Have you lost your connection to others?

August 30, 2008

BY NORRIS BURKES
FOR FLORIDA TODAY

When it seemed the stranger in the public restroom was talking to me about meeting later, I almost closed my fly a bit too hastily.

I bolted for the door, but not before I suddenly realized he wasn't talking to me. He was talking to a friend through his wireless earpiece.

He didn't even know I was there, because, in his mind, he wasn't standing at the urinal. Through technology, he had isolated himself from his environment. He was in another place.

Isolation is becoming the rule of our society. We don't even ask directions anymore.

In our car, we ask Nuvi. We call her Nuvi after the model name printed on our GPS unit. I selected the female voice because I have four women in my household and follow directions better from a female voice.

Even on crowded airlines, we isolate. Remember the interesting conversations you used to have on the plane? Not anymore. Most people isolate by plugging their ears with a headset.

Even at my church, we've found ways to isolate. We have three services without much visit time in between. Each minicongregation is isolated from the other. In the parking lot, we play a game of musical cars with the incoming folks. And if you really want to self-isolate, you can stay home and watch our pastor on the Internet.

Our forefathers lived with long periods of isolation on the farms, but today we submerse ourselves into isolation with our electronics, nearly as quickly as Maxwell Smart from the '60s television series employed the Cone of Silence.

Isolation isn't always bad. It just depends how you use it.

Isolation can be a good thing. I've written several columns about finding a "God space" on the beach, or the mountaintop or near a good fishing spot. I've said many times, "Mark the places where you find God and go there often."

Even Jesus found such isolated places on the sea, in a garden or on a mountaintop. Jesus isolated himself, however, only long enough to recharge his ultimate purpose. He expressed that best in his "Prime Directive."

Remember "Star Trek" and the Prime Directive? Starfleet dictated there can be no interference with the internal affairs of other civilizations. Sounds good, but it still was basically, "Don't get involved -- isolate."

The Prime Directive Jesus gave was to "Love the Lord your God with all your passion . . . and love your neighbor as well as you do yourself."

It's the second part of the directive that gives us the most trouble. You certainly can't love your neighbor in isolation.

Jesus knew this.

He moved off the mountaintop and down into the valleys where the people lived. He did so because he knew real love is a game, which always requires multiple players.

This world is filled with a cacophony of distractions that threaten to drown out the purpose of our creation by blocking our connection to people. When we feel that happening, it's time to take a step back. Take off your headphones, put away your book and tune in.

It's really not such a profound principle. It all boils down to three Ls: listen, look and love.

Listen to people. Hear their needs, their hurts and their dreams.

Look people in the eye. Because looking at them in the eye helps you see their soul.

When we listen and look, the love follows rather naturally. It follows because by listening and looking, you start to see yourself.

Hence, the Prime Directive also becomes the best antidote for the pains of isolation, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Burkes is a former civilian hospital chaplain and an Air National Guard chaplain. Contact him at norris@ thechaplain.net or visit www.the chaplain.net.

'Gu-ahhd' says find your voice and use it

August 16, 2008

BY NORRIS BURKES
FOR FLORIDA TODAY

It is a piece of advice I'll never forget.

It was offered to me when I was a 19-year-old ministerial student at Baylor University after preaching in a rural Texas church.

I'm not exactly sure what I said during my 30-minute assignment, but given my youth, I probably stuck to the most profound theological truths like neo-Kierkegaardian Existentialism. And that was likely just the warm-up as I moved into dealing with the problem of evil in the world and God's plan for Africa.

Honestly, it would be hard to recall what my topic was, because I was much more obsessed with sermon delivery than I was with my sermon topic. As an "orator," I'd studied the best. Like Paul Harvey, I spoke in dramatic and exaggerated tones. Like Billy Graham, I held my Bible open wide with one hand while slicing the humid Texas air with the other.

I projected my voice and emphasized my points with pronounced gestures. I paced back and forth so people would be forced to follow me.

After I finished, the church's veteran pastor laid a hand on my shoulder and asked, "Son, do you mind if I offer some constructive criticism?"

