Other Roads Less Traveled: Some Pathways of Life Seldom Explored

By Charles Shannon Mallory

In a provocative manner, Bishop Mallory crosses boundaries of orthodoxy and raises some issues not commonly discussed, such as a possible Christian approach to reincarnation, betrayal as a normal part of life, the common thread in all religions, praying for ones enemies by name, and not believing everything you think.

In Other Roads Less Traveled, he presents a collection of sermons and meditations that ask and answer a wide range of questions:

Who is God to you? What happens when we die? Whats the meaning of life? Whats the value of prayer? Whats the good of other world religions like Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism? How do we fight a war on terrorism?

Practical and down-to-earth, Other Roads Less Traveled is a compilation of work derived from fifty years in the ministry. It reflects Dr. Mallorys experiences living and working in more than a dozen third-world countries, including eighteen years in Africa where he and his family lived under the apartheid regime of South Africa and the deadly reign of Idi Amin in Uganda. With the overarching theme of truth and justice, Mallorys messages gather together his many experiences of a worldwide ministry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491717011

Charles Shannon Mallory

Going to Africa as a young priest, Mallory encounters two deadly regimes, one in South Africa, one in Uganda. These memoirs are entangled therein, with adventure, survival, new beginnings and thrilling discoveries, finally settling in the peaceful, enlightened democratic Republic of Botswana.

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Copyright © 2014 Charles Shannon Mallory, DD.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1699-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1700-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1701-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923674

iUniverse rev. date: 02/19/2014

Contents

Forword By Archbishop Desmond Tutu

1.   Fifty Years Chasing Truth and Justice

2.   Life Is Holy with or without Religion

3.   Labor Day: A Way to Work That Really Pays Off

4.   God Made Me This Way, and I’m Proud of It!

5.   The World’s a Village, and We’re All Villagers

6.   God Loves Us No Matter What

7.   Family Life Is a Great Treasure

8.   The Church’s One Foundation Will Never Crumble or Fall

9.   Life Can Be Black or White, but God’s Color Is Both

10.   If You’re Late to God’s Party, You Don’t Need to Worry

11.   The Symbol of Your Faith May Need Polishing

12.   When Religion Forgets Its Purpose

13.   There Are Many Good Pathways to God

14.   What Do Episcopalians Believe?

15.   When Will You Feel Secure?

16.   Listen Carefully When God Speaks

17.   On Father’s Day I Heard Him Say, I Did the Best I Could

18.   Jesus Was a Jew, so Why Are There Christians?

19.   The Fire of God Purifies Everything

20.   While We Celebrate Independence Day, the World Looks on in Wonder

21.   Why God Said There Would Be Wars and Rumors of War

22.   God’s Vision of Peace

23.   The Twin Towers Are Rebuilt, but Are We?

24.   Thanksgiving Day: What Do You Have to Be Thankful For?

25.   God Comes So Frequently as a Stranger

26.   Christmas: Why Did God Even Bother?

27.   Let the Light Shine Forth!

28.   Betrayal Is So Costly, but We All Do It

29.   Easter Is When God Made All Things New

30.   You Promised God You Would Do What?

31.   What Happens When We Die?

32.   We Wouldn’t Recognize Jesus Today

33.   Don’t Believe Everything You Think

An insightful pastor of the human condition, Mallory lures and prods us into new ways of thinking, seeing, and acting as those beloved of God. Ancient and postmodern wisdom are both on offer here, lyrical and provocative, lovely and wondrous connections, in service of truly good news for all humanity and all creation. This is creative and expansive gospel – turn in here and savor the feast!

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church

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A former U.S. Senator once remarked that his constituents wanted answers to complex questions that would fit on the back of a postcard. Other Roads Less Traveled focuses on complex questions without falling prey to easy answers. One has the feeling, as you read these well-crafted sermons, that you are joining Bishop Mallory in a shared exploration. If you do not know Bishop Mallory personally, you will be in for a delightful time participating in his journey as he wrestles with life’s difficult questions.

