Those who sweat together...

I'm on may way out to Phoenix for the weekend for my friend J-Sad's bachelor party. Ironically I'm also on a parasite-killer medication that forbids me alcohol. So it'll be a fun weekend of drunk-watching.

Following on the Dear American Christian Church post and discussion, I'm working on a post about "the hard work of community." Community, in my mind, ties together a lot of the truth that I've learned about God, love, and humanity, and is a key to making some necessary changes in how we live faithful lives. I'm looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts!

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Phone for the Homeless

My good friend Aaron sent me this story about Google giving free permanent phone numbers to homeless people in San Francisco. They operate like standard voicemail boxes, accessible from any phone, and will allow these people to include their callback numbers on job applications and the like. If it works in San Francisco Google plans to scale it to other major cities.

Great idea.

I was thinking about how to capitalize on this. Why not offer these newly-phone-numbered folks the chance to sign up for a call list. Or several lists. Then aggregate the most applicable job openings and send them out via voicemail to each person. It's practically no marginal cost once the infrastructure is developed. You can do this with health information, housing opportunities, etc.

One thing I learned while traversing skid row in Los Angeles is that, more than money, hope is often the greatest need among homeless people. What better way to start rebuilding hope than by presenting opportunities directly to people over and over again.

It's a new era in addressing homelessness, because never have homeless people been so easily addressable.

Any other ideas?

Outliving Yourself

Changing the world.

It’s about changing people, right? It’s about millions, even billions of people changing the way they treat each other. But then, all of them are going to die. And the world will be left with the next rebellious upstart generation that wants to change the world.

Maybe that’s the significance of the Biblical story where God knocks down the life expectancy from 900 to 90. Whether you take it as history or myth the meaning is the same: any changes that we make are erased in 100 years. We live in perpetual cultural upheaval.

So how do you change the world for generations? What lives on after people pass away? Two things come to mind – ideas and organizations.

There’s a lot of talk these days about viral ideas – ideas that spread from mind to mind the way that a virus spreads from body to body. Once it plants itself in a host, the host spreads the idea to others, almost involuntarily. The idea takes on a life of its own. Some even have the power to jump generations.

Organizations can also last – look at The Red Cross, Ford, the Mormon church. And it seems to me that the stronger the commitment to an organization’s ideas, the more likely it is to last. (And its ability to make money. That helps too, for a time.)

The collision of ideas and organizations is what gives religions their amazing longevity. They are organizations built completely on ideas, or perhaps they are ideas that people perpetually build organizations on. Either way, they have staying power.

The ideas that Jesus talked about were archetypically viral. Viral ideas have spreading mechanisms built in. Like an email forward that promises you a new iPod if you send it to enough people. The idea is spread by virtue of its contents.

Jesus’s ideas had a different spreading mechanism. His ideas were about life change, and his life was their first showcase. When they spread to a new host, I mean really took root in her like a virus, her life changed. And when people saw the life change they were introduced to the ideas in a powerful form. If actions speak louder than words, then a new way of life is a sustained shout. Jesus’s ideas were shouted from his and his followers’ lives.

The reason his ideas spread so powerfully in the years immediately after his death was that the change they created in his followers was overwhelmingly attractive. These hosts of Jesus’s ideas loved each other, provided for each other, transcended extreme difficulties with joy and patience. Who wouldn’t want to know more? The virus multiplied.

I wonder about today’s Christian church, though. Is it founded on Jesus’s viral, life changing ideas? Or are there new ideas at its core? Or is it more like an organization (or group of organizations) that propagates because it has learned how to make money? Perhaps, like one of my last posts, it's a mix.

The Mixing Pan

Random train of thought this morning on my way to catch a bus to Gulu: According to a new billboard the PAM Awards are back in Kampala soon. They are annual music awards, and this is the second round since I've been in Uganda. It's strange that annual events here are no longer new.

The PAM in PAM Awards stands for Pan-African Music. I was wondering if that meant all-African so I thought about other words with the prefix 'pan.' The first that came to mind was pantheism. The belief that God is everything, or everything is God. So, yes, 'pan' means all, and well done Uganda on hosting such broad music awards.

Then back to pantheism, and its close relation panentheism - the belief that God is in everything. Then I wondered at the distinction, what it actually meant. If God is in everything then isn't everything, in a sense, God? And if God is everything, then isn't God de facto in everything? And so I wondered if the distinction held any relevance in the actual beliefs of people. Hindus might say that God, or Brahman, is in everything, as might Buddhists. But they might also say that everything is Brahman, everything is a working out of God, and everything will eventually settle into its eternal state as Brahman. It seems that Hinduism and and the Buddhism that it spawned are mixtures or overlaps of the theoretical distinctions of pan- and panentheism.

And then I wondered about monotheism, the belief that God is unique and separate, and perhaps even personal. Could there possibly be overlap with the broad, transcendent God of Hinduism? I think there may be some, especially when Christians speak of being created in the image of God. If you listen to Christians talk about that heritage, you'll often find that it holds deeper meaning to many than just a family resemblance. You'll find that it imparts value, significance, unalienable rights, even glory. It's almost as if they believe that there's a little bit of God inside them, like the Buddhists.

So then I thought about all the theoretical distinctions that we make to order our existence, to make sense of the ceaseless variety of our experiences, thoughts, beliefs and wonderings, and I wondered whether many of those might mix and overlap as well. I thought they probably did.

Then on the bus, waiting for it to leave the hot, noisy Kampala bus park, I was reading Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. He wrote in the first chapter about how the distinctions between Republican and Democrat are often more blurred than not in the minds of individual voters. Like the Christian mother who pays for her teen daughter's abortion, or the midwestern factory worker who favors tax cuts for the rich, because that's what he plans to be someday. My politics are similar. I haven't been able to work out which party most closely aligns with my own ideas, mostly because their polarized rhetoric doesn't seem to apply to daily decision making. There is no room in their politics for overlap.

As I write I'm reminded of Christian denominations - theoretical constructs with thin differences to which adherents align their beliefs. But I would guess that the actual (as opposed to rhetorical) faith of individual believers across denominations blurs as much as not, and is more similar than different.

I bet it's like that with a lot of beliefs - evolutionists who pray, Christians who sit cross-legged and meditate, republicans who don't mind same sex marriage, individuals whose ideas are more nuanced than the labels that they're stuck with.