WE BELIEVE WHAT WE WANT TO BELIEVE

Fake news. Conspiracy theories. Collusion. The moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood back lot. The world is flat. There was no Holocaust. There is no god/God. There is a God. There are many gods. Jesus was not God. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Jesus was raised from the dead. Jesus was not raised. The list is endless, is it not? Each of us can add to it. And we do.

We watch the news. Or do we? It has almost gotten to the point where we do not know what to believe or whom to believe. Perhaps it has always been that way. Truth hucksters have been around from time immemorial. The snake oil salesmen we see depicted in old cowboy movies are only one version of the snake oil salesmen today who are trying to sell us their version of the truth.

So how did they get away with it back then, all those back-thens? The same way they do today. How is that possible? Very simply: we believe what we want to believe. If we want to believe that that bottle of whatever it is can cure us of some malady, we’ll purchase the bottle, take the medicine and trust that it will work. If we want to believe what someone is telling us is the truth and that the opposite is not the truth, we will believe it trusting that the truth is being told.

When that snake oil turns out to be worthless and the truth we believed to be true turns out to be a lie, when reality sets in, then what? Whom do we now trust? Or does what happen is that we no longer trust anyone? It happens so easily. Someone we trust deceives us and we either wonder if we can now trust anyone or we become cynical when someone tells us that we can trust what is being said.

All that said, the bottom line still remains the same. We believe what we want to believe because what we want to believe fits who we are. If we want to believe that most people are good, we will be trusting. If we want to believe that everyone or the government or our boss is out to get us, we will believe that without any proof or because of some slight or because (fill in the blank).

And so when we turn on the news and we hear others asserting what we believe is false, we wonder how they came to believe that nonsense. They believe it because they want to believe it. And if they asked us why we believe what they consider nonsense, we would have to reply in the same way: we want to believe it.

So how do we know what to believe? How do we know what is the truth and who is telling the truth? Do all we have to go on is what we personally believe until the truth comes out as it always does sooner or later? As with what we believe about God, so with everything else we believe: the truth will all come out in the end. That’s not much consolation but it may all we have at the present moment in time.

WEST POINT

Blessed and thankful once again. Arlena and I recently returned from a bus tour that took us to many Revolutionary War sites in New York and New England where the War really got started. We began, however, at the site that was, in essence, the end of the War, namely Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, New York. Then we headed to what was one of the later results of that War: West Point.

Thomas Jefferson, almost immediately after his inauguration, directed that plans begin to establish a military academy at West Point, West Point being a strategic site overlooking the Hudson River during the War. Our stop there was probably the highlight of the tour, at least for me. What I remember most was one of the first things I laid my eyes on. We walked into the Visitor’s Center. I looked up and on the wall were pictures of five alumni in their cadet uniforms: Ulysses Grant, John Joseph Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight David Eisenhower and Omar Nelson Bradley. Wow!

Perhaps for my children and grandchildren these names mean very little. Even for me on a personal level there is little connection. The wars these men fought in and led were over before I learned about them. Eisenhower was President during most of my teenage years but there was no real connection. And there still is not. But that is not the point and that is not what made me stand there in awe as I looked up at their portraits.

No one knew, not even these men themselves, how their lives would turn out after they graduated and entered the military. They could not even have imagined it. Yes, they may have dreamed of becoming a general or leading a great army into battle as they were completing their studies, but those would only be dreams. My guess is that when they looked back on their careers, even then they could not believe who that young cadet in that picture became.

And then I thought of my children and especially my grandchildren, none of whom at this point in their lives has a similar photograph. They’re still too young. And then I thought of myself and my college graduation picture. Yes, I had a pretty good idea what my life would be like, dressed in my seminary cassock. But even those thoughts and dreams, in hindsight, were way off the mark.

