EVERYBODY’S GOING HOME: Sam Harris, The Shack and Carlton Pearson

 Something “comes together.” A noticeable “convergence of things” that sparks, at the least, curiosity. Call it simply “coincidence,” a chance happening, nothing dramatic. “Serendipitous” comes to mind, more curious and playful. “Synchronous” suggests a touch of mystery, per chance a trace of Mystery. “Gift from God” a more explicitly faith-based interpretation. I have come to call it “constellating.” Just as a grouping of stars – light years apart in both breadth and depth across the night sky – “come together” to form a single constellation, so I find myself mystified and graced when clearly unrelated events – sharing no common source, arguably arbitrary, of no intrinsic meaning – converge.

I cannot remember who gave me The Shack (William P. Young, Windblown Media, Los Angeles: 2007), long before it became a best-seller. I read enough to become “turned off” by the unlikely, to my eye annoying contrivances, and tossed it aside, completely unaware it was a first star of a silently forming constellation. A friend, in what seemed more than a challenge, a gauntlet of sorts, gave me The End of Faith, by Sam Harris (W. W. Norton, New York: 2004). I was not offended, but found it heavy going, and tossed it, unawares, on top of the Shack. Star number two. Channel surfing one Friday evening I settled on Bill Moyer’s Journal, his guest a Pentecostal preacher named Carlton Pearson. Three stars, a small constellation, like Orion’s Belt.

Something about Carlton Pearson, it seemed, compelled me to retrieve both those books I had tossed aside, and I began reading them simultaneously. From any distance, from any perspective, this would seem an unlikely trio, surely offering no common threads, intrinsically discordant notes, colors that clash. Yet, oddly, they’ve woven a mini-tapestry, composed a catchy tune, become oddly compatible colors for me. No, that’s too cute. Their combined effect has been profound, their common call to act insistent.

Sam Harris argues, with disarming and disquieting persuasiveness, that beliefs, of whatever religious tradition, pose nothing less than a lethal threat to the human family, to unfolding history, to global sanity. Sweeping claims, un-subjected to reason, outlandish by any rational standard, are accepted as true simply because a sacred text, a revered teacher or a faith heritage announces them as true and trustworthy. Sipping arsenic-laced kool-aid, committing suicide to await celestial rescue by the Hale Bopp comet, or cutting out the still-beating heart of a tribal virgin to assuage the gods would be dismissed as brutal and demented by any sane or reasoned person. But, Harris points out, believing a virgin conceived and gave birth, that waters parted with the raising of a shepherd’s staff, or that a very dead Nazarene rabbi returned to life is common fare for the Christian faithful.

Resistant, ready to counter, at the edge of outrage, I read on. Harris’ deepest concern is not with the irrationality of such beliefs, but the ends to which such certainty leads a faith’s adherents – utter disrespect, disregard and dismissal of not only non-believers, adherents of other faiths, but the heretics of their own faith. He cites a dozen global conflicts over the last two decades, pitting faith against faith, belief system against belief system, millions of lives lost in these collisions of belief certainties. And he offers a grotesque, most difficult-to-read commentary relating the means of torture and death administered during the Inquisition. Just to offer a taste of the revulsion, mere burning at the stake offering too quick a death, too mild a deterrent to would-be heretics, consider the practice of slow-roasting a heretic high enough above the flame to make death a slow and excruciating matter. The “God” who emerges from Harris’ critique makes atheism a reasonable and responsible option!

At first returning intermittently to The Shack provided respite from Harris’ assault. Persevering through those aggravating literary contrivances, I found myself reading pages that sent more tears coursing down my cheeks than any book I had read in a decade. The Trinity makes a most unorthodox, unexpected and compelling appearance – the “Father” a heavyset black woman most at home in the kitchen, Jesus an overall clad ranch hand, and the Holy Spirit a wispy and mysterious tender of the garden. I found it natural to identify with the novel’s main character, MacKenzie, a fairly crafted Everyman, struggling with familiar human issues, posing the awkward and enigmatic questions that seem just as human, daring like the psalmist to audaciously challenge God. But I was most drawn to the deep compassion, penetrating understanding, and transforming love voiced by the god-figures in such everyday terms. The God I met, aside MacKenzie, at the shack made belief so rich and powerful.

Unrelated (as if anything is unrelated), while sorting a stack of CD’s and DVD’s, I found a recording of an NPR interview of Carlton Pearson by Ira Glass (This American Life, December 16, 2005). His story took on fresh resonance with my reading. Briefly, hopefully enough to follow a thread, Carlton was a protégé of Oral Roberts, whom he referred to as “my black son.” Under Robert’s tutelage, Pearson founded a Pentecostal congregation outside of Tulsa that quickly swelled to 5,000 members, inspired by the young pastor’s electrifying preaching, “salvation by the blood of the Lamb” his cornerstone theme. One afternoon he was sitting on a couch watching their plasma screen TV with his three-year old son, wondering why he did not change the channel away from the overwhelmingly graphic, depressing and tragic scenes of slow death by illness and starvation in Rwanda. A deeply disturbing thought seemed to invade his mind, “If you think your death is awful, after you draw your last earthly breath, as a Muslim, a non-believer, you will awaken to a still more awful existence, hell’s Lake of Fire.” But even more startling and unsettling was the thought that followed, only slightly cushioned coming as a question, “Is the God I preach a monster?” After some intense Bible study Pearson, began to evolve a “gospel of inclusion” proclaiming “universal reconciliation” – the blood of the Lamb, still his faith’s foundational tenet, was shed for all. As exuberantly as he preached this message, his congregation shrunk to less than 500 within a year, the church building going into foreclosure in 2006. He was abandoned by his staff and declared a heretic by his denomination. (He has since become a U.C.C. minister and begun a congregation in a Unitarian Church in Tulsa that has grown to 500, without a single member from his prior flock.

Let this unsettling thought from Sam Harris, my paraphrase, provide constellation-making: when an adherent of a given faith, particularly moderates, even progressives, perhaps especially progressives from a faith remain silent in the face of the fundamentalists of their tradition, they offer silent consent, become not only permission-giving but empowering, are co-dependent enablers. Tempted to set such words aside as those to be expected of a cynic, I found them those very words demanding of a personal commitment. I must speak, boldly and unhesitantly, of the “God I know” – all-embracing, inclusive, all-redeeming, finding a way to welcome each and all of the human family home!