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Author Archives: Fred Yi
Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize
BOB ABERNETHY, host: The surprising choice of President Obama as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace came with a citation praising Obama for goals familiar to many, especially the religious communities. Kim Lawton reports:
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The Nobel citation praised what it called President Obama’s “extraordinary efforts” to strengthen international cooperation between peoples. It said his vision is founded in hope and the concept that “those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values that are shared by the majority of the world’s populations.” At the White House Friday (October 9), Obama called the award “a call to action.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (speaking at the White House): These challenges can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation, and that’s why my administration’s worked to establish a new era of engagement in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek.
 Obama at the United Nations |
LAWTON: Obama began sounding those themes during the 2008 presidential campaign. He captured global attention with a speech in Berlin.
PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking in Berlin): In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help us make it right, has become all too common. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.
LAWTON: After Obama’s election, he began changing the tone of American rhetoric on the world stage, emphasizing cooperation rather than confrontation, and then in June, his dramatic speech seeking a new relationship with the Muslim world:
PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking in Cairo): One based on mutual interest and mutual respect and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
LAWTON: And just last month at the United Nations, Obama invited the world community to join in helping him to make his vision a reality.
PRESIDENT OBAMA (speaking at the UN): For the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings…the belief that the future belongs to those who would build and not destroy; the confidence that conflicts can end and a new day can begin.
ABERNETHY: Kim, and the reaction from the religious community?
LAWTON: There’s been a lot of reaction from religious groups, really across the spectrum, many of them praising Obama but also noting that a lot of work still needs to be done to achieve this vision that he was awarded for. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop, himself a Nobel winner, said that it shows that Obama has really changed the temperature of the world, and everybody, he said, is more hopeful. The Vatican also praised Obama, noting his commitment to peace in the Middle East and also his fight against nuclear weapons.
ABERNETHY: And that is becoming more and more favored by a lot of people in the religious community, isn’t it?
LAWTON: There seems to be a lot of momentum in the religious world around that issue. Obama has been talking a lot about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and we’ve seen movements—Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams—but interesting to me even in the evangelical community. Evangelicals are calling this a pro-life issue, and so there is a movement for their campaigning against nuclear weapons as well.
ABERNETHY: And a lot of people have been saying, haven’t they, that this is an award not only for what—for the tone that has been created so far, but also and particularly for what might be ahead.
LAWTON: Exactly, and it’s interesting to me that Obama has really included the religious community in that work, and every single one of his speeches on the international stage, where he talks about creating this vision of a new world, he explicitly mentions religion and the fact that he wants to see religion not be a force for division and violence, but for peace, for bringing people together and for sharing common values for the good of the world.
ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.
End of Life Decisions
FAMILY MEMBER: She’s been fighting cancer for five years, twice. She has emphysema of the lungs real bad. It’s gotten worse, they said, since she’s been in here, and right now she is fighting a bad stroke. They are not sure, but they are saying something like it could affect her left side and maybe her brain.
BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: Did she leave any instructions about what to do?
FAMILY MEMBER: No, she did not.
ROLLIN: And that’s a major problem, says Dr. Jeff Gordon, an internist at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Gordon has had dying patients who have not made their wishes known and haven’t realized that some extreme measures are almost always futile.
DR. JEFF GORDON (Grant Medical Center): Most people think, that is for elderly people especially, that heroic measures like CPR and ventilator support is really effective, and the truth is, in older people with complicated medical problems, it just doesn’t work effectively, so the bottom line is people suffer needlessly at the end of life.
Ventilator–there is a plastic tube that goes through the mouth into the windpipe, and just imagine the gagging kind of feeling. Now we give high levels of sedation to inhibit that, but that alone, now think of yourself, these people typically have to be restrained so that they don’t just reflexively reach up and pull that tube out, and so they have their arms restrained. They can’t move freely, and think of yourself being on your back restrained, just the muscle aches and pains that you would develop.
ROLLIN: Dr. Gordon points out that sometimes aggressive treatment is a good idea.
