You have probably guessed by now that the culture of manipulation doesn’t end with worship.  The high-profile mega-church types who use television to spread their propaganda use take advantage of people’s fears to manipulate and control them.  When Franklin Graham, for example, says that he believes that President Obama is a Muslim he is engaging in manipulation for political reasons.  He’s not the only high-profile preacher who manipulates people in this way, he’s just the latest example of those who regularly violate IRS regulations for non-profit organizations by interfering in the political process.

My objection is that there is a dishonesty in all of this that has no place in a person who claims to be a religious or spiritual leader.  Make no mistake about it, Franklin Graham doesn’t believe that the President really is Muslim.  Anyone who really believes the Muslim nonsense, or the birth certificate nonsense, at this point is either too stupid to tie their own shoes or they have voluntarily donned a set of blinders larger than most automobiles.  The truth is that Franklin Graham and others of his ilk care only about profit margins and continuing to build power and control over their constituents – and they would sell their soul to the devil (if there was such a thing as the devil) to do so.

At the beginning of the movement that we today know as the televangelist mega-church movement, it wasn’t like this.  There were good and wonderful people who really wanted to make a difference.  Before long making a difference became a very expensive proposition.  Fund raising became a priority.  The movement birthed the non-denominational movement, which brought with it a lot of freedom without much accountability.  Say what you will about the shortcomings of the denominational system, there is at least oversight of clergy and churches.  The oversight isn’t perfect, as we have seen over the past fifty years, but when one hears that a mega-church pastor who has imploded recently is willing to let someone take over their ministry for three million dollars a month – and that’s a ministry in trouble – we begin to see just how out of control things have become in what was once a religion but now is quite clearly an industry.

If the current economic collapse has taught us anything, it has taught us that captains of industry seldom act in the best interest of either their employees or their customers.  They act in the interest of their profits and their own bottom line.  As an aside, I wonder how many CEOs need three million dollars a month just to stay afloat?  I can’t even being to imagine the kind of pressure that someone like Jim Bakker was under when he needed to raise one million dollars each and every day to keep PTL afloat!  What kind of staff does it take for Joel Osteen to be able to fill what amounts to a huge stadium every Sunday, and what would his people have to do if the collection dropped off?  If you came to realize that what you were preaching wasn’t true, how could you possibly change the message if you thought it would impact the collection?

That question is precisely why “ministry” on the scale we are discussing cannot possibly be done with integrity if the ministry is to survive on the scale to which it has become accustomed to operating. Sooner or later, the leader will be faced with a choice between financial survival and personal and spiritual integrity.  The only person I know of that has ever made the right choice is Bishop Carlton Pearson, and I am privileged to know him.

I feel sorry for those who are under the influence of the Franklin Grahams of the world.  The people who are under the influence of such charlatans are good people who have been sucked in by master manipulators.  In what amounts to little more than a spiritual Ponzi scheme, there cannot be a good ending.

I don’t feel that there is anything wrong with being a spiritual or religious person.  In fact, as a spiritual teacher and priest, it would be sheer hypocrisy for me to find that problematic.  I also believe that everyone has a belief system, even if they have no particular spiritual or religious perspective.  Most of us would agree, for example, that if we say an elderly person in the supermarket struggling to reach something on a shelf it would be a good thing to help them.  Which one of us wouldn’t stop to help a child who had fallen and injured themselves?  Who among us is not moved by video of natural disasters such as the tornado in Joplin, MO last year, and who among us did not feel compassion for the victims of Tsunami and the subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan?  You don’t need an overtly  spiritual perspective to respond to people struggling or suffering,

I would expect that an elected official, whether local, regional, or nation, would respond from their own internal values while in office.  If a tornado struck the next county over, I would expect officials in my county to send assistance because they would be motivated by compassion.  Decisions such as those to create ramps at cross walks so the elderly and those with physical struggles have an easier time crossing the street arise from a basic human concern for the other that gives us all hope for humanity.  We would be hard pressed indeed to find someone who understood the reasons for such actions and still believed such measures were bad ideas.  As human beings, we have an innate capacity for caring for one another.

I believe, then, that it’s fair enough to ask questions of people running for political office questions that help us determine their beliefs.  We will want to know how they feel about helping the homeless, about accessibility issues of all kinds, about victims of crime and natural disasters, and so on.  How would they respond to a natural disaster half way around the world or right next door?  What’s their position on military action?  We need to know the answers to these kinds of questions regardless of our political affiliation if we are to make an informed decision at the polls.

