Brian McLaren on COVID-19 | May 17, 2020 | Hillhurst United Church

when you wrote the book this great spiritual migration we spent three weeks looking at it in sermons and and looking at the various shifts that you talked about and the question that first question that comes from me is the pandemic going to accelerate or derail the great spiritual migration do you read well as in most things I think the answer is both first of all the fact that you and I are having a conversation like this and that we're having church remote tells us that levels of change that people never would have voted for it never would have accepted that they've adjusted pretty amazingly in a matter of a matter of weeks if you had told people that they could have Church online they would have given you a thousand reasons why not know there's debates in some churches whether they can have communion online and there's people still holding the line on that what they don't realize is when they get back together it will be even more dangerous to have communion in person so you know so the changes are compressed and Excel accelerated but I think there are other people who all of this just makes them more desperate to try to cling to a status quo that is harder and harder to cling to and I think we should expect to see that happening as well hmm someone asked me the other day is this is this pandemic a snowstorm would you know have a lot about in Florida about a snowstorm or a season or an epic experience what do you what do you say to that question how do you see that it's funny I just this morning I was talking with some people about an article that just appeared in the New York Times by Jon Meacham about the Black Death and some people some historians think it wasn't Martin Luther and the printing press that brought about the modern era but it was the Black Death that the plagues that spread through Europe and the late Middle Ages caused so much death and so much destruction and they didn't fit in traditional theological parameters you know it people who are biblical literalists read the Bible and think oh does has happened because God is bringing a plague or even the devil is bringing a plague and and you know that was so deeply embedded in the way people read the Bible and in their assumptions about God but when they actually experienced a plague they realized this takes good people more than bad people this this is completely non discriminant indiscriminate there is no theological justification for the suffering and payments going on and and of course people have already tried it remember with HIV they tried to say oh this is you know God's judgment on gay people so people try to do that sort of thing but with a pandemic that touches almost everyone in one way or another and everyone by touching the economy people are gonna realize oh a lot of our theological assumptions the way we thought the world work works it can't take this into account and and so I think what's going what we're going to see is at the very core of this a theological shift in in what we leave about God and God's relationship to the universe and and that's going to I think that's going to have far-reaching effects now I should also say mmm never underestimate people's ability to be in denial so I'm sure a whole lot of people just be able to swaddle this away and and stick with our old thinking but I think it's going to accelerate the the need for congregations like yours that don't tell people to have to check their brains in the parking lot and that say no faith is it faith requires and challenges us to open our minds and face all the facts and bring all of that it into into account in our in our spiritual lives so with that how we you know my I concur in I sense my worry is that people are going to quickly go let's go back to the way it was let's just carry on let's forget it how do we how do we hold people to account and say no let's sit in this well here's the the thing that's different with the bubonic plague 500 years ago and more and with the with as flew a hundred years ago and even with HIV you know just a generation ago we are far more globally connected than we ever were then we have a global economy and if we think we're going to be able to shut down the global economy quickly without any ramifications you know I think we we just don't realize how connected we are so I'm sure that farmers in Alberta sell a lot of their crop to the Chinese and so you put a quarantine line up and you know it and people are going to feel it even if they don't feel they're part of the global economy we're just farmers or whatever no we're part of a global economy and so I don't think any of us can estimate where this is going to go and I hate to sound dire but I live south of the border so I have to I think we shouldn't underestimate that when things get shaky like imagine if enough people are unemployed long enough and are hungry long enough that we start having food riots you can imagine that the demagogues coming in clamping down on that you can imagine the level of autocratic control that would come in to try to suppress that kind of unrest it could be super far-reaching and it could change things that we assume when we use a word like democracy and and maybe that's easier to imagine happening on my side of the border than yours but I think we shouldn't be unrealistic human beings have we have similar we have a fear of chaos and people are willing to put up with an awful lot of autocracy in order to protect themselves from chaos and it's just too soon to know if we will be able to go back to the old normal or if already the cats out of the bag yeah I don't think any of us know but if there's one word I would say is important at a time like this it's preparedness and preparedness means that you don't have only one fix in mind you don't have only a one plan you need a whole set of scenarios of how we adjust to certain future that keep that word is the word it adaptable to to be adaptable to this adaptable agile exactly right and of course its reminder to us that plagues our huge biological events and sometimes their extinction events and and in a certain sense we are finding ourselves subject to once again is that we're part of a biosphere on planet Earth where what Charles Darwin said really turns out to be true if you're not adaptable yeah you don't survive and and so adaptability agility flexibility creativity they really become deeply important and of course you and I we believe that those are characteristics of spirit those are characteristics of true faith but they're people those are the last words they think of agile adaptable when they think of religion and with good reason yeah or or in your book on the Galapagos you talked