DR. GORDON: Intensive care and heroic measures are awesome when they are used in the right people. The right people typically are younger people that have a chance of survival and having a good outcome.
ROLLIN: Dr. Philip Hawley, who is director of the intensive care unit, says the state mandate is to keep life going no matter the cost, so although doctors think their patients should be allowed to die peacefully, their hands are tied by custom and law.
DR. PHILIP HAWLEY (Grant Medical Center). We have people who are terminal on aggressive life support measures. Clearly they are not going to survive. We are spending all this time and money taking care of them. They are suffering, and it’s completely inappropriate.
DR. GORDON: What people need to do is talk about this with their family, with their physician, in advance. If they get a life-threatening illness, a lot of times they won’t be able to. Maybe they won’t be coherent, or they’ll be on a life-support machine. They can’t express their wishes, then they put their family in a bind, so they feel guilty, they don’t know for sure, and then what often happens is the sort of default is, well, let’s do everything, as much as possible.
ROLLIN: And sometimes families disagree about what to do. It’s hard for some to let go, which complicates things further.
DR. HAWLEY: If we could get families to deal with this we would not have this problem. We feel we as physicians should be able to step in and say we’ve got to stop the madness.
DR. GORDON (speaking at church service): Lord, help us have perspective. That’s what changes lives. That’s what gives us hope.
ROLLIN: Dr. Gordon, who is also a nondenominational pastor, was surprised to find that patients who are religious often want more aggressive treatment at the end of life than others.
DR. GORDON: I have even encountered people that are people of faith, and they are, what I think, pursuing futile-type measures, and they say well, we are going to let God have his way here, and I try as gently as possible to say we are not really letting God have his way. We are forcing the issue here.
(speaking to patient): Has anyone talked to you about this?
PATIENT: Oh, no.
DR. GORDON: No, no. It’s a topic that doesn’t get talked about.
ROLLIN: Dr. Gordon practices what he preaches by getting patients, as well as their families, to talk about what they want at the end of life while they still can, and he tries to make both patients and families aware of realistic rates of recovery.
DR. GORDON (speaking to patient): I just want you to understand is that those kind of things like CPR and breathing machines in somebody that’s got the problems that you have are not very effective. You need to decide whether that is something you would want or not, but you need to have all the facts about it, too.
ROLLIN: One of the reasons conversations like this rarely happen between patients and physicians, says Dr. Gordon, is that physicians are paid to treat, not to talk, which is not to say that some don’t talk anyway.
DR. GORDON: The person that needs to have this conversation is the primary care physician. They are going to have to call family members, they are going to have to gather these people, and besides that it’s a very difficult conversation, and so we are underpaying them. They are going to have to make a financial sacrifice to have this discussion, and then we wonder why it’s not happening.
ROLLIN: There are three things people can do to make their end-of-life wishes clear: Sign a durable power-of-attorney naming a person to make decisions if they are unable; sign a living will which is about long-term life-sustaining treatments; and deal with the DNR question—whether if your heart stops you want to be resuscitated or not.
Jill Steuer, who has metastatic breast cancer and has been given four months to live, has decided to stop any kind of treatment and receive hospice care.
JILL STEUER, RN: I’ve been through all the chemotherapy, and there is no chemotherapy to help me anymore. I don’t want to be stuck. I don’t want to have any extra medications. I want to just go peacefully. The only medications I want are going to be the ones that are going to comfort me. That’s all I want.
ROLLIN: Jill Steuer is a nurse and researcher at Grant Hospital.
JILL STEUER: I’ve seen patients who have died horrible deaths, where their families wanted everything, the doctors wanted everything, but it was not to be, and that scared me. I’m not sure they realize that it’s okay to say “I’ve had enough.” Even now people will stop me in the hallway and they’ll say keep up the good fight, keep up the good fight, and I think some people are afraid that they are going to disappoint others if they just say let’s have nature take its course. I’m putting up a good fight, but my goal is not to live a long and painful year or two. I would much rather say at this point in time I want the next four months to be as interesting as the last 57 years have been.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in Columbus, Ohio.