Real life always gets in the way of our dreams and plans and expectations. It is what we do with that life as it comes our way that is important. Grant failed in almost everything he did until he became General of the Army of the Potomac. Eisenhower was a fun-loving cadet who once showed up for roll-call without his pants and who graduated in the middle of his class. Who knew?

Who knows about what life will bring? No one, that’s who. But what we do know is that, dreams notwithstanding, if we do the best we can each day, we’ll be okay.  Okay?

WE’RE ALL FAILURES

Who of us hasn’t failed at something sometime in our lives? In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we have failed many, many times. No one is perfect. Even the best of the best failed regularly. Ty Cobb was the best hitter of all time in baseball. His career batting average was .367. That is almost unheard of these days. And yet, as great a hitter as Cobb was, he still failed to get a hit more the six out of every ten times he came to bat. If you fail only seven out of every ten times over a career, you’re Hall of Fame material.

Imagine that: being considered the best in baseball when you fail that often! Get only three out of ten questions on an exam and you fail miserably. Getting six of them correct just might get you a D. Granted I am comparing apples with street cars, but the point still holds: we all fail and we fail much of the time. What we fail at is living up to our potential, whatever that potential is.

That means two realities. First, we can allow ourselves to be satisfied with not doing our best because no one does his or her best all of the time. What’s a little failure here now and then, we may ask ourselves. We all come up short, so what’s the big deal? It’s easy to fall into that trap of allowing ourselves to settle for something that is less than our best. My guess is that if you are like me, you’ve done that settling on occasion, maybe on too many occasions.

On the other hand, always giving it our best shot even though we might come up a little short is what we should expect, even demand, of ourselves. The great athletes always get angry with themselves when they fail to get a hit. What they do not do is either shrug their shoulders and not care or allow that failure to so consume them that they get stuck in their tracks and, thus, continue to fail.

To be sure, failure is good for the soul and the psyche. First of all, it reminds us that we just might not be as good as we think we are. That can and should keep us humble. Second, it allows us to learn from our mistakes, our failures. Good hitters, when they fail to get a hit, go back to the dugout to reflect about why they did not. Sometimes it was indeed their fault. And sometimes the other guy, the pitcher or his teammates, just happened to be a little better on that occasion.

It happens. We fail because we are not good enough at that moment. We fail because others are better at that moment. We fail because we did not give our best. We succeed because we were good enough and because we gave it our best. What we need to do, at least every once in a while, both after failures and after successes, is to take a moment to reflect on why we failed or why we succeeded.

If and when we do that, what we will discover over time is that our failures become less and our successes become more. But we will still continue to fail and continue to learn.

F. E. A. R.

Fear. We are all afraid of something, perhaps many things, certainly of the unknown – and there is much that is unknown to us. That is simply a fact of life. It is how we deal with these fears that is important, vital even, to our physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Fear can paralyze us and, at times, does. Fear of the unknown makes us stop in our tracks so much so that we are immobilized. Such is the power of fear.

Lest we think fear is bad we need to be reminded that it is not, certainly not always and often for the better. It keeps us from heading down the wrong and dangerous road. It keeps us from acts of foolishness that, in the end, would bring harm to ourselves and, even worse, to those we love. We know this to be true because there have been times when we went against our better judgment and brushed fear of consequences aside and had to pay the piper for our foolishness.

But there is another kind of fear that is insidious and, sadly, seems to be very prevalent in our society today. It is the fear, as a colleague pointed out in a sermon I heard while on a busman’s holiday one Sunday, that is engendered from F. E. A. R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. It has become such that we are not sure any more about what is true and what is a lie. Even worse, any real truth with which we disagree is now labeled as fake, unreal, and in other words, a lie.

That should cause us to truly be afraid. When we know longer know what is true and what is not, then all we can do is live in fear. Is this what we have become as a people, as a nation? Is every truth with which we disagree now somehow false simply because we disagree with it or because it makes us look bad or somehow less? Is this how our government wants us to live?