about playfulness as part of that as well - that whole way of being in the world of being adaptable - to the world around us and play playful in it is so important I want to just go back to the Bible for a second because we a few weeks ago we explored the apocalypse we interviewed a theologian from Vancouver School of Theology on the book of Revelation and he was helping us understand the book and about apocalypse about is about an unveiling about looking at what is hidden and looking at ourselves and what's there and a person from Vancouver is given me a question for you around this wondering about in in that book and the talk of the Great Beast and the battle there what's what's your take as you see this with the 1% in the economy and how they're responding over all a part of this how do you see us responding to this in a way that brings a sense of not putting consumerism and capitalism and get the economy going as the God perhaps reshipping and seeing what's hidden in a new way what's your take on the apocalyptic talk yeah well first of all that word that's the perfect the definition of that word it's an unveiling and so you know even the idea of the book of Revelation with the Beast the idea is behind what looks like a benign government is actually a ravenous Beast and of course this is the language Jesus used to when he talked about you know on the surface you know they seem like well manicured lawns but underneath their dead men's bones you know we're walking on a cemetery that there are bodies hidden in this field and so that that certainly is apropos on my side of the border we see this where African Americans are a hundred thirty three percent I read yesterday in one state more likely to die of covin 19 and white people and how the disease is not evenly distributed because because of disparities of wealth disparities of health care and so on and I'm sure you have the parallel issues on your side of the border and in different regions but what what this what this says to me is that we're having an unveiling of the fissures and weaknesses and imperfections and in fact design flaws because a lot of these were intentionally designed of the status quo and the opportunity that we can seize here is that as they're destabilization and maybe in some places even kinds of collapse and you can never say that lightly because I don't think any of us know fully what that means but when those things happen this is where preparedness comes in so what we realize now is that once the ugly truth is unveiled what are we going to do about it and we have a chance now to say what would a sane or economy be what would a better way of rebuilding be let's not just try to get back to where we were let's try to move forward to something to something either I'll give you a quick example we all know that fossil their problem and and in Alberta you feel this in a special relay but one thing's for sure the airline industries aren't coming back anytime soon and and it's possible that this co good 19 could last for years and that we can never crowd in on airplanes like we used to be well what will that mean it'll mean the prices will go up but will that mean the demand will go down the fact that we're all becoming much more comfortable communicating visually but at a distance like we're doing now might mean that a whole lot of us say why do I want to bother the risk of getting on a plane in the hassle so we could end up with a situation where demand for fossil fuels goes down and we could seize upon that and make that a good thing for the planet and as well as we'd have to help all the people who lose jobs and all the rest are gonna be you know new challenges there but but that's what I mean and unveiling and a destabilization creates moments of opportunity for crave enough to seize the moment we example how many families have been forced to spend time around their their spouses and kids but they I think of course probably a lot of them had big fights and you know it's not been Pleasant but I think for a whole lot of folks they're gonna think what would long this thing you know why would I ever want to go back to the rat race I was part of there's been something humane about this and so all of that could be opportunities for us disease yeah I totally think that that we're going after we examine our health care our education our obviously our church our relationships just as you say so that the hope is that you know in the order disorder reorder the disorder wherein we don't quickly rush to go back that we move forward I've read your pure book Galapagos Islands and enjoyed it immensely and look again this morning at your your last chapter on Echo theology can you say something about that you might want to explain that term for folks and then just say how you see this you know I think you see it as an opportunity yes well I mean one thing's for sure that let's say it like this in October or November of last year we weren't guessing that this would be the pandemic there are a lot of people who are telling us they've been telling us for decades someday a pandemic is going to come I should just say when I was a pastor in the Washington DC area I had a lot of scientists in my church and this is where they spent their entire careers I remember one fellow his entire career was spent in studying bacteria and viruses that spread among birds because the concentration of birds you know for chicken and all the rest is so great that if that kind of virus hat would happen he knew and scientists knew it would spread around the world so we knew something like this was going to come but October November last year we didn't know how soon it was going to come and we didn't we didn't realize how costly our unpreparedness was and I think for us at this disjuncture moving forward we have to realize that we are in a lot of trouble about the environment we're like in October or November of last year in relation to the kind of environmental environmental Cataclysm that is waiting just around the corner if we don't get prepared and if we don't start to take what's called mitigating action or action to help minimize the bad effects of hundreds of years of ignorance and greed that have driven us to the mess we're in so eco theology says you know what concern for the earth doesn't start with human beings whatever however we understand God as creator or as the spirit in all of creation it's not all about us it's it's about all of creation and so ecology makes us - makes us both rethink who God is and the light of how God has revealed through creation and makes us rethink who we are in relation to that creation because the way we relate to creation is inseparable from the way we relate to God but it also changes our relations with