News Item: Progressive Journalist Christopher Hedges was ordained a Presbyterian minister on October 5, 2014, in a New Jersey ceremony at which scholar Cornell West spoke. Hedges, who possesses a Masters Degree from the Harvard Divinity School, was refused ordination by a church committee some thirty years ago. The committee did not see a call to ministry in his desire go to El Salvador to write about that tiny war-torn country and the misery its people were enduring amid a conflict in which the United States had dirty hands. Reporting the news did not seem to be the work of a minister to them. Now that Hedges has spent several years in volunteer teaching to the incarcerated in New Jersey, the Presbyterian Church has finally deemed him fit to join their ministerial ranks.
Dear Christopher,
Congratulations upon your recent ordination to the Presbyterian ministry. I was interested to read about your long journey to ordination and the people who influenced you, such as your father, also a minister, and writers James Baldwin and George Orwell, two authors I read in school.
I am a progressive writer, radio producer, and gift economy advocate who is following a path to consecration as a priestess of Hermes. Although I am pursuing a pagan path, I feel a certain solidarity with you. I understand how you have seen your writing as a “call” to the ministry. In my case, my secular work is a mark of my “call” as a priestess. As a polytheist, I believes in the existence of many Gods, even the God you worship. I also believe deities have many aspects. Hermes, among other things, is a God of communications and commerce. My journalistic work, especially on alternative economics, is quite appropriate for someone who aspires to be His priestess. No one would claim otherwise. (So is being an athlete, but to look at me, you would know I do not model that aspect of Hermes.)
Assuming one’s work is of a good character in the first place, e.g. One is not out to “save” prostitutes by availing oneself of their services, anyone passing on the validity of a religious calling – my High Priest has asked me why I wanted to become a priestess so I understand the query – should be concerned with the sincerity of the “call” rather than the exact nature of the work one wishes to do. We never know when deity will make Himself or Herself known or through whom.
What I don’t understand is the view of that Presbyterian Church committee in Albany, New York, which refused to see your intention to write about El Salvador as evidence of your “call”. Didn’t Jesus say something about “the least of my brethren”? Did the Presbyterian Church, formally or informally, or at least that committee, have a policy of non-interference with US foreign policy that your reportage would have breached? Did they think your journalism would have been along bland “objective” lines absent the moral vinegar that would have made war reporting a religious “call” ? (The spiritual reasons you said you gave for wanting to go to El Salvador were clear enough to me.) I would like to think that the Christ, Hermes, and all deities, would find merit in telling the world the truth about the horrors of war and naming the governments that promote it. (War correspondents are a very special breed. I would never have the guts to do that kind of journalism.)
It seems to me that the committee members had a very narrow view of what the ministry means. It is more than just weddings and funerals and rituals on holy days. I applaud your desire to meld your secular work with your spirituality. As someone on a path to priestesshood, I see my journalism as an opportunity to represent Hermes in the world through my secular work, to do His work in the world, as it were. I think that you are trying to do some of the work of the Christ, as you see it, through your writing.
The problem for progressives like us – I hope you don’t mind that term; you have written scathingly about the liberal class and I figured you did not want the “L” word applied to you—is that we have to remember that there are others who wish to represent their deity concepts in the world. Their ideas of deity, morality, and “God’s work” are very different from ours, even moreso than the differences that exist between a progressive Christian and a progressive Pagan. But their right to pursue their path is the same as yours and mine. Sometimes we forget that.
A greater problem arises in the desire to enforce any particular religious or philosophical view on the public as a whole. We see the devastating consequences of such a desire in the world today, in the “My God is the Only God and if you don’t do what we say He wants you to do, we’ll kill you” movements. We also see those consequences in “My God has a bigger dick than your God.” “God gave man dominion over the earth to subdue it”. (Undoubtedly, this is one of the worst ideas to spring from the human mind.) “There is no God but Money and bankers are his prophets.”–or is that profits?—is another problematical belief system that is harming people globally. Shouldn’t all spirituality be about harm reduction, for people and the earth?
To accommodate varied spiritual systems and practices, Thomas Jefferson argued for separation of church and state, first with the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and then later on the federal level. “It does not bother me if my neighbor thinks that there is no God or there are twenty,” he allegedly said. “It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.” This tolerance plays no small part in holding our polity together, especially in our highly diverse modern age. Would that right-wing extremists of all stripes come to understand this.
We cannot and should not expect policymakers to abandon their own spiritual or philosophical beliefs when they are doing their work. Those who do, especially for money, votes, or future jobs in private industry, are merely unprincipled sell-outs. But policymakers must also remember that they make policy and law for a diverse populace. It is not a sell-out to “live and let live” when it comes to policy and legality, while otherwise attempting others, peacefully, of their point of view. Democracy does not apply only to those who believe as we do. To think otherwise is to have the narrow spirituality to which James Baldwin was referring in the passage of “Down at the Cross” that you quoted, “When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that meant But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did….”
Neither can those of us who stand outside of the legislative chambers abandon our spiritual or philosophical beliefs in our mundane pursuits. Ultimately, our sacred and secular paths should be reflections of who we are. They should be forms of what Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein called journalism’s function: a search for “the best available version of the truth.” Is not the true essence of spirituality is the search for “the best available version of the truth” ?
The alignment of our work—whatever it is—to our spiritual or philosophical path—whatever it is—in and of itself, does not guarantee that we will do good in the world. One only has to think of history’s monsters and the political, economic and spiritual tyrants of today to see that. But the alignment of what we do and what we believe is an essential part of living an authentic life, and not merely doing whatever someone else demands of us so that we might earn a crust of bread with which to go on to the next day. Such an alignment is the difference between vocation and occupation. (Note: In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said, “Our Father, who art in heaven…give us this day our daily bread”, not give us this day a job so that we might earn our daily bread.)
Your ordination is a public acknowledgment of your alignment of work and spiritual path. In your particular case, it is an alignment to be celebrated for producing good in the world, for casting light on some ugly truths that are keep more people from making a similar alignment for themselves; truths that are preventing people from simply keeping body and soul together.
Thus, though I follow a different deity, I salute you.
Kellia Ramares-Watson
Devotee of Hermes 