A Serious Man
(from movie trailer, various voices): I’ve tried to be a serious man. We’re going to be fine. I’ve tried to do right, be a member of the community. Please just tell him I need help.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: “A Serious Man” is a dark comedy that asks some universally serious questions.
CATHLEEN FALSANI (Author, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers): Why do we suffer? If God is there and God is a good God, why do bad things happen to decent people? I don’t care what flavor of spiritual person you are, or if you are a person of faith or not, there is no real good satisfactory answer to that.
LAWTON: Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani is author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. She says the brothers’ newest film grapples with those theological questions in unexpected—and yes, quirky—ways.
FALSANI: It’s a powerful film, but it’s a powerfully funny film as well, and in the Coens’ 25 years of filmmaking, it’s often their funniest films that are in some ways the darkest, the most serious spiritually.
(from movie): Honey, I think it’s time we started talking about a divorce.
LAWTON: Set in 1967, the story centers around a Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnick, who experiences a Job-like set of personal and professional calamities. He looks to his faith to make sense of it all.
(Larry Gopnick, from movie): Please, I need help. I’ve already talked to the other rabbis. I’ve had quite a bit of tzurus lately. Marital problems, professional, you name it. This is not a frivolous request.
LAWTON: He doesn’t find any easy answers.
(dialogue from movie): Rabbi’s secretary: The rabbi is busy. Larry Gopnick: He didn’t look busy. Secretary: He’s thinking.
FALSANI: To their credit, the rabbis in the film don’t really try to give an answer. I think they kind of encourage the wrestling out of the answer, which is, in fact, in my estimation, to continue to live your life.
LAWTON: The film is full of Jewish motifs. It’s set in a community outside Minneapolis, where the Coen brothers themselves grew up in the 1960s. They say with “A Serious Man” they wanted to explore what they call “the whole Jewish Midwestern thing.”
ETHAN COEN (filmmaker): The whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest, Jews on the plains. It’s just—it’s odd, and that incongruity is something that we kind of wanted to get across, too. It’s its own strange subculture.
 Ethan and Joel Coen |
LAWTON: They acknowledge nervousness among some Jews about how the film may come across.
ETHAN COEN: People were really supportive in the Jewish community especially, but you know, occasionally people would ask, you’re not making fun of the Jews, are you? This really deep Jewish thing where, you know, is this good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?
LAWTON: Like Larry’s son, Danny, the Coen brothers went to Hebrew school and were bar mitzvahed. They’ve indicated that faith no longer plays a central role in their lives, but they are notoriously reticent to discuss their personal beliefs or the messages in their 14 films.
FALSANI: They don’t say a lot about what they believe or don’t, but their movies are filled with theological and metaphysical and existential questions.
LAWTON: Falsani admits those themes may not always be obvious in what she calls “the Coeniverse”—the enigmatic and sometimes violent worlds the Coens have created.
FALSANI: I think there is a moral order to the Coeniverse, if you will. It might not be the moral order we were hoping for, but it’s there.
LAWTON: “A Serious Man” may be more overt than other Coen films in its religious exploration, but it is no more obvious in its conclusions. Still, Falsani says, in true Coenesque fashion, meaning can come by simply raising the questions.
(Larry Gopnick, from movie): I need help.
I’m Kim Lawton reporting.
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Afghanistan War
BOB ABERNETHY, host: This past week in Washington, the administration’s top political, military, and diplomatic leaders gathered to think through US options in Afghanistan. On October 7, the US will have been involved militarily in Afghanistan for eight years. What’s our mission there? Can it be achieved, and what are the moral dimensions of the debate? William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He brings to the discussion a strong grounding in the just war tradition. Bill, welcome.
WILLIAM GALSTON (Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution): Good to be here.
ABERNETHY: What can we say about what the mission in Afghanistan should be?
GALSTON: Well, we have to understand the mission in light of 9/11. The attack on the United States, which killed thousands of civilians, was conceived and launched by Al-Quaeda using Afghanistan as a base, with the Taliban government sheltering them, and the piece of the mission on which everyone agrees is the importance, the urgency, and the moral justification, the defensive justification, of making sure that Afghanistan cannot again serve as a base for terrorist attacks on the United States.
