Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Amber. Stat locks. Kate’s healing stoma site. Rigel, whose love buoys me up. Kep and his steadfastness. Kate’s reading. Invisible Man right now. Ellison’s classic. The almost full Lughnasa Moon, red over Black Mountain this morning. Our more organized upstairs. Needing more blankets. The kindness of CBE.

Cancel culture. from Merriam-Webster: “To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person.” I’m giving the definition because I’ve been reading this term for a while now and didn’t know what it meant. Once I found the definition I immediately thought of a recent change I’d made in my e-mail signature:

“There is a love of wild Nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.” ― John Muir btw: Yes. I know about his racism. And, I deplore it. But, I also know about his love of the natural world and I love it. None of us are all one thing.

Other items I read pointed to the #metoo movement as a starting point as well as the more recent protests around George Floyd. It goes deeper and further back than that, though. Sinners don’t get into heaven. How much sin denies you entrance through the Pearly Gates? Never real clear. I’m speaking as a theologian here. Martin Luther famously said, “Hate the sin and love the sinner.” I’ve always found that an important idea.

Taboo. Kapu. Karma. Sin. Religious ideas that get social traction. In the Christian tradition the idea of sin, hamartia, missing the mark, plays an outsized role. IMHO. So outsized that it can cancel your heavenly bliss.

But who decides if your sins are too much? Or, just this side of the line?

In Christianity, God decides. But who knows how God views a particular person? Especially yourself? This question has dogged Christian apologetics for centuries. How can we know whether or not we stand in God’s favor? Clearly an important question if the afterlife is in play. Eternity.

The Protestant Ethic* is a good example of how this question can lead to corruption and blasphemy. Calvinists especially felt a need to know where they stood since predeterminism, in some cases double predestination, was a cornerstone of Reform theology. Double predestination says that God not only predetermines all actions in the universe, but also (the double part) determines who goes to hell and who gets salvation.

Since the race was all over at the starting line, the finishing places of everyone already known, it became critical to see if there were signs in this life that could identify which direction you were headed after death.

The Protestant Ethic came to identify hard work and success, financial success in particular, as evidence of God’s favor. A golden ticket.

What was not to be known was God’s judgment. Among believers in the Protestant Ethic who bought pews and clergy, a surety of salvation arrogated to themselves the power of God. That is blasphemy. You could even call it a form of witchcraft, using spells and incantations to bind divinity. For that was surely the expectation. I lived right, I did well. Reward me.

Cancel culture uses similar logic to discover who is damned. Commit a sex crime. Cancel them! Woody Allen. Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Commit an act of racist hatred. Cancel them. Lindsey Graham. DJT. Derek Chauvin. George Wallace. Bull Connor. And so many unnamed yet. The perpetrators of police murder. Cancel them! The reinforcers of systemic racism. The apologists for wealth and power. Their insurers.

Let me be clear. These are heinous crimes, sins against humanity, and deserve punishment. Prison. Public diminishment. The ignominy of seeing yourself in history books as bad examples.

But. All of these people, like John Muir, are not one thing. Not only sexual predator, not only racist cops or politicians or creepy entertainers. I don’t know any of them well, but there might be a good father there. A devoted son.

Cancel culture condemns the whole person for one aspect of their personality. I understand the impulse. That wrong is, in my eyes, so awful, so often neglected, that those who get caught must be pilloried in the square forever.

But we can’t do that. If so, we’ll need to get someone to make each of us stocks and lock ourselves in them. These bad impulses, the yetzer hara as Judaism names it, are attempts to gratify the ego. And that’s all they are.

Each person also contains a yetzer hatov, an impulse to bear the burden of the other, to love the neighbor as the self. We all let our yetzer hara out to play. Perhaps not as egregiously as the canceled, the left behind of our culture, but perhaps so, too.

We need, no, must, see each human, including ourselves, as working our way through this life, this one wild and precious life, as well as we can. Some choose a slack hold on their impulses, hoping gratification will lift them up. Some choose to struggle, to work with the selfish impulse as a means for motivating change, achievement.

We all, always, have this choice. Even Cosby. Even Chauvin. Even Wallace.

Let’s not have any more left behinds in this damaged and broken nation. We’ll need all our resources to come back from Covid and Trump.

*”Protestant ethic, in sociological theory, the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, which, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation.” Encyclopedia Britannica