Final Leg

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Travel is a form of education.  You won’t get college credit for it (unless some administrative footwork is involved), but it is a means of learning.  One of the things you pick up flying coast-to-coast is how exhausting a day on a jet can be.  Quite apart from jet lag itself, the weariness of occupying your minuscule allotted space in a pressurized cabin can be intense.  And like ocean travel by ship, you have to dock at a distance to use smaller and smaller forms of transportation to reach your destination until at last you walk inside.  This was the first year that such a trip ended by returning to a house rather than somebody else’s rental unit.  It’s an odd feeling.

Work starts again tomorrow, and since I’ve been pretty much unplugged for an entire week, I know chaos awaits.  I also have the task of learning what has happened in this off-kilter world for the last week.  And then I have to make an inventory of the books that were ruined in our own personal Noah event just days before our flight.  The changing of scenes feels rather like a jump-cut in a movie.  Suddenly you find yourself somewhere different, with circumstances that have their own set of parameters.  Vacation time, in a sense, is like a dream sequence.  None of the episodes from back home can reach your sleep-addled mind.  And then you wake up.  Bills are due.  The lawn wants cutting.  The unpacking must continue.

For all that, it feels as if something transcendent happened.  Like Elijah being whisked away in his own personal whirlwind, I was on a plane that took me to a different plane of existence.  A place where no matter what decisions were made the outcome would be pleasant.  Coming home involves what theologians like to call “metanoia,” a sense of transformation—memories that give you strength to carry on the quotidian tasks that make up the vast bulk of our lives.  Lakes in the mountains are all fine and good, but society demands its pound of flesh, and the way they get it is through productive employment.  Tomorrow it’s back to work, a chance to test just how successful the metanoia might’ve been.  This is the reason we traveled on a Saturday, for the sabbath should be a day of rest.  No one knows where that whirlwind set Elijah down, but it’s virtually certain that he had plenty to do once he got there.

Work Weekend

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It’s a Saturday and my wife’s at work. She’s worked five days already and will still be at work tomorrow. I’m lazing in bed until 5 a.m. when I hear the neighbor’s alarm clock from upstairs. An hour later I see him headed to his car, dressed for work. I think about the concept of weekend and how it apparently means nothing any more. Well, I’m not at work, so it must mean something, but it’s not what it used to be. Don’t get me wrong—when I was a professor I gladly worked through weekends. Indeed, I was working pretty much all the time. I was paid to be a thinker, and I can’t shut this thing in my head off. My current job, however, is a 9-to-5 with expectations of more, but not entailing any extra compensation. Overtime? You lucky one, you’re “exempt!” And don’t forget to take your laptop home, in case something comes up in the middle of the night. (I do read the timestamps on my emails.)

The weekend is a religious idea. Ideal, even. We have the biblical concept of the Sabbath to thank for our free Saturdays, when they come. Christian beliefs about resurrection to account for Sundays. Days originally set aside for worship. Time off work is worship now. When else will we get the laundry done? Groceries bought? Floors swept? I leave before six each day and arrive home near seven at night. To keep up my Manhattan lifestyle I have to awake before four and head to bed at eight. If I had an extra minute to access my memories I might think this a little odd. I used to have time to write books. Where did that go? Vacation time? You have to be at the airport two hours early so you can be frisked for a plane that’s inevitably late. You get five days off, and two will be spent traveling. Work waits for no one.

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I guess it’s no surprise that those who argue that we should abolish religion have jobs that either they love or that don’t require weekend hours. They have time to examine this gift horse minutely in the mouth. You know, we don’t have to have days off. In olden times, or even today on farms, the concept of a weekend is only academic. Those whose jobs are just work to keep an imprisoned soul in its weary body are, after all, expendable. Perhaps I’m just too weak. The occasional three-day weekend rejuvenates me to a degree that’s almost frightening. I wonder why we can’t add holy Fridays to our list of days to worship. There is a price to be paid for neglecting time to reflect. I can’t imagine Pharaohs and kings wanting to grant any more time off, however. We all know who we’re really working for, and it’s not the one who gave us our weekends in the first place.