ABERNETHY: Okay, so what are the means to that end? How do we do it?
GALSTON: That’s one of the questions that’s being debated in Washington right now, and there are two basic options. Option number one is to try to create an Afghan government that is legitimate, enjoys the consent of the people, and has the capacity to prevent Al-Quaeda and other terrorist groups from acting on its territory. The other possibility is to abandon the hope of creating such a government on the grounds that we don’t have the capacity to do it, and focus instead on direct attacks on Al-Quaeda and other terrorists, using drones, using bombs…
ABERNETHY: In Pakistan as well as …
GALSTON: …and special forces, in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, absolutely.
ABERNETHY: And so can we do either of those?
GALSTON: That is a very important question, as we learned so painfully decades ago in Vietnam. It is wrong not to ask the question at the threshold, can we do what we want to do? It is immoral to send young people, young American men and women, to die in pursuit of an end that cannot be attained, and it is even worse if political leaders have good reason in advance to believe that the end that they are publicly declaring is unobtainable, and the worst of all is to use American troops for the immediate political advantage of the party of the administration in power.
ABERNETHY: One of the issues here is whether we can create the trust of the Afghan people in our ability to stay and do what’s necessary. Can they trust us to see it through?
GALSTON: That is a critical question, because by having anything to do with us in these remote villages they are risking their lives, and it would be wrong of us to send a signal that we’re in for the long haul and then leave our local allies in the lurch. Unfortunately, we have done that from time to time since the Second World War, and the results are never pretty, and the policy is never justified. If we tell people that they can depend on us, we’ve given a solemn promise on which they are wagering their lives, and we better honor that promise.
ABERNETHY: And so how do you come out, quickly? How do you come out on it?
GALSTON: I think that we have to go forward, and I have reluctantly concluded that an investment of additional troops represents the best way forward. Others that I respect differ with that conclusion.
ABERNETHY: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, many thanks.
GALSTON: My pleasure.
Mojave Cross
TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: If you ever wondered where the middle of nowhere really is, it just might be right here: the Mojave Preserve in southern California. At 1.6 million acres, it is vast. Some find it beautiful, some even sacred. Slightly more than 90 percent of the preserve is owned by the federal government and maintained by the National Park Service. In 1934, the Death Valley chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars put up a cross here to honor American soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. But the cross is now encased in a plywood box as a result of a lawsuit brought by Frank Buono, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union.
FRANK BUONO: I want the cross on every Catholic church. I want the cross in my home. But I don’t want the cross to be permanently placed on federal government public lands or any other public lands for that matter.
 Frank Buono |
O’BRIEN: Seventy-year-old Henry Sandoz has been taking care of the cross for the last 26 years. His best friend, a World War I medic on his death bed had exacted a promise from Sandoz back in 1983 to do so.
(to Henry Sandoz): Why is it so important?
HENRY SANDOZ: Well, because of my word to my friend that I would maintain it. To me it means a whole lot.
O’BRIEN: Buono persuaded federal courts in California that the cross unconstitutionally promotes the Christian faith, a claim Henry Sandoz says he just doesn’t get.
HENRY SANDOZ: It shouldn’t mean no more than a memorial to the veterans, and also, when you see a cross on the highway you don’t necessarily—and I don’t either—think about that cross aspect, like you’re saying, well, somebody died there. That’s the meaning I think most people have out of it, or should have.
O’BRIEN: The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, found putting the display on public land violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from advancing religion. The decision outraged many veterans and triggered a public relations campaign on their behalf by the Dallas-based Liberty Legal Institute:
(Video produced by Liberty Legal Institute): “Our veterans stood for us. Now that their memorials are under attack around the country, are you willing to stand with them?”
