My last three columns

Many paths lead to spirituality
Feb 20, 2011

Occasionally I get e-mails from well-meaning Evangelical folks who, knowing that I come from a Southern Baptist tradition, will challenge me to take my column to the next level.

I get comments like, "Why don't you use your column to spread the good news of Christ?" If they are feeling particularly brave, they will issue stronger comments like, "Your meaningless drivel doesn't belong on the religion page! Why don't you tell people that Jesus is their only hope?"

There are two reasons I don't use my column to proselytize. First, aside from the fact that I wouldn't have a column if my editors thought I was using it to spread my own version of the Gospel, there is a simpler reason: I write a spiritual column, not a religious one.

What's the difference, you ask?

Spirituality is that sense of awe and wonder we all have about the creation that surrounds us. It's about who we are, how we hope, how we pray and how love works. Spirituality is that piece of ourselves that attracts us to something outside ourselves. It is that basic appetite or search engine we have that seeks our creator.

Religion is one of the destinations to which spirituality often can take us. Destinations can be different for all of us. Spirituality may bring a person to Christianity, but it might also bring a person to Buddhism or Judaism.
Personally, I'm not ashamed to say it here, loud and clear, that my spiritual search has led me to Jesus Christ and the God that Jesus is said to reveal.

My personal faith is something I recommend to everyone who asks me about the hope I carry within me.

Since Christianity is my chosen religion, I worship and dialogue with those who believe as I do. But in this newspaper column, I seek a more ambitious dialogue. I seek a dialogue that takes me beyond the Christian community and into a conversation with all those made in the image of God.

It is the same kind of cross-cultural dialogue I challenge my readers to seek and explore.

Now, consider the aforementioned reaction that I've received from some Evangelical readers, and you can see how easily it can translate into a metaphor about how we seek to share our own faith with others.

There are many folks who seek to share their faith and spirituality on the religion page of life and proclaim their faith only to people who would agree with them. The kindly expression for their strategy is that they are "preaching to the choir." The less kindly expression is they've "become so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good."

The problem with that strategy is that if we only look for a god that looks like us, we are going to miss God in a lot of places. The truth is, if you really believe your religion has relevance to life, then you'll want to forgo the discussion with like-minded people and test it out where people really live.

So, in the end, I'd rather write this column in the same way I live, not as some kind of apostle or Elmer Gantry evangelist, but hopefully as a signpost or headline in life, gently nudging, not judging, people toward a relationship with a benevolent creator.

Burkes is a former civilian hospital chaplain and an Air National Guard chaplain. Write norris@thechaplain.net or visit thechaplain.net.

What do you hold sacred?
Feb 13, 2011

About twice a week, I jog past the burnt shell of a neighborhood house and wonder what the owners were able to save. If I were to lose my house to fire, I would at least rescue the three P's: people, pets and pictures.

But after that, I'd rescue the ordinary items I've learned to call "sacred."
First, there is the Gerber pocketknife my brother-in-law gave me 30 years ago. A newlywed at 22, I remember thinking, This is a grown-up knife. Grown-up dudes like MacGyver carry knives in case they have to skin something, carve something or defend sweethearts against roving street gangs. As ludicrous as it sounds, you can't always choose your sacred things, they choose you.

I'd also retrieve my 1979 Baylor University class ring. My attachment for it has nothing to do with being true to my school. No, my affection for the ring comes from a challenge issued by my roommate as I struggled with a physics class assignment one afternoon.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "You'll never graduate. You're just not 'Baylor material.' "

From that day forward, I not only counted my remaining days with him, but I counted the days until I would become eligible to wear the ring. It was not just proof I could be "Baylor material," but a sacred reminder of my self-promise to finish what I'd started.

After graduating, my girlfriend, now wife, accepted it as a promise ring during a summer job I took in an adjoining state. She knew the ring was sacred to me, and therefore a sacred promise to her.

I'd also be certain to grab the New King James Bible that Susan Bradley, a parishioner, gave me in 1988. The Bible is the out-of-print Robert Schuller's Positive Thinking Bible with optimistic Scriptures highlighted in blue.

