came flooding back. I had truly been frightened. And I will be eternally in my father's debt for recognizing the grave situation I faced but couldn't admit to and coming to my house with his truck, insisting I load my stuff and leave at the end of the second school year. I don't know what he had heard. But I do know he probably saved my life.

As Ennis del Mar said in the story, "If this thing gets hold of us in the wrong place it could kill us." I've been in that wrong place and know Ennis' observation - born of his own experience of a fatal gay bashing his father forced him to observe up close - to be true. Living in the valley of the shadow of death can be debilitating. It can mark you for life. Denial of the fear, necessary to continue functioning and often accomplished through the consumption of more than ample amounts of pain and fear numbing alcohol, cannot last forever. And so it's not surprising that Brokeback Mountain evoked weeping, weeping for innocence lost, weeping for remembrances of vulnerability and desperate loves. This film touches places deep in the soul. For that Ang Lee is to be thanked.

Unlike Jack Twist, I have survived. And unlike Ennis, I have begun to find a way to overcome my sense of being without value, a work still in progress here at midlife. In many ways, I have been fortunate, finding a beautiful, gentle partner who could love me when I could not love myself, who stayed with me through the desperation that drove me to self-destructive behaviors and who has helped me find a modicum of stability and serenity, albeit a stability still vulnerable in an erratically sometimes just, sometimes frighteningly homophobic world.

I would like to believe that Ang Lee's film will win the Oscars it is touted as meriting. I'd like to think that people will be able to see the universal themes lying in the depths of this love story, so poignant in the scene where Ennis, visiting Jack's parents after his untimely end, discovers his own blood spattered shirt still hanging in Jack's closet, Jack's own shirt tucked securely inside it. I want to believe Americans can prove less superficial than the predictable "gay cowboy" reductionism already used to describe the film suggests. Time will tell. And perhaps by December I will be ready to face my dragon, allow the ragged edges of my soul to be prodded once again and see the film. As Ennis del Mar said, "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it."

In the meantime, if you want to see the trailer that spawned this long, rambling introspection, I invite you to do so at:

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/brokebackmountain.html

Warning: The best advice I got from those who discussed the trailer on the list was simply this: Bring plenty of tissue.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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