Have you ever been approached by a friend, an acquaintance, or even a total stranger who wished to tell you of their vision? Visions—the world is full of them. In this season of the church year we read of the angel vision of the shepherds and the dreams of the Magi, both of the impending birth of the Messiah and of the wrath of Herod, warning them to flee. Even the survival of the child Jesus is attributed to a dream. But I’ve learned to be wary of dreams and visions. Just because it’s a vision doesn’t make it true or right or good. You can walk down Carmel Valley Road from the Village to Highway 1 and get enough to fill a book. They’re pretty common, actually. Everybody, it seems, has one, and after hearing ten or twenty it’s really no big deal. Visions can be dangerous, too, the kind that lead us astray and even kill people. The destruction of Europe, the injured and dead of World War II, with over six million lives of innocent civilians snuffed out by a racist madman, was the product of the vision of the Third Reich. And it didn’t stop there. Examine any tragic event and you will frequently find a vision lurking behind it, from the Manson Family murders to Mark David Chapman to the Jonestown massacre to the Cambodian killing fields of Pol Pot . The vision is too often a recipe for madness, and so we must be careful—very careful. When the vision of Jihad meets the vision of the Apocalypse, the rest of us had better watch out. Those who cheer on either holy war or the world’s destruction will cause us to pay a terrible price if this insanity is not stopped. Our very survival is at stake, and visions are largely to blame.

Visions, you see, give us a cheap excuse for not thinking deeply. A critique of modern society reveals a number of fleeting images—visions—flashing before our eyes: video clips, sound bites, slogans, advertisements, and the icons of pop culture, all of them rooted in next to nothing and distracting us from considerations of any substance. I am amazed at the ability of people to analyze, memorize and recite sports statistics and all manner of technical, artistic and historical details and yet few among us apply that same detail of thought to public policy, particularly that which concerns global issues. We are so insulated that we are often blind to the larger geopolitical sphere in which we exist.

The vision, to be a workable one, must be tested by several real-life criteria. First, cause and effect must be considered. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Take the immigration issue, for one. Poverty-stricken people head for the border due to the economic engine of globalization which grinds the traditional economic and social order into the dust. Quoting Latino political activist Carlos Montes, “U.S. foreign policy, whether it’s war or free trade or other matters, leads to globalization , which leads to poverty and unemployment in other countries, which results in mass migration and more undocumented immigrants coming to the United States.” It is not that we do not need an immigrant labor force. As I speak, crops are rotting in the fields, and others were left unplanted because it was cheaper not to plant them at all rather than to deal with the uncertainties of the harvest labor supply necessary to bring the crop to market. Furthermore, our energy consumption drives the demand for ethanol fuels. This affects the price of corn, which is the Latin American food staple, leading to further impoverishment in rural areas. And yet in the face of all of this our only action has been to construct a wall, a tactic which does nothing to address the problem. The wall is a testimony to our failure to construct a workable social policy, which if it were in place would eliminate the need for a wall, along with its enormous expense.

Second, a workable vision must be fair to all concerned. One of the greatest dangers to our society is concentration of capital. This is not a plea for state socialism, which is a proven failure, but rather for economic opportunity and the social activism necessary to achieve it. A class of the super wealthy, along with a vanishing middle class and a service economy built on the back of growing numbers of citizens below the poverty line, will obliterate any advantages gained, resulting in an increased demand for social services, the breakdown of the family and positive social values. A permanent underclass, along with societal isolation, is social dynamite. The recent riots in France—in fact, the origin of World War II—was due to this. Violent crime will increase, especially gang activity and an increasing number of young offenders. Like walls, more jails do not provide the final solution. Our determinate sentencing laws are a mishmash of arbitrary penalties that leave so little room for judicial discretion that we now boast the highest prison population in the world. Overzealous prosecutors place court victories ahead of truth, imprisoning many who are innocent, and a political atmosphere of “get tough on crime” provides an easy slogan that prevents us from enacting effective crime laws.

A friend of ours, a contractor working on a neighbor’s house, was falsely accused of breaking and entering and stealing property. Several calls by my wife to the District Attorney remained unreturned because the case was considered closed. Only when she assisted the public defender in presenting the truth in an appeal hearing was the verdict overturned. All of us pay the price for this. The current drain on public resources in California is forcing our Governor to consider early release of non-violent offenders as an emergency measure. In legal affairs, the vision of democracy frequently fails those it claims to serve, from false prosecution to frivolous lawsuits to the abuse of lobbying.

Third, a workable vision must serve humanity, seeing the needs of others in the same light as our own needs, and no one’s needs as lesser than our own. I am proud that this Chapel makes a concerted effort to support the Monterey County Food Bank. If someone tells you that no one goes hungry in America, he or she is lying. Each year more and more must depend upon food assistance, and many of these are adults who work full time. It is also clear that we need some sort of health care reform, and while we must struggle with the form it will take, one thing is clear: the current system leaves far too many with no medical resources. Those who scream the loudest against socialized medicine will have only themselves to blame when the private sector fails to provide a workable health care solution.

In the last analysis, you see, it is up to those who are faithful to the workable vision to do what others cannot or will not do. The church has historically been in the forefront of the battle for economic and social justice, and this includes bearing witness to human rights. My former neighbor, Philip Butler, served thirty years in the U.S. Navy, eight of them as a prisoner in North Vietnam. In a November 18 article in the Monterey Herald, he spoke of what he was intimately familiar with, the subject of torture. He writes,

“Resorting to torture or stressful coercion of prisoners makes us out to be the biggest liars in history. We profess to be the most democratic and humane country in the world. But this current national ‘debate’ and our recently exposed actions in Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other hell holes where we have resorted to rendition of prisoners only tells the world that we are deceitful, dishonest, inhumane and immoral.”

“There is one more irony I find in this topic. I had the unfortunate personal experience of being tortured numerous times as an eight-year prisoner of war in Vietnam. And my expert testimony is that torture only results in useless information, made-up stories, or whatever the victim thinks his or her torturer wants to hear….Even more ironically, we Vietnam POWs actually received moral strength from repeatedly telling each other that ‘our country would never treat POWs like this.’ That moral high road helped sustain us through those dark and challenging times….I can only wonder these many years after my POW ordeal why we are even having this conversation.”

“admits how absolutely mysterious and unfathomable are the world and life. It is knowledge in so far as it does know the one thing which we can and must know in the sphere of this mystery, namely, that all Being is life, and that in loving self-devotion to other life we realize our spiritual union with infinite being.”²

“As a young man, my main ambition was to be a good minister. I completed my studies; then, after a while I started to teach. I became the principal of the seminary. All this while I had been studying and thinking about the life of Jesus and the meaning of Jesus. And the more I studied and thought, the more convinced I became that Christian theology had become over-complicated. In the early centuries after Christ, the beautiful simplicities relating to Jesus became somewhat obscured by the conflicting interpretations as the incredibly involved dogma growing out the of theological debates….Elaborate theology…disturbed me, for it tended to lead away from the great and simple truths revealed in Jesus’ own words and life….Now what was I to do? Was I to teach that which I myself had been taught but that I now did not believe?....I decided that I would make my life my argument. I would advocate the things I believed in terms of the life I lived and what I did. Instead of vocalizing my belief in the existence of God within each of us, I would attempt to have my life and work say what I believed.”³

“Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase ‘Reverence for Life.’ The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side….The most immediate fact of man’s consciousness is the assertion: ‘I am the life which wills to live in the midst of life which wills to live.’” ⁴