The Bible is special because Susan was special. She and her husband, Bill, floated the interim loan we needed between the sale of our first home and the purchase of the next.

While we weren't much of a risk, it was a lot of money. At the time, I knew Bill had cancer, but Susan kept her cancer a secret. A few years later, I read from her Bible while officiating at their funerals. The Bible is the tangible demonstration of sacred trust.

Finally, I'd save my trumpet. Funny thing is that this pawnshop purchase has never worked well. The internal valves shift to produce the sound of a wounded animal.

It's not sacred at all, for it never could replace the sacredness I knew in my boyhood trumpet stolen 30 years ago.

What is sacred is the effort my wife made to replace the trumpet on a newlywed budget. Seeing the hurt caused by the petty thief, my wife scrimped for six months, saving the money to replace it.

I keep it now for the sacred effort she made to protect me from the painful loss.

Sacredness isn't limited to religion. In fact, it may be sacrilegious to delineate between the sacred and the ordinary.

Sacredness is contained in the ordinary spaces and things we allow the love of God to permeate, enunciate and illustrate.

After I grabbed these sacred things, I'd let my plasma screen TV and my computer burn. After all, I'm insured, and I'd do what any good man would do after a devastating fire. I'd buy a bigger TV and a faster computer.

What sacred thing would you rescue? Share your answer with someone special and then e-mail me at Norris@thechaplain.net or write me at P.O. Box 247, Elk Grove, CA 95759.

Subtle questions still plague race relations
Feb 06, 2011

"Have you ever been fired from a church?" I once asked my dad.
As a pastor, he was subject to the whim of the local congregation whose denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, saw 2,000 ministers fired each year.

My dad paused, as if wondering how much he should tell me.
"Once," he announced. "I shook hands with a black man on the steps of our Mississippi church. I was fired the next week."

Last month, as I hung around the National Guard Chaplain's Conference in Washington, D.C., with Seventh-day Adventist Chaplain Ivan Williams, I realized how far we've come in race relations since my dad's generation.

Ivan is African-American. We've been friends for almost 10 years, and during the conference, we ate meals together, shared our hurts and even went shopping together.

Hanging around Ivan is like befriending a true celebrity. People of all colors and persuasions love him. He's funny. He's sincere, and he's extremely caring to people he meets.

On one of our museum outings, when we stood looking at a gallery of previous museum directors, I said to Ivan, "Did you notice there aren't any people of color among these directors?"

Ivan surprised me when he responded with, "You ask questions other white people won't ask."

"Are you talking about how I asked the question about lunchtime in the conference?"

"Nah, man. You know what I mean," he said.

I did know. So, I asked a few more things.

"Why is it that you make friends wherever you go? And why is it that since I'm a member of a majority race, I have to prove my intentions with folks? Sometimes I'm jealous of you, man."

I don't know why, but we always call each other "man."

We laughed, perhaps a bit nervously as friends breaching the race issue. We both knew race relations had come a long way since rogue policemen let loose the dogs or pushed folks to the back of the bus, or off the lunch counter, but we also knew the subtle questions remain.

I had to wonder what it was about the clerk or waitress of color who'd greet Ivan first and bring that extra ice tea without asking. Yet I'm sure Ivan also questioned why it was the white people we met would often speak to me as if I was in charge.

There is an interesting little verse in Romans, which says, "God does not show favoritism." It's not a particularly profound thought until you analyze the passage in the early manuscripts. Literally, the verse says: "God is not a face receiver." It means God doesn't look upon the race of the face, but as the verse says, grants "glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good."

About the same time that the church fired my dad for shaking hands with a black man, a Biblical scholar named Clarence Jordan founded an interracial farming community called Koinonia based on the question: "Could people who followed the same Lord work side-by-side with people of all colors?"

As you might imagine, they experienced a great deal of opposition to that question, but the community still exists today. (See koinoniapartners.org.)
Jordan believed in questions that could provoke change. And I leave you with one of those questions he asked his own brother. When his brother balked at helping Koinonia Farms with legal representation, Clarence asked him, "Are you a disciple of Christ or merely an admirer?"

Good question for all of us.