O’BRIEN: Attorney Kelly Shackelford, who runs the Liberty Legal Institute, says the cross is all about honoring the nation’s war dead and has nothing to do with promoting religion:
KELL SHACKELFORD (Liberty Legal Institute): Well, I mean, if this cross goes down, because it’s a memorial in the middle of the desert, if you have to tear down a seven-foot cross in the middle of 1.6 million acres of desert, what do you have to do at Arlington Memorial Cemetery with a 24-foot-tall cross? This would literally affect almost every community in our country, because they all have veterans’ memorials, and a lot of those have religious imagery that’s attached to those.
O’BRIEN (to Frank Buono): What about Arlington National Cemetery?
FRANK BUONO: Oh, wonderful. You know, there’s probably no better place to express one’s religious beliefs than in a cemetery. This is not a cemetery.
 Henry Sandoz |
O’BRIEN: At least on the surface Frank Buono, a transplanted New Yorker, would appear to be an unlikely plaintiff in such a case. He helped run the Mojave Preserve in the mid-nineties as an assistant superintendent, and he is a practicing Catholic. The walls of his home are lined with crucifixes and other religious symbols, and Buono rankles at the suggestion that the purpose of the Mojave cross is solely to remember the nation’s war dead.
FRANK BUONO: What really disturbs me is the argument that somehow the cross is a secular symbol. I can’t think of anything more offensive to a Christian, to a Catholic, that the cross is a secular symbol. They say, well, it’s a secular symbol of death and sacrifice, and I say, well, only to the extent that it symbolizes the death and sacrifices of Jesus Christ. That is why the cross is a symbol of death and sacrifice, and believe me, I think to a Muslim, to a Jew, to a Hindu, to a Buddhist the cross is no such symbol of death and sacrifice.
O’BRIEN: The furor, if not the rage, the case has generated has not been lost on Buono.
(to Frank Buono): We’ve seen interviews with the people in that little town.
BUONO: Yeah.
O’BRIEN: They want to string you up.
BUONO: Oh, I have been told, though I try to avoid the sites, that if you go on the Internet and put my name in you’ll get people saying incredible things about me. Even within my own family I’ve had some people say, what are you doing? This is the cross, you’re a Catholic, and what are you…
O’BRIEN: Buono’s case also got the attention of the U.S. Congress and Representative Jerry Lewis, whose 41st congressional district includes the Mojave Preserve. Lewis introduced legislation that would have transferred the land on which the cross was located to a private veterans group in hopes of circumventing the constitutional question the cross raised.
REP. JERRY LEWIS (R-Calif.): We’ve attempted by way of the amendments and the appropriations process to first allow there to be a property exchange. Because we were fighting a battle with endless lawyers of ACLU, it seemed to us it was important to set aside the question as early as possible to preserve the cross itself.
O’BRIEN: Lewis’s bill allowed the Interior Department to take the land back should the cross ever be removed, prompting the lower courts to find the transaction a “sham.” Buono has now moved away from the Mojave Preserve—almost 500 miles away—to a small town in Arizona not far from the Mexican border, so far away that the Interior Department says Buono no longer has a real stake in the case. The department has asked the Supreme Court to throw out Buono’s complaint because his only real injury is that “he must observe government conduct with which he disagrees.”
(to Frank Buono): What’s it to you? You live 500 miles away.
FRANK BUONO: Whether I’m 500 miles away or five feet away from it, the fact of the matter is that that land is land that I own, that’s land that you own; that’s federal public lands. It belongs to everyone, and so it matters to me that the lands that are held in common by the United States do not become the venues for sectarian religious expressions, even of my own religious expressions.
O’BRIEN: Legal scholars say this case has at least the potential to be the most important religion case to reach the Supreme Court in decades. But there have been many cases involving religious displays on public property. What makes this case so different may have less to do with the case itself than with the court that will decide it. The justices have long been sharply split on religion questions, often dividing 5-4. The addition of three new justices in the last four years could change everything. Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine.
PROFESSOR ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: I think there are five votes on the current court that want to dramatically change the law with regard to the wall that separates church and state. These five justices—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito—don’t believe that there’s a wall that separates church and state.