Other Roads Less Traveled tells a story of someone who refuses to settle for the shibboleths that pass as answers to our deepest issues of faith. The sermons are of a type that, after you read them, you will not forget how you were led, step by step, into a greater understanding of the Christian faith.

The Reverend Dr. Roger O. Douglas, Rector Emeritus, St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church, Tucson, Arizona.

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At last I have been introduced to common sense that can help me enjoy a sensible living-of-life. Welcome to the joy of the no-nonsense mind of Bishop Shannon Mallory! This classically trained Bishop’s book will enlighten you, dear reader, on life-living issues in a manner you have never been exposed. In simple language and a combination of discipline and delight, the Bishop challenges us to think really hard. Traverse life’s landscape in this reading because this book will give you tools and reason to explore religion and spirituality.

John P. Hagen, author "Play Away Please—The Tale of the Sale of Golf’s Greatest Icon"

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These sermons and essays express the thoughts of a rare mind, one that has not been content to offer mere homilies. Bishop Mallory is like a spiritual air-conditioner. He brings insight and relief to those of us who would let our hearts beat in time with others. Wisdom and compassion are not just empty words in his room.

Glenn T. Webb, PhD. Univ. of Chicago, Professor Emeritus East Asian History and Religion, Pepperdine University; Japan Order of the Rising Sun, 2011

A word from the author…

Every preacher worth his or her salt has labored over what to say and how to say it, and I am no exception. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Tolkien, says that not everyone who wanders is lost. I take great comfort in those words, for many a day (and night) I have wandered in search of what to say and how to say it.

Every sermon will be heard by someone, but, mercifully, not all are printed. What you hold in your hands is a Collection of some of mine that did get printed and Collected on the occasion of my fiftieth ordination anniversary. Friends have pressed relentlessly for this book of sermons over a span of years, and I leave it to them and to you to read or otherwise wander through. They follow no particular order. Some of them may go down pathways of thought you seldom explore and some may bring you little comfort. They all come out of the crucible of my own life from which I have learned that the things that make me uncomfortable are the most likely to help me grow.

FORWORD BY ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU

I have known Shannon Mallory for over 40 years. We first met in Kampala, Uganda where he was teaching at Makerere University. Since that time, our paths have crossed many times during his ministry in Africa and beyond.

Shannon has a great love for Africa and a passion for issues of truth and justice which this collection of sermons reflects. He has experienced difficult times in Africa, being deported from South Africa during the time of apartheid and having to flee Uganda under the regime of Idi Amin. He knows well the cost of truth and justice.

This is more than a collection of sermons: they are essays on vital current issues which we all need to engage. They come out of the crucible of his own experience in Africa and the Third World, and I find what he has to say to be challenging, provocative, and at times may push traditional thinking in new directions. His words may stretch your mind and challenge your assumptions.

May this book inspire you and move you as it did me.

Chapter One

Fifty Years Chasing

Truth and Justice

Eternal God, who tarries often beyond the time we hope for, but not beyond the time appointed by Thee; from whom comes in due season the truth that cannot lie, the counsel that cannot fail; make us faithful to stand upon our watchtower, and wait for what You would say to us. Amen.

As I reflect on the past fifty years, I realize that truth and justice have been a recurring theme in my ministry, characterized by two questions: Whose truth is it, and whom does it serve at whose expense? The first question establishes the truth, the second justice. Fighting for truth and justice over the years has made me a little sympathetic with old Pilate when he uttered those immortal four words you may remember: Truth? What is truth? We all think we know what the truth is when it’s going our way, but is it really the truth?