Uh-oh, I thought. I could hear the gears grinding in this man's head, and they sounded like the gears of a truck ready to run me over. Didn't he like what I said about hell? Or did he want to argue the second coming of Jesus?

"Certainly," I said, brushing my hair back far enough for him to see he might be talking to Billy Graham's prodigy.

"How do you pronounce
G-o-d?" he asked, spelling "God" with the mannerism of a parent quizzing his preschooler.

Was this a trick question? Was this a question like the Kung Fu master poses to his disciple? ("Kung Fu" was a very popular TV show then.)

"God," I answered, adding a hint of a question.

"Exactly," he said. "It's just 'God.' One syllable, not two."

Before I could blurt out my denial, he asked, "Do you watch Billy Graham?"

I nodded that I did and added that Paul Harvey was another favorite.

"Graham is a Southerner. He pronounces God with a Southern drawl -- 'Gu-ahhd.' Didn't you say you're from California?"

My face reddened as I heard Graham's voice in my head. I found myself unconsciously mouthing Graham's pronunciation. The seasoned preacher was right. I had mimicked Graham during my entire sermon.

Yet the veteran preacher was giving me more than a speech lesson.

He was telling me my pulpit voice had become a mere puppet voice. I had mastered Graham's enunciation and Harvey's dramatic pause, but where was Norris?

The truth is with all those people in my head, there was no room for Norris.

But even worse, there was no room for God.

I left the church that night determined to use my remaining undergraduate years to find and learn my own voice. And I discovered it was only when I found my own voice that God came alive in the experiences I shared in my sermons.

It's a piece of advice I've never forgotten. God's name is easily memorized or mimicked. The hard part always will be finding a way to let God's voice become present in yours.

As I walked away that day, I must have looked a bit dejected.

"Hey, Norris," he called out. "Look up 1 Corinthians 1:21." Then he walked away smiling.

When I got home, I looked up the passage. It's about God's ability to speak to people of faith "through the foolishness of preaching."

As Paul Harvey would say, "Now you know the rest of the story."

E-mail norris@thechaplain.net or visit www.thechaplain.net.

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Faith will prevail in trying times

August 9, 2008
BY NORRIS BURKES
FOR FLORIDA TODAY

If you're picking up this newspaper, you've likely noticed the headlines: Everything is worse than you thought.

The mortgage crisis, still worse. The AIDS epidemic, growing worse. Global warming, far worse. Gas prices, unimaginably worse. Even the air at the Olympics, horribly worse.

The last guy who tried this hard to scare me was Hal Lindsey. He co-authored a 1970 runaway best seller with Carole C. Carlson titled "Late, Great Planet Earth."

Many people saw Lindsey as the Nostradamus of our times. Like today's doomsayers, he capitalized on the headlines of his day: the rebirth of Israel, the threat of war in the Middle East, an increase in natural catastrophes and the rise of Satanism and witchcraft.

He claimed these things were predicted by everyone from Moses to Jesus, and they pointed toward our impending destruction.

Some of us laughed at Lindsey. Some of us memorized him. But when gas prices soared during the Yom Kippur War of 1973-74, many of us were terrified that the Lindsey scenario had crept into the nonfiction section. Indeed, the NewYork Times called him the "No. 1 nonfiction best seller of the decade."

The whole book was a variation of the good cop-bad cop strategy, and many folks are using today's headlines to play out the same game.

The strategy is well stated in the old bumper sticker: "The good news is, Jesus is coming back. The bad news is he's ticked." (OK, the sticker doesn't say "ticked," but this is a family newspaper.)

The approach is used by a lot of religious people who want to present faith as war between good and evil.

You've no doubt encountered a few of these folks. They make faith seem like a choice between spending eternity in a bottomless pit of eternal fire or going to church three times a week. It's as if we're being asked to either obey Satan or give money to a poufy-haired evangelist.

The problem with their thinking is that real faith isn't an either/or proposition. It's an invitation. It's an invitation into a relationship.

It's like this. When I met my wife, I didn't say, "Marry me or you'll burn."

God doesn't say that either.

God doesn't need to scare us. He's not like the plaid-suited salesmen selling "Falling Sky" insurance, telling us to "please read the fine print."

