I remember a particular coaching session, years ago, when my client had a significant breakthrough. The client, a senior executive who was retiring at a relatively young age, knew that he wanted to continue to use his time and skills and resources to make contributions for the greater good. Yet, he lacked clarity about where to focus his efforts and resources.
Sitting across a table from him, I pulled out a deck of cards. On each card was the name of a value, with a brief definition. I asked him to look at all the cards and to arrange them in three stacks, according to how important they were to him: not important, highly important, and somewhat important. As he read through the cards, he worked steadily to create the three piles. Once he looked up from his sorting, I asked him which pile was the not important pile. He pointed, and I swept those cards up and put them away. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I want you to go through these remaining cards and pick the five values that are most important to you. Trust me that this exercise can help you with clarity in your direction.’ He looked at me with a this-will-be-hard expression, but with some gentle encouragement he got right to the task. Soon, he had determined what four of his most important values were, but he got stuck in his choice for the fifth value. He held a card away from me, close to his face, and said in a quiet and embarrassed voice, I don’t think this should be a value that matters so much to me, but it actually is. I listened with interest and then shared more about the purpose of the exercise: to clarify his values so that they could help provide direction to him in where and how he wanted to focus his efforts and resources. I encouraged him to think about that value that he was reluctant to claim as important, asking him, ‘How could you give expression to this value in ways that serve the greater good?’ He thought deeply, and then a look of relief appeared on his face. He radiated excitement. That value, which he feared could have a negative connotation, was in fact important to him. By intentionally claiming it and directing his efforts to give expression to that value in ways that served others he could authentically contribute his efforts and resources in ways that mattered. In the years since, the good that he has done in his quasi-retirement is beyond my calculation.
Values.
They seem to have been important to me all my life. As the chaplain of my high school’s girls’ service organization, Uniteens, I was in charge of the schoolwide Values Emphasis week, through which we elevated the importance of thinking about values that are important to us so that we can align our actions with our values. As an editorial community columnist for the Arizona Republic years later, I wrote on subjects of interest in the community. Once, I received an email from a Jewish couple—a judge and his wife, who said that they enjoyed my columns and that they noticed that the common denominator between all my columns was that each one was driving at consideration of a value that I wanted to elevate in the greater community of Scottsdale and Northeast Phoenix. I had never thought about this, but looking back, I realized their observation was true.
Many years later, I clarified my own top five values. In decision after decision since I claimed those five, I have tested my challenges against those values, sorting through each value one by one to see how that value could inform my decision-making. Yes, sometimes our values can be in conflict with each other with respect to a situation, and sometimes we have to decide which of our values wins the day. My value of ‘health’ has an expansive meaning to me: health of myself, of others, community, of relationships, and the world in which we live. As I have dealt with medical challenges recently, reluctantly I have had to elevate ‘health of myself’ at times over my value for ‘productivity,’ which to me means giving or producing the best of what I have to give from my gifts in ways that serve the greater good. Living in alignment with our values is not a static exercise, it is dynamic.
In my work with organizations over the years, I’ve observed what values were driving organizations’ culture and choices. Some organizations have articulated aspirational values that are at least modestly or intermittently realized. I’ve seen organizations where the values seem to have been determined in a one-and-done exercise but aren’t referenced or operationalized in decision-making, serving instead as window dressing on their company website. I’ve seen organizations where values are living, breathing influences on decisions about how the humans in that organization will effectuate their mission. And I’ve seen organizations whose stated values are run over in choice after choice that marginalized those values in actuality.
I have been thinking, this Holy Week, that countries— and most specifically in my thoughts this week, the United States— also are directed by values, which can shift at first imperceptibly and then more graphically over time, as influences and trends take hold. As long as I can remember, the phrase I’ve heard most associated with the United States’ values is ‘Judeo-Christian values.’
With fifteen years in Sunday school as a student, plus twenty-five years of teaching high school Sunday School, plus twenty years in the church choir loft, a term on the board of trustees of a seminary, and almost a decade of serving as a Christian speaker in public middle schools in Arizona, alongside a Jewish speaker and a Muslim speaker as we shared in their social studies classes about the religions that formed in the Middle East, suffice it to say I’ve thought a great deal about religion. I’ve had questions from brilliant high school students and curious middle school students, I’ve had a lifetime of questions of my own, and I’ve heard a gamut of perspectives. In a season, my law school education added to my life experience a study of constitutional law, common law, federal jurisdiction, criminal law, constitutional criminal procedure, civil procedure, and more. But it wasn’t until after law school, when I did a deep study of what we Christians call the ‘Old Testament’ and Jews call ‘The Bible,’ that I discovered the threads of the Torah (the first five books of the Jewish Bible) that are woven into our system of laws.
Notable and previously unknown to me was the provision of care in the Torah for the vulnerable. In Leviticus 19:9-10, God commands,
‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.’
In Deuteronomy 24:19-21, God commands: ‘When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.’
Born into the family tree of Christianity, my branch of that tree promoted an approach to religion that was grounded in scripture, informed by tradition, reason and experience, with an ethos to ‘[d]o all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.’ (Quote attributed to John Wesley) Shaped in that tradition, which encouraged bringing rational thinking to religious practice, I found the years with high school and middle school students exhilarating, as their minds probed edges and nooks and crannies of scripture and theology and as they challenged any hint of hypocrisy they sniffed out as they learned and questioned.
One of the questions that has stayed with me across a couple of decades was a question from a middle school student in the East Valley of the Phoenix area. He asked me, ‘What do Christians think is most important in their religion?’ I paused and reflected on what answer I would give. I decided to take my response directly from scripture, sharing that Jesus was asked what law was most important. I paraphrased these words from Matthew 22:34-40:
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’
I followed up by pointing out that Jesus was quoting directly from the Hebrew Bible, which Christians now call the Old Testament. (See specifically Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18)
Again and again, in these Abrahamic panel presentations with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim speakers, students always remarked on the parallels in Jewish values and Christian values as well as values shared with Islam.
With the rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, like many other Christians, I have been offended by the appropriation of the label ‘Christianity’ to advance ideas and values that are antithetical to Christian scripture, teachings and practice. I ask myself multiple times a week, Have these people actually read the Bible?
Seeing those in power pitting faction against faction, building a culture of division and grievance rather than a culture of mutuality, demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants and refugees, acquiring ever more wealth that is brandished and weaponized narcissistically, ridiculing those with disabilities