My own spiritual journey has been a piece with my politics. As I understand Christianity, the primary concern of the Scripture and much of our tradition is justice. To us who are affluent that concern for justice often feels like an unfair "option for the poor." The following articles are parts of my spiritual journey for anyone interested.
Repentance
Repentance appeared in The Living Pulpit, a journal for preachers in the summer of 2004. In it, I look at the question at what repentance might look like for a middle-class American like myself who benefits from so much injustice.
It is not against human enemies that we have to struggle but against the Sovereignties and the Powers who originate the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens. Eph 6:12
Every day, tens of thousands of children die of hunger and easily preventable infectious diseases, yet the countries of the developed world do not spend the insignificant percentage of their resources necessary to prevent these tragedies. Scientific consensus warns of the terrifying dangers of global warming—likely to cost millions of lives and irreparable harm to the environment—yet we refuse to cut our greenhouse gas emissions significantly for fear of reducing profits. An American citizen can work full time, year round and still not raise his or her family out of poverty, yet our local, state, and federal governments refuse to enact living wage laws or craft tax policies that could easily solve the problem.
When Mental Illness Blocks the Spirit
Aside from my first article (in 1984) on medical mistakes, I have had more response from this article than any other article I've written. I've suffered from clinical depression all of my adult life, and I've found it very difficult to experience the "joy in the Spirit" that is supposedly a hallmark of the Christian life. I've known others with similar problems. We have no difficulty recognizing that a person's physical ailments are not a sign of alienation from God, yet we still tend to think of mental illness that way. The article first appeared in The Other Side in the spring of 2002.
I first met Päivi the summer after my freshman year in college. I’d flown to London, took a ferry across the English Channel, and hitchhiked to Finland to spend the summer visiting the foreign exchange student who’d caught my eye in high school. Every Sunday night during the college year I’d written a long letter to Marja, and every Thursday there was a long letter from her in my postbox. We were anxious to see each other again. Marja’s parents welcomed me and were unfailingly gracious that entire summer. Only later did I learn that they had not been particularly happy to see me. They didn’t like the idea of losing their oldest daughter to a foreigner. But they gave me a bedroom, I started work at a local construction company for 65¢ an hour, and Marja and I became reacquainted, taking walks and long bike rides through the forests and farmlands of a Finnish countryside that was bathed in light almost twenty-four hours a day.
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