God is not trying to save us from this world. For heaven's sake -- pun intended -- God created the world.

Healthy faith always will give me a perspective on the world. It helps me to understand that although I live in the world, I've come from different material, a spiritual material.

Faith doesn't save me from the effects of the world. Even Jesus said this in the verse immediately following the one commonly thrust before TV cameras at televised events. The message translates John 3:17 saying, "God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help."

God is about helping during times of hurt and pain, but he's not about making the pain so that he can then play the hero, the good cop.

The Lindsey star eventually faded when, in the end, the cold war defrosted and the Berlin Wall crumbled. The counterculture of the '60s never became the main culture, and Lindsey's prediction about it all crumbled with the wall.

These days, the man can be heard predicting the final jihad. Same station, different program. I guess there always will be fortunes found in the capitalizing on demise, death and destruction.

As for me, I choose to find my fortune -- and my future -- in the hope of faith.

Burkes is a former civilian hospital chaplain and an Air National Guard chaplain. Contact him at norris@ thechaplain.net or visit www.thechaplain.net.

Turn deaf ear to whispers of hatred

August 2, 2008

As Jim Adkisson awaits trial on first-degree murder charges in Knoxville, Tenn., from rampage in the liberal Unitarian Universalist church last month, many of us struggle to understand where that hatred comes from.

The truth is, it comes from liberals and conservatives. It's contagious. People don't get that way by themselves.

Hate comes as an individual thought. Then, it's whispered in the ear of another. Sometimes, the whisper is rebuffed by the brave, and hate thankfully dies.

But more often than not, people ignore the whisper of hate, which is where we get our word "ignore-ance." Ignorance and apathy provide virulent places for hate to grow. And when the whisper of hate is ignored or only half rebuffed, it sprouts a love-resistant strain, the strain that infects people like Adkisson.

Most of us are immune from the infectious strand carried by the likes of Adkisson or David Koresh. But there are subtle forms of infection just as there are more seemingly innocuous carriers.

In the world of religion, I've yet to see more infectious carriers than I've seen in the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These evangelical atheists would have you believe that all our problems stem from all forms of religious faith.

In his Dec. 3, 2006, New York Times op-ed piece, columnist Nicholas Kristof pleads for a "Truce on Religion."

Criticizing what he calls "an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive," he identifies Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," as leading the "Charge of the Atheist Brigade."

"It's a militant, in-your-face brand of atheism . . .," he writes. "Such discrimination on the basis of (non) belief is insidious and intolerant, and undermines our ability to have far-reaching discussions about faith and politics."

Dawkins encourages his readers to imagine a world without 9-11, Crusades, witch hunts, Israeli/Palestinian wars, Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, Northern Ireland "troubles," "honor killings" or "shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money."

Kristof asks you to imagine a world without the infamous atheistic leadership of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

Thankfully, Kristof, a world traveler, sees another side.

"Every time I travel in the poorest parts of Africa, I see missionary hospitals . . . churches support soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics that otherwise would not exist. Religious constituencies have pushed for more action on AIDS, malaria, sex trafficking and Darfur's genocide, and believers often give large proportions of their incomes to charities that are a lifeline to the neediest."

Kristof concludes, "We've suffered enough from religious intolerance that the last thing the world needs is irreligious intolerance."

Amen, Kristof. We can't allow intolerance of either kind. We must allow room for the conversation.

Fortunately, I have friends and readers who are the kind of atheists who put the human in "humanist." When I ask them what they want from the faithful, they tell me two things. First, they are tired of people making the assumption that an atheist can't possibly be a moral, upstanding, civic-minded person and not believe in God.

But mostly they tell me what I hear from nearly everyone.

"I want a conversation in which you aren't trying to make me think like you. I just need you to respect me. Respecting me will help me feel a lot better about respecting you."

At the end of the day, no one wants to be blasted for their faith or lack of it.

So, whether you're born again or atheist, liberal or conservative, don't give ear to the hate whisperer. For when you choose that level of hate, you will give room to the Jim Adkissons of the world and likely become a casualty yourself.

Visit www.thechaplain.net.

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