O’BRIEN: No decision is likely from the High Court for several months in a case that could have momentous consequences for the country, notwithstanding its simple beginnings arising out of Henry Sandoz’s pledge to a dying friend 26 years ago.
HENRY SANDOZ: You know, to me—I guess it’s really great, but I’m just kind of a hick, I guess you’d say, a country person, and it’s really out of the ordinary for me.
O’BRIEN: The words “separation of church and state” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment ban on government establishment of religion would surely require at least some separation—but how much? This reconstituted Supreme Court today appears poised to reconsider that crucial question.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.
Church Garden
DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: It’s hard work on a warm day, but Bob Lewis never shirks.
BOB LEWIS (Garden Volunteer): I garden at home. On off days, I’m out here.
POTTER: “Here” is a vegetable patch in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in suburban Washington, tended by volunteers from the parish.
VOLUNTEER: We got a bumper crop and more coming in!
POTTER: Last year, this garden was just an idea—something the rector dreamed up.
REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY (Rector, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland): I think “come eat, go serve” is becoming our slogan.
POTTER: For Reverend Stephanie Nagley, the garden as a way of living out what she sees as God’s call to give away what you’ve been given, especially in tough times. St. Luke’s is one of several churches across the country that planted vegetable gardens for the first time this spring, partly in response to the recession. Most of their food goes to local food banks, but what comes out of this garden goes right next door. All of the produce grown at the church is donated to St. Luke’s House, a mental health facility the parish helped to found almost 30 years ago.
VOLUNTEER (to class members): You want to help us get all this stuff rinsed?
POTTER: Cooking class is offered daily as part of a life skills program. The goal of the class is to help these adults with mental illness learn to live more independently.
(to class member): What are you learning?
CLASS MEMBER: How to cook different veggies.
POTTER: The fact that those veggies come from the church next door isn’t lost on anyone at St. Luke’s House.
BETH WELCH (Client, St. Luke’s House): I think it’s really absolutely nice. We get a lot more veggies to eat.
MARK ROBBINS (Client, St. Luke’s House): I really appreciate it. I really should thank them sometime, I guess.
ERIC GORDON (Staff, St. Luke’s House) I think the clients get a real kick out of it. One guy in particular is always double-checking: Are you guys really using that in your cooking classes? Are you sure? Yes, we definitely are using this in our cooking classes.
POTTER: The clients and staff of St. Luke’s House benefit from the garden’s bounty, but that’s not its only value. Parishioner Anne Elsbree organized the 30 volunteers who tilled the ground, planted the seeds, and now harvest the crops.
ANNE ELSBREE (Garden Organizer) I think it’s produced good teamwork at church. We’ve all been working on a project together and getting results, so it’s been very satisfying.
REV. STEPHANIE NAGLEY: In some ways, I think a lot of this was just sort of an unconscious bubbling up of people’s faith, and now I think it’s sort of come to this next era, where it’s really now articulated, and we’re making it clear that this is what we’ve been about all along.
POTTER: Cara Gonzalez worships at St. Luke’s and has brought the local youth organization she works with to help out in the garden.
CARA GONZALEZ (Parishioner): There’s definitely something spiritual about working with the earth and feeling a relationship with all of God’s creation, and then taking that and making it into a human relationship with those who benefit in the cooking program and with the youth who benefit. I think it’s all about that connectedness, and that’s very spiritual.
POTTER: This year’s harvest was such a success that St. Luke’s plans to keep the garden going next year and make it bigger, so it can feed even more people, body and spirit.
CARA GONZALEZ (holding out fresh basil): Amazing. Here, take a sniff. Tell me that’s not spiritual right there. Amazing.
For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Bethesda, Maryland.