What follows is a personal story, so please bear with an excess of personal pronouns. It begins in 1958 in my senior year at UCLA, when upon graduation I traded a childhood dream of a career in medicine for the priesthood and headed to the Big Apple for seminary. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, I headed east to conquer or convert the world, whichever came first. I remember the naïve boldness with which I took up the cudgel, even before my studies began. It was a mild summer day in New York City, and I happened upon a young lady in her cups, as the British would say, drowning her sorrows in an upscale restaurant in Central Park. I recall with embarrassment my determination to straighten her out. After all, thought I, weren’t priests meant to fix people and straighten them out? She was drunk, and this young kid was on a mission to save her. (Since then, one of my favorite bumper stickers became the one that says, Jesus, save me from your followers!) You see, I had the naïve notion that if truth is logical and most people are rational, then all I needed to do was find the right combination of words to explain to her the enlightening truth of Christianity and the damsel in distress would see the light and amend her ways. In my youthful enthusiasm, I believed that truth would convince if it was explained correctly. What I didn’t yet fully appreciate was that truth isn’t always logical and people aren’t always rational.

In my naïveté, heart went before head, and I believed sincerity could convince and the Christian Faith would sell itself. What I also didn’t yet understand was that sincerity is sometimes more entertaining than convincing, and what makes Christians is not what you say but what you do. I was years from understanding T. S. Eliot, who once said that Christianity doesn’t always convince people or soften the edges of life—it just makes them more cutting. And I was a lifetime from understanding the wisdom of Amos Elon, who made famous the notion that hell is the truth realized too late—a wisdom I have come to heed and appreciate. However, I did soon come to abandon the foolish notion that there is any sweet reasonableness to truth, for generally there is not. Truth is only sweet and reasonable when we want it to serve our own ego. And over the next fifty years I would learn that truth usually stands alone, sometimes bravely on the gallows and sometimes alone on the Cross, but rarely at center stage and never at our beck and call.

Upon graduation from seminary, with a wife on one arm and a baby in the other, I sailed off to save Africa from God knows what. I had learned a little, but not much, about life and had a mixed-up notion that Christianity has something to do with saving people, but I wasn’t quite sure of my part in it. Years later I became friends with a New Yorker cartoonist who, in the days when saving the whales was the Great Cause, drew a cartoon showing two whales spewing off the coast of California and saying to each other, But can they save themselves?

Out of over fifty African countries, I chose to go to one of the most troubled. Known now as the peaceful Republic of Namibia, it was then governed illegally by the apartheid government of South Africa. To refresh your memory, apartheid was a vicious racial system forced upon sixteen million blacks in South Africa by a tiny white government. Under that regime, I discovered truth in a totally new guise in the strangled voice of an oppressed black majority. Recently I came across some old notes scribbled to myself shortly after I arrived in Africa: SWA, beautiful country, beautiful people, hateful race relations; struggling to learn new words and phrases of African languages; never experienced the power of evil as in apartheid; feeling great frustration and anger at the racial situation; don’t know if I’ll be able to make it here. We did make it; but we didn’t turn out to be very good citizens, because that meant you had to live by the rules of apartheid, by which truth and justice were perverted to serve the white minority. For most whites that meant simply, My country, right or wrong. T. S. Eliot once said that living in a crazy environment like that is like saying, My mother, drunk or sober… she’s my mother, so I’ll support what she does. We were living in a land of total denial where everyone was indoctrinated to believe that whites were superior to blacks and born to be their master. I thought a lot in those days about how it must have been once upon a time in Nazi Germany.

The African nation I chose to live in had become a moral swamp. The depth of the swamp was seen when the government conjured up biblical justifications for their claim that blacks and whites were not created equal and even had separate heavens; and for the next half century podiums and pulpits all over the land supported the twisted evil of apartheid. The pounding on many podiums and some pulpits never convinced the blacks, but it would still be decades before they would see their freedom. And when the torch of freedom was finally lit in South Africa, what did they call the Nelson Mandelas and countless others who had been banned, hounded, jailed, and executed in the cause of racial equality… what did the white South African government call those who lit the torch of freedom? They called them terrorists. Nelson Mandela, the first freely elected president of South Africa, was called a terrorist. Even Margaret Thatcher called President Nelson Mandela a terrorist!