Truly Educated

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Binghamton University looms large in my consciousness, for rather obvious reasons. Although it sits in a small corner of upstate New York not particularly near anything famous, it has its own culture. Having taught at several schools, and having studied at many along the way, I’ve always been particularly struck by the genuine nature of Binghamton. For example, it is the only school—apart from a hazily recalled “Bible Study” led by the then president of Grove City College—at which the president has made himself available to be met and chatted with by hoi polloi. I’ve met and talked with him twice, and although I taught a phenomenal number of courses at Rutgers, and conveniently solved a crisis in the religion department for a year at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, I never found a time or place when the president was available to the likes of mere mortals. Not only that, but at a time when other universities are cutting whatever faculty they can to make more administrative posts, Binghamton is actually hiring faculty and expanding. I feel renewed when I visit the campus. You can tell they care about people.

A story in the Washington Post underscores this. One of the graduation speakers at the Watson School of Engineering is an Orthodox Jew. His commencement ceremony fell on Saturday—the sabbath. According to the dictates of his faith, speaking through a microphone system that passes through a soundboard is considered work, and could not be done on the sabbath. In today’s climate, I would expect most universities to say, “too bad.” Religion is not to be taken seriously, right? So just get over it. Here’s where Binghamton, however, shines. They taped the address beforehand, allowing the speaker to take the stage and have someone else broadcast his speech. This isn’t about picking apart the logicality of anyone’s personal Torah, it’s about recognizing the human.

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Our very religious society has a way of compartmentalizing religion so that we can still get away with what we want to do. We can be religious when our clergy so dictate, but otherwise we’re pretty much free to look out for number one. This story is one that makes me proud to have once been a part of a system that includes a school that can truly lay claim to the designation “higher education.” We learn about the world to become, ideally, better citizens of it. Any university that is able to take what might seem to be a petty problem and recognize its human dimension deserves to have our admiration. It restores my faith in the future. At least in a small corner of upstate New York.

Aftermath of Easter

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Holidays, it seems, are increasingly overloading themselves with baggage. Not only are many of them thinly veiled celebrations of materialism, but many are now being tied to “issues.” As I survey the aftermath of Easter as I saw it this year, it becomes plain that even the message of self-sacrifice and hope springing eternal can be co-opted. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students at Montclair State University hosted a screening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ last week. An outcry of biblical proportions flooded university discussion groups over what was deemed cultural insensitivity. Gibson’s version of the gospel failed to impress me when I saw it, stressing as it did Gibson’s sadomasochistic torture scenes in an effort to raise a few welts over “Christ-killers.” Back at Nashotah House I was regularly on the preaching rota. (I’m not now nor have I ever been ordained in any denomination. I have, however had preaching experience going back to my high school years.) My final sermon asked whether we should accept theological truths from a loose cannon of an actor. These physical accidents may have had more than a little in common.

Conversely, my first sermon at the seminary – the very year I was hired, and several years since my last pulpit performance – featured Abraham Lincoln. Nashotah House was a bastion for disgruntled southerners at the time; they were often the only ones conservative enough to fit the seminary’s profile. My admiration of Lincoln was expressed in an innocent expostulation on the merits of freedom. Afterwards I was drawn aside and admonished, being informed, “not everyone here believes Lincoln was a hero.” Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, a point that has not escaped those who note that the Civil War began 150 years ago this month. Those at Nashotah who disliked my words felt that I was disparaging the south. With roots in South Carolina, I indeed was not. Slavery is wrong in any ethical system that will stand up to scrutiny. Those who believe in equality, however, often pay the ultimate price.

Holidays do not always bring out the best in us. We need the respite, and we have the Jewish community to thank for coming up with the Sabbath that has led to our weekend lifestyle. Each weekend rival churches fill up with those who believe others to be wrong. Religion seems to have failed in its quest to unite. A colleague at Montclair cited the quotation of uncertain attribution: “having a war about religion is like having a fight over who’s got the best imaginary friend” – this was in the context of the screening of Mel’s Passion. The fact is, when it comes to religion nobody knows the correct answer. The humble response one would like to imagine is the mutual encouragement to continue to strive for the truth. More likely than not, the response is someone will select their weapon of choice and try to prove their point of view the old fashioned way.