Spiritual Gardening
by Norman Wirzba
Gardening is never simply about gardens. It is work that reveals the meaning and character of humanity, and is an exercise and demonstration of who we take ourselves and creation to be. It is the most direct and practical site where we can learn the art and discipline of being creatures. Here we concretely and practically see how we relate to the natural world, to other creatures, and ultimately to the Creator. We discover whether we are prepared to honor these relations by nurture and care and celebration, or despise and abuse them. Gardens are a microcosm of the universe in which all the living and nonliving elements of life meet, elements ranging from geological formations and countless biochemical reactions to human inventiveness and age-old traditions about cuisine and beauty. When and how we garden gives expression to how we think we fit in the world. Through the many ways we produce and consume food, we bear witness to our ability or failure to gratefully and humbly receive creation as a gift from God.
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To garden effectively is to bring human living into fairly close, appreciative, and sympathetic alignment with the life going on in the garden. It requires us to know a particular plot of land and understand its potential, and then work harmoniously with it. To garden is to unseat oneself as the center of primary importance, and to instead turn one’s life into various forms of service that will strengthen and maintain the many memberships that make up the garden. It is to give up the much-trumpeted goal of modern and postmodern life—individual autonomy—and instead live the life of care and responsible interdependence. This is what the biblical command to “till and keep” the garden means. When we garden well, devoting ourselves to the strengthening of the memberships of creation, personal ego and ambition gradually recede from the lines of sight so that the blessings and glory of God can shine through what we see. When we serve a garden well by learning to calibrate our schedules and desires to complement gardening realities, life has the chance to thrive and smell and taste really good.
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Gardening, besides being a practical, life-nurturing task, is also always a spiritual activity. In it people attempt to make visible and tasty what is good, beautiful, and even holy. Every act of gardening presupposes and embodies a way of relating to creation, a way that invariably invokes moral and spiritual decisions. Though membership in a garden is a given, how we will take our place in the membership is not. Our aim must be to develop into good gardeners, gardeners who work harmoniously among the flows of life. This means that besides vegetables, flowers, and fruit, gardeners are themselves undergoing a spiritual cultivation into something beautiful and sympathetic and healthy. A caring, faithful, and worshipping humanity is one of the garden’s most important crops.
Norman Wirzba is Research Professor of Theology, Ecology, and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School. These excerpts are from his book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Navaratri
NARAYANSWAMY SUBRAMANIAN: Navaratri is known as the Festival of Nine Nights, and this is dedicated to the Supreme Being in the form of the Divine Mother.
The Mother is worshiped in three different forms. Each of these forms have a certain characteristic. Goddess Durga helps us overcome obstacles. Goddess Lakshmi gives us both spiritual as well as material wealth. Goddess Saraswathi is the one that confers knowledge and wisdom and ultimately takes us to the path of liberation.
We have been having a special fire ceremony. This year, in view of the calamities that are facing the world, we seek the divine grace and blessings of the Divine Mother to mitigate financial turmoil, the H1N1 virus and other diseases that are spreading.
Priests offer a variety of fruits. We offer vegetables, grains. In India, women wear what’s called saris, so we offer saris to the Divine Mother. These are all offered with clarified butter, the purest form of offering.
The fire is a carrier of all the oblations that you give to divinity. Just like when you send a telegraph money order, the fire takes what you give and converts it to the kind of food or the material things that is desired by the deity.
Material offering, when combined with chanting portions of what’s called the 700 hymns on the Divine Mother, becomes a very powerful vibrational offering to the deity. We feel that the divine vibrations will reach throughout the world and will benefit all mankind.
Water is supposed to be a very powerful way of absorbing these vibrations. They carried these silver pots filled with water that had been energized with all the powerful chantings up to the temple. The sanctified water is poured on the deities. This is one way of recharging, resanctifying, increasing the positive vibration of the deities. The deities are already very charged, but from time to time, we need to recharge it so that the vibrations increase, and it becomes more and more powerful in terms of blessing the devotee who comes to worship.
We had anthropomorphic forms, where God is deified in a human form, and as we progress in our meditation, in our spiritual exercises, the form no longer becomes important. God is no longer confined to a certain temple, to a certain deity. God is everywhere, and once you start seeing God in everything, that’s when you have reached a certain level of perfection, and that’s when we say there’s no more worth for you, because you’re now merged with the God, and this is what Hinduism is all about.