In turn, politicians should be prepared to explain their beliefs and values so that we can make informed decisions.  They should be willing to help us come to understand them better so that we can elect someone who will take the actions that are important to us.  Certainly, there will be times when politicians will have to vote their conscience rather than poll their constituency, particularly when their isn’t a clear mandate from the electorate on an issue or the elected official feels that they would violate their conscience by voting in a certain way.  In turn, if we disagree with their decisions, we have the right to vote them out of office or recall them.

A line is crossed, however, when a politician cannot understand the difference between acting in accord with their own values and imposing those values on other people.  The notion of establishing a theocracy in America is contrary to the Constitution, and regardless of how strongly one believes their own values are correct it is inappropriate to attempt to impose their belief system on others.  This is precisely the flaw in the reasoning of the US Roman Catholic bishops on the issue of providing access to birth control for their employees.  In America, we are Constitutionally guaranteed that no particular religious perspective will be imposed upon us.  That means that you are free to practice your religion and beliefs, but you don’t get to tell someone who is not a member of your religion what they should do or believe.

A similar line is crossed when politicians imply that biblical law should be the law of the land in the United States.  Here we must recall that there is no one, clear definition of biblical law – Rabbis have been arguing about the Jewish Law for thousands of years and aren’t likely to come to consensus any time soon.  There is no small amount of irony in the reality that many of the same politicians who seek to outlaw Islamic law based on the Quran, known as Sharia law, also seek to impose biblical law in America.  The fact that a large segment of the population cannot see the hypocrisy in holding both positions simultaneously is frightening, indeed.

I have come to agree with the Hindu understanding that human beings are growing into new levels of consciousness all the time.  Any number of factors including education, life experience, the culture in which we are raised, our socio-economic standing, and our spiritual practice will affect that growth and spiritual evolution.  There are clearly people, and Rick Santorum is an excellent example, who simply cannot see beyond the confines of their own rather narrow religious perspective and are motivated much more by the teachings of their religion than the Constitution of the United States.  Why?  Not because he is a bad person, but because his consciousness has not sufficiently evolved for him to be able to see over the rather high fence that is the Roman Catholic Church.  The question for those seeking to elect him President is, how would he understand his vow at inauguration to defend the Constitution?  Would he feel compelled to defend it only when it didn’t conflict with his understanding of his Church’s teachings?  The same question could and should be asked of every candidate running for political office on every level.  We deserve to know if they are sufficiently evolved to serve us in the way we want to be represented.

This view also explains why, no matter how terrible a particular candidate may seem to you or me, someone will vote for them.  From our different places on the continuum, we have very different ideas about what make a candidate attractive.  No matter how unattractive, the two ugliest people (physically or behaviorally) at the dance usually end up dancing together.

This is precisely why those of us who enjoy a progressive spiritual perspective need to continue efforts to educate others – not to our positions, but rather to a place where they can made informed decisions in an increasingly compassionate way.  If we tell people they must vote as we do, we are just another groups seeking to impose our will on others.  If, on the other hand, we give others a supportive environment in which they can ask difficult questions and explore alternatives, they will begin the process of spiritual evolution – and everyone will benefit from that development.

Over the last fifty years or so the number of Christians – both practicing and not practicing – who believe in Atonement Theology has shrunk, as have the number of true believers in the existence of a customized, eternal torture chamber known as hell.  Not surprisingly, these changes make it necessary to reassess much, if not most, of our beliefs around Lent and Easter.  Does Lent still serve a function, or does it need to be abandoned?

I believe that Lent does, indeed, serve a purpose.  An annual time of reflection is worthwhile even if there is no broader meaning though I do believe there is broader meaning.  Regardless of your spiritual practices and beliefs, Jesus of Nazareth serves as an object lesson in applied spirituality.  For those of us who don’t see him as the victim of an abusive father God who created a system from which he couldn’t extract himself without committing filicide, Jesus is a reminder that the call to love radically and work for change in society that destabilizes the power and control of those in charge can lead to our untimely demise.  Again, regardless of our own spirituality, we might find Lent a convenient time to contemplate our own activism or – more fundamentally and more importantly – how well our own actions in our daily life reflect our beliefs and values.