Flaming Chariots

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Religion is a demanding taskmaster, often completely at odds with the lifestyles of even its most staunch practitioners. Having spent my entire lifetime trying to understand it, I marvel at its imperiousness. In a story reminiscent of the unlikely hit film of 1981, Chariots of Fire, a recent Verizon human interest story highlights how religion sometimes impedes people, particularly children, from achieving what they may believe God put them here for. The story focuses on aspiring gymnast Amalya Knapp, yet to see 10, who has been prevented from full competition potential because of observing the Sabbath. As the article points out, this is not an issue limited to Orthodox Judaism, since “She isn’t the only young athlete faced with reconciling her passion for sports with religious obligation. Experts say the issue arises in all faiths, in nearly every sport, and at all levels of competition.” In one of the great ironies of human psychological development, we have engineered religions to prevent us from reaching our full potential.

In a way that few can appreciate today, the Sabbath rest was originally an unexpected gift. Ancient people had no concept of a weekend, a harrowing thought for most frantic people today who live their lives for the brief respite from insanity that the weekend offers. The recognition that a mandatory day off might actually improve the human condition was as prescient as it was radical. Time off to improve productivity? Today we know it to be true. But the more a religion gives its adherents, the more it seeks to take away. The God who gives you that free time wants to take it back. It is not really your time after all. “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” So says Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire. He will also refuse to feel his pleasure on the Sabbath.

Religions disagree on the fine details of why the divine put us here. They are united in the belief that such a reason exists, but the terms of the contract differ widely. For reasons that the divine alone can comprehend, many human activities are subject to heavenly hegemony. The classical Greeks called it hubris when a mere mortal excelled to a point that embarrassed the gods. In response a human who wanted the most out of life knew not to show the gods what you are truly made of. For even the kindest of gods are jealous of divinity. And as all religions repeatedly demonstrate, despite divine demands for us mortals to share, gods are in no way obligated by their own rules.

Monday Morning of the Soul

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Western society is much indebted to the Hebrew Bible and the culture it has engendered. Nowhere is this more evident than the now hallowed concept of the weekend. Most of our time increments are determined by the movements of celestial bodies – the sun marks our days and years, the moon keeps our months rolling along. But the seven-day week is a bit of an anomaly. We know that the ancient Babylonians experimented with the seven-day idea, but it was the Hebraic concept of the Sabbath that provided us with a regular day off.

Ancient agrarian societies knew no “days of rest.” The old saying, often attributed to nineteenth-century American farmers, states that your cows require milking, even on the Lord’s day. Life in ancient times, for most individuals, was a daily slog, repetitive, long, and repetitive, of struggling to survive. The idea that you could take a break from survival to relax and not work simply did not equate. A break from survival is the same as death. When ancient priests – city-dwellers, no doubt – decreed that Saturday was a special day because even the Almighty needs a little Miller-time, well, the idea caught on. Society, once it had become sufficiently urbanized, could allow one day off a week.

Fast forward to the Christian contribution. Early followers of Jesus were Jewish and therefore already sold on the Sabbath concept. The resurrection, they asserted, took place on Sunday, so it was appropriate to worship on that day as well. A two-day worship minimum had been established. To many ancient folks this looked like laziness with a religious blush. Nevertheless, it caught on. Now many of us in a leisure-based society, with white-collar work that usually can handle being put off a couple days without immanent starvation or over-lactation, live for the weekend. Constraints of doing it for “the man” are off, we are free to be who we really are. Two-sevenths of the time, anyway.

Religions have given the world special gifts. As another dreadful Monday morning forces us out of bed early and focuses our eyes on a distant Friday afternoon, we should remember to thank Judaism and Christianity for their combined worshipful sensitivities. If it weren’t for them, we would have endless weeks of Mondays.