So who’s telling the truth anymore? Remember Pilate asking Jesus “What is truth?”? Pilate’s obvious unsated implication was that “truth is what I say it is because I am the one in power. That’s the truth!” So is what is true what the one in power says is true even if there is false evidence appearing real to the contrary? Is what is true only that which makes us look good and that which doesn’t obviously a lie?

President Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of the Great Depression, when millions of people lived in real fear because they did not know where their next meal was coming from, told the people that they “have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Real fear, not fake fear, fear arising out of someone’s need to control. Roosevelt was encouraging the people to not allow fear to so overwhelm them that they lost all hope. Hope overcomes fear, real fear, not false evidence (meaning lies) that appear to be real but are simply meant to make us afraid.

I am not afraid, F.E.A.R. aside. I live in hope. The truth, not lies, always wins in the end.

WHAT A BLESSING: JULY 4 AT MT. VERNON

Independence Day will never be the same for me again. Arlena and I were privileged and blessed to be able to spend July 4 at Mt. Vernon, which is, as everyone knows, the stately home of our first President. We were part of a bus tour that also stopped at the War Memorials around the city and then spent some time on the Mall. But it was being at Mt. Vernon on July 4 that made everything else pale in comparison.

As our tour arrived, 101 men and women from 50 countries around the world were naturalized as citizens of the United States. Then “George Washington” spoke to the thousands gathered around the porch to remind us about what being a citizen means. To be sure, 101 of those who heard him truly know what that means. Daytime red-white-and-blue fireworks put a period onto his talk.

We did not tour the home because, blessed again, we had been there the week before as part of a five-day tour of presidential homes in Pennsylvania (one home: James Buchannan) and Virginia: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Wilson. It was almost an historical information overload. Almost. But in these times in this country it was a blessing to be reminded how much our forefathers (and foremothers who supported them) gave to make this country great. It has never lost that greatness in spite of what some people say.

And never will. Why would any of those 101 new citizens have left their homes if not because they wanted to live and work in and become a citizen of the United States? Why do you think there are Pittsburgh Steeler bars everywhere around this country and even across the oceans? Why? Because Pittsburgh is still where their heart is. For those 101 and their new compatriots all around the USA who became citizens that day, their old home will always be where their heart but their home is now here.

Being at Mt. Vernon on July 4, and then watching the fireworks over the Capital from high atop a restaurant while thousands gathered on grassy slopes and in hundreds of boats in the Potomac to do the same, made me proud to be a citizen yet all the while knowing that as great as we are as a country, we can and must and will be better. The better angels among us and the better angel within us will make that happen.

And while the July 4ths yet to come, God willing, will never top this one, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said on another occasion, I have been to the mountaintop called Mt. Vernon. It will always be a reminder to me to be thankful for all those men and women who gave their lives for me to be so blessed to live in this great country. It is so easy to take this blessing for granted, to even honestly and validly complain about its failings and shortcoming. But we should never not be thankful for what we have.

If you have any doubts about that, ask any one of those 101. That’ll clear it up.

THANK GOD FOR THE HEART

The heart lies between the head and the stomach, and fortunately so, because more often than not it tempers the brain, wherever the brain happens to be at the moment: the head or the gut. If it were not for the heart, the brain, left on its own, could become the body’s own worst enemy.

When the brain is in the gut, the body and the mind operate on perceptions and likes. The food looks good, like that big piece of chocolate cake, so we eat it because we are convinced that something so good looking must also be so good for us – or at least the brain-in-the-gut makes it so seem. If the food, like liver, or the person, like someone of a different color, is not pleasing to the sight, we convince ourselves that there must be something wrong, even bad, with that food or that person. Gut reactions can get us into trouble and, of course, be totally wrong.

But, then, so, too, can perfectly rational responses to what we see and hear: the brain-in-the-head can prevent us from going down roads we should go because those roads seem to be the incorrect, even foolish, roads to take. For instance, we come up on a situation, analyze it thoroughly, and then rationally determine that the best thing for us to do is walk away. The brain tells us to have nothing to do with what we see, and so we do not. Sometimes, perhaps too often, listening to our head can prevent us from doing what we should do.