Particularly as we move toward Spring and the seasonal renewal and rebirth that will soon occur all around us, we might contemplate the cycles of our own lives.  Hopefully, with each passing year we change and grow.  We experience life transitions not every year, but every few years.  This season could be a time to reflect on our transitions, both those that lie ahead and those we have already experienced with an eye toward evaluating how we are coping with them.  We might enter into dialogue with a trusted friend about our joys and concerns in these areas.  We might also look at those areas of our lives that need renewing, both practices we would like to discontinue and new experiments in living life more fully we would like to begin.

Spiritual renewal doesn’t have to be about self-denial and eating fish on Friday, although it certainly can be.  I’m not a big believer in a cookbook approach to our spiritual lives, and so I encourage you to take some time over the coming days and weeks to ask yourself what you need to do to nurture yourself and develop a plan to do so.  That would make this Lent a time of joy and spiritual rebirth that just might change the way you look at your world!

So you decide to take a, holiday.
You got your tape deck and your brand new Chevrolet.

A tape deck!  Not just a cassette player, mind you, but a tape deck.  Am I the only one who remembers tape decks or that the first ones were 8-track tape decks?

If you don’t remember 8-track tape decks, the whole thing is kind of hard to explain.  Think about a cassette, only much less convenient with much lower sound quality and a much higher likelihood of being eaten by the tape deck.  If you don’t know what a cassette is, please find your mother and tell her you are on the internet again without her permission.

Which one of us didn’t know, or have in our family, or were, this guy (I didn’t have any sisters, so it couldn’t have been me):

Your sister’s gone out, she’s on a date.
You just sit at home and masturbate.

Thankfully, I don’t have any pictures of that!  I do have one of this, however:

So you stand on the corner in your New English clothes.
And you look so polished, from your hair down to your toes.
Ah but still, your finger’s gonna pick your nose
After all.

Maybe that’s why the Cowboys can’t win the big game – Jerry’s [draft] picks leave something to be desired!

On the surface, of course, Captain Jack is about heroin use among the bored middle class on Long Island when Billy Joel was growing up:

But Captain Jack will get you high tonight,
And take you to your special island.
Captain Jack will get you by tonight.
Just a little push, and you’ll be smilin’.

There are also some pretty wild, amateurish interpretations of what the song means if you but do a Google search.  By the way, kids,  for those of you too young to remember, the middle class – which became extinct under President George W. Bush – used to be the socio-economic status of most of what we today know as the working poor.

So, on the surface Captain Jack is an anti-drug song, but as I get older….er, more mature, I have developed a sensitivity to other levels of meaning in the song.

So you play your albums, and you smoke your pot.
And you meet your girlfriend in the parking lot.
Ohh, but still you’re aching for the things you haven’t got.
What went wrong?
And if you can’t understand why your world is so dead,
Why you’ve got to keep in style, and feed your head.
Well you’re 21 and still your mother makes your bed,
And that’s too long.

There is a universal search for meaning in every human being.  We want to know why we are here on this planet and what life means.  The 1960s marked the beginning of a period we are still struggling with, a time when the institutions that had previously given us meaning started failing us profoundly.  We now recognize that these were the early years of the Roman Catholic Pedophilia scandal.  The Korean War ended without a victor, though nobody seemed to notice much, and the powers that were hastened to get us disastrously entangled in Vietnam to try to prove that we could still win a war.  President Kennedy was assassinated, as was his brother five years later, and Dr. King, and Malcolm X, and countless others in the struggle for Civil Rights – a struggle which continues to this day and now encompasses groups that weren’t much on the radar in the sixties, but the struggle is the same, isn’t it?

Artists know, very often long before the general public, because art is an undeniable expression of the Spirit.  Perhaps that’s why institutional religion is often so critical of art – art often does a better job discerning the Spirit than the Church does.  If you change the tape deck to a CD player, this could be written about American society in 2012:

So you decide to take a, holiday.
You got your tape deck and your brand new Chevrolet.
Ah, there ain’t no place to go anyway.
What for?
So you got everything, aww, but nothing’s cool.
They just found your father in the swimming pool.
And you guess you won’t be going back to school
Anymore.

It’s never too late to start listening, or re-listening, for what the Spirit has been saying all along but we have been too deaf to hear.