each other our ethical obligations in relation to each other if we live in a planet that has real actual environmental limits that we have to respect suddenly just as going outside without a mask or going outside coughing on people has an obvious effect well we find out that so many things we do are also having an effect on our neighbors and what maybe is even scarier the people who will suffer the most from things we're doing now are our children's children's children right and and the potential destruction of the world that they'll inherit it's so great that it makes us say if we could go back to November and December knowing what we know now or maybe even better we could go back a year or two or five years if what would we do differently be better prepared for what we're going through now hmm so when you when you think of preparedness I want to be cautious here's preparedness isn't being preparedness includes being adaptable and open and all that but preparedness means being a paying attention is that what you mean I think so I'm glad you clarified that I think preparedness means not sleepwalking yeah I think preparedness means not being stuck in a rut of everydayness some people call it normalcy syndrome oh this is normal first this is false what we're about to say is this is the way it's always been well it's not but we think that this is normal its way it's always been this is the way it'll always be sorry no and and that's when and that normalcy bias that everydayness that complacency is is what really can be destructive to us in evolutionary terms it's the dinosaurs before the comet hits you know yeah but have a say your contempt of practice your contemplative thinking influencing your take on this situation we're in and your personal life etc yeah well you know I think when I look outside of myself and I see people desperate contrasting the normal that they've lost and what they have now and they just want to go back that they're stuck between two options what I have now and what I had before those are my only two options part of what a contemplative mind does is it makes it suspicious whenever we present ourselves with with two options like that and say it says well there might be more and there might be more going on and maybe I shouldn't be just in my reaction and and I should calm my my anxieties that want me to fix things right away maybe before I get so furious I should become curious and start to say I wonder what's really going on and you know that move to curiosity is often the difference between panic and reactivity and breakthroughs in to new wisdom hmm I like that curious - curious that's a nice if indeed what is there what keeps you up at night in a good way or better oh okay okay I mean this I think we are in a critically dangerous moment because I think our religious institutions have failed to teach people anything close to what Jesus meant by the gospel and I think what they've done instead is they've they've taught people how to just keep surviving as drones in the status quo you know keep people feeling like forgiving and happy drones to keep the status quo going I mean in my country I see how we did that in slavery in both of our countries we did it with a lamp theft but we've also done it while we're destroying the earth and and while we let more and more wealth get funneled to a smaller and smaller percentage of people and leave more and more people more and more vulnerable on the margins you realize that our religion has basically said oh listen you're going to heaven when you're dot when you die don't pay attention to that man behind the curtain and and as a result what keeps me up at night is this sense that if religion fails it's not like nothing happens Oh religion goes away no if religion fails then all of these other dynamics have no nothing left to acknowledge them and that's I suppose what makes me think we need a vibrant spiritual and religious life to help us access those deeper resources and see from a wider framework and to ask questions of ethics and beauty and value not just questions of profit and loss so that keeps me up at night in I suppose in a negative and positive way because I can't give up I just think yeah I think a lot of religion is failing but let's say we wrote it off as a failure we'd have to start again tomorrow what are we going to do and we'd be talking about value and stake Rinna's and vision and in and internal formation and we'd have to recreate the whole thing tomorrow so you might think that that's even what's going on is a kind of death of old things that aren't working in resurrection of things that we we can't loop it out well that's what gets your heart pumping in a really good way it does yeah yeah yeah pardon me and that's what gets you up moving into the day yeah it does I mean the other thing that gets me up day after day it's just that I mean this is a beautiful world and every day is such a gift and gosh I don't want to you know I I don't know how many days I have left so I sure want to be sure I enjoy each one and savor it and experience the gratitude and Wonder and all of all that thank you I I want to thank you for your time with us but back in the fall pre-pandemic and then the the opportunity to be here in the midst of this and I think your reminder invitation your curiosity your passion well has inspired me I know our Church community in the wider community too so I want to say thank you for that we hope that we learn deeply and pay attention through this so that we don't go back but we actually step forward into whatever God is calling us to and I give thanks well thanks well can I just say touch doesn't it feel like a decade ago that we were together it was just six months seven months and it just was like a different epoch but I have such good memories and I have bragged about your church to so many people since I saw you and none of us know you know what the future holds but can I just say how I think congregations like yours are blazing a really important trail and we need you and thank you for your leadership and your old team and the whole congregation we're all in this together and and the breakthroughs and discoveries that we have in one place is one of the realities of a context of a connected world as they can spread everywhere and I hope that your I hope that you spread I know this might be too soon to use this metaphor but the e spread the right kind of contagion that there's the that there's the right kind of contagious joy and vision and creativity because that's what you all truly have god bless you thanks very much Brian best yet

Channel: Hillhurst United Church

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Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020