It’s important to understand that the hideous darkness that fell over those two countries for fifty years was engineered not by bad men, but by upstanding Christians like you and me who were convinced they were right. It is said it was the same in Nazi Germany. Chesterton once observed that the diabolical operates in the modern world through people of good character but for whom sin is not real; and whenever there is no awareness of sin, truth becomes relative and serves only those in power. Misguided truth, however sincere and even prayed over, is no truth at all. Now, please understand this point: those who constructed the racial system of apartheid were God-fearing people who thought they were doing God’s will. They said their prayers and went faithfully to their Dutch Reformed Church. But praying and going to Church will never turn wrong into right or falsehood into truth. Never.

I remember hearing Africans say of the Godly Bishop under whom I served, He cares for us in our suffering, and if he’s a communist [as the government claimed], then I want to be a communist. He was no communist, and the Africans knew nothing about communism; but they knew about love, and they recognized people who were kind and cared, even as the South African government called such people subversive. Actions still speak louder than words, and a skeptical world continues to say to do-gooders, Christian or otherwise, Talk is cheap, so don’t tell us the truth you believe in; show us. Don’t preach to us that God is love; show us. And this I say to you: don’t trumpet too loudly how much you or your Church love people; just show them, for if you don’t show love, words mean nothing. Truth will always speak for itself.

I was learning that speaking for truth and standing for justice had a terrible price. It was costing the blacks their lives and the whites their freedom. After years of lodging formal protests over police treatment of the African students in our mission schools, I was visited by a high-ranking member of the South African Police, Major Pretorius, who said to me, Padre, I suggest you watch what you say and do, because you’re courting disaster. Courting disaster could mean many things, none of them good. One African leader had recently courted disaster and died mysteriously in his police cell in Pretoria. That was Steve Biko, whose unexplained death made international news. Courageous journalists were courting disaster and being banned or put under house arrest. My Bishop had courted disaster and was deported. Was I next? One of my favorite books in seminary was by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled The Cost of Discipleship. It was about the cost of living the truth in Germany during World War II, which cost Bonhoeffer his life. And now it seemed like the ghastly racist evil of Nazi Germany had been reborn in the racist evil of South Africa, and blacks were paying with their lives as the Jews had paid with theirs. In this setting, however, while the blacks were paying with their lives, the whites never did. There was a white truth and a black truth: the one got you off; the other got you killed. I realized that Pilate’s question was now more relevant than ever, and I was beginning to wonder if there was any truth left.

By now we had moved to South Africa, and after ten years the ax finally fell. After preaching a Lenten sermon about truth and justice in a prominent cathedral in South Africa, I was given ninety days to get out of the country. Biblical truth had infuriated the authorities, and for preaching it I was now on the growing list of banned undesirables. I had learned that following the Gospel can be a costly business, and seeking too much truth and justice can really mess up your life. My wife and I had five kids at the time, all in school. Africa was the only home they had known. Where were we to go, and what were we to do? We had to get out of South Africa, but we didn’t want to leave Africa without the chance to live and work in an independent African country.

We chose Uganda, then a relatively peaceful and somewhat prosperous country—until the week before we arrived. That was when General Idi Amin seized power. Our timing in moving to Uganda couldn’t have been worse, but it promised plenty of excitement. But, alas, there was no use looking for truth or justice in what was about to become a bloody military dictatorship. And here I discovered a great irony: whereas in South Africa there was not always a community supporting Christian principles of truth and justice, in Uganda there was. People don’t generally know it, but Uganda is over 90 percent Christian, and the Church is a vibrant force, except in matters of politics. In those days the Church was led by courageous clergy who spoke out against Amin’s injustice and were being systematically eliminated. Bishops were disappearing and being executed. Archbishop Janani Luwum, a happy friend to everyone, was assassinated by Amin personally and found later with four bullets in him in the shape of a Cross. All hell had broken loose in this Christian nation, and the faithful looked on in disbelief, powerless but defiant in their condemnation of what was happening. Many a day I anguished over truth and justice and even wondered if God was dead. Day after day, truth was dying valiantly but violently at the barrel of a gun. Fear and terror were everywhere. After two years of this horror I gave up searching for truth and settled for survival. We had to flee Uganda for our lives, and my dream for Africa was in tatters.