So it is very good for us as a person and as a people that the heart gets in the way. Sometimes, perhaps more often that we realize, it is only the heart that keeps gut reactions in check and lets us loose from rational prohibitions. If it were not for the heart, we would never be Good Samaritans. The gut tells us that we should avoid those we do not like and the head tells us that we should, even must, avoid trouble. The heart, however, says that we must help someone in trouble even if we do not like the person and even if it is dangerous to do so.

The heart tempers. Both the gut and the head are narrowly focused. The heart is as wide as can be. The gut chases after that which is pleasing and avoids that which is not. The brain thinks not of pleasure but only of what is best for the self. The heart reminds the gut that what is pleasing is not always good and what looks bad may very well be very good. The heart reminds the brain that while discretion may be the better part of valor and while prudence is a virtue, the right thing to do is not always the safest and surest.

If it were not for the heart, we would all be very lonely and isolated people, and also very stuck. We would not eat the pleasing food because the brain-in-the-head would warn us of the danger involved because we would probably eat too much and we would not eat what was good for us because the brain-in-the-gut didn’t like its taste.

The heart allows us to be open to everyone and everything but keeps us from going overboard in either direction. It does gut checks and brain scans to help us do what is right. We need to rely more on our heart than on our head or our gut.

GUT THINKING

As is obvious to anyone who knows me, my brain often resides in the wrong part of my anatomy. Instead of being in the head where it belongs, it migrates to my stomach and firmly ensconces itself there. I know this to be true. Why else would I eat chocolate and ice cream and all those other goodies my brain-in-my-head would tell me are not good for my physical well-being and that I must avoid? The devil made me do it? I only wish I could blame someone else and not the fact that my brained moved.

If there is any consolation, and there is little, especially when the pants get tighter around the waste, it is the knowledge that no one is immune from such thinking. When we think from the stomach, the gut, we really do not think. We react to stimuli, pleasant or otherwise. If the food looks good, smells wonderful, appeals to me, I will eat it. My gut thinking takes over.

On the other hand, if someone tells me to eat what is placed before me because it is good for me, my gut thinking immediately kicks in. The gut knows, instinctively knows, that the food will taste awful. On the other hand, if my brain resided in my head, I would eat the food no matter how horrible it looked or tasted simply because it would be good for my health.

Gut thinking goes beyond the physical. If it only remained there, we would have a world both of fat people and a world of fatheaded people, for that is what gut thinking creates. In fact gut thinking is an oxymoron. We do not think with our gut; we react. Gut thinking produces prejudice: if it looks horrible, it must be horrible; if it doesn’t feel good to me, it must be bad; if I do not understand it, it must be wrong; if the people I like say it’s the truth, it must be the truth.

We think with our brain and react with our gut. Yet, all too often, we allow gut reactions to control our thoughts, our words and, even worse, our actions. If this tastes good, looks good, it must be good for me; thus, it must be good. If it tastes bad, looks bad, it must be bad for me; thus, it must be bad. Again, we allow our gut reaction to pre-judge the truth to make what is not true into the truth.

History is replete with examples of whole societies prejudging others because they did not like what the other looked like, acted like or spoke like. It was only when they were able to allow their brains to take over and allow themselves to truly get to know the other that they discovered the truth. Would that all those examples are historical and not current. But, sadly, even tragically, they are not.

It is very difficult to admit the truth when we think, or rather react, with our gut. It is even more difficult to admit that our actions and reactions are the result of gut thinking, which, again, is not thinking. What brain-thinkers and gut-reactors both all too often forget about is that part of the body in between: the heart. The heart tempers both the gut and the brain. Can you imagine what a heartless society would look like? It would be so out of whack if ruled by the gut and so dull and boring if ruled by the brain. More later.