God’s ways of working have never been stranger than when we left Uganda, discouraged and despondent. As that door closed, a most unlikely one opened in a newly independent African country, where I was called to be their first Bishop. When we arrived, the Republic of Botswana was barely six years old but already had one of the most enlightened constitutions in the world. God had done His thing, and at last we found a place where truth and justice prevailed. The next seven years in Botswana were good, and there was plenty of truth and justice. But my old nemesis was not far away: South Africa was just next door, always there to remind me I was still a prohibited immigrant in that country. They took delight in visiting that curse upon me every time I traveled outside Botswana and had to pass through South Africa, but by now it didn’t matter.

Pilate asked a good question, and we need to ask it too. What is truth? Sometimes the Church gets God’s truth right, and sometimes it doesn’t. Vestries and Church councils at all levels can be guilty of betraying the truth when they have a hidden agenda, and sometimes they do. No human institution is free from hidden agendas. But the greatest betrayal of truth comes when religious institutions get the truth wrong and think they are right. That’s when the Church is most dangerous. There’s an ancient prayer that says, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of truth, deliver us. We need that prayer a lot these days.

Like God, real truth is not always our best friend, for it confronts us in our attitudes and prejudices, our habits and addictions, our relationships and the way we live our lives. I think this is what Jesus was talking about when He said, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free (John 8:32). But for many the cost is too great to be set free, and they settle for limited freedom and let the truths they live by go unexamined. Still others settle down with comfortable prejudices and communicate the limited truth of their lives with a wink and a nod.

I have learned that in civil societies like our own, falsehood can masquerade as truth, where it often parades as conservative truth or liberal truth. One is truth unexamined, the other truth undigested. The one says, The Bible (or the Church) says it, and that’s it for me. The other says, The Bible (or the Church) is irrelevant, and that’s not it for me. A conservative’s truth wonders why people don’t behave as religion dictates; a liberal’s truth wonders why they do. Chances are neither is entirely right. Unexamined truth is as dangerous as undigested truth, and swallowing the truth half-chewed is as bad as swallowing it whole.

And today in corridors of power and places of prayer, where is truth to be found? One wonders. Only a few months ago a major newspaper carried a front-page headline that read, Most Governments Lie to Each Other (USA Today, June 16, 2011). Imagine that! That’s us, folks. And we, the people… when will the lying stop, and where? We don’t like to hear it, but to keep quiet and not seek truth and justice is a form of lying. And here are the results of that: when we lie, the ancients tell us, we shake trust, we generate stress, we lose self-esteem, and we corrupt our character. All that happens when we lie. Imagine that.

Yet in Churches and schools, in mosques and temples, and in society at large, the search for truth is so often left for journalists and annoying crusaders. Solzhenitsyn had it about right when he said the dividing line between truth and falsehood cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? Instead we say in effect, come let us negotiate the truth, as if truth was a debatable commodity. Truth cannot be negotiated or established by voting, any more than we can establish right or wrong by counting hands up; yet we attempt to do so in the Church no less than in the state. Whether in Church council or city council, whether in high estate or low, whenever truth gets determined by voting, it gets compromised with falsehood and continues to suffer on the Cross of human history.

I have come to the end of my story and the end of my sermon, and some of you may be thinking, What kind of a sermon was that? He said nothing about the Bible or going to Church; he said nothing about prayer and made little mention of Jesus . . . nothing about converting people or pushing kids into Sunday School, or shelling out our money to pay for it all. No, I didn’t talk about those things. Jesus didn’t talk much about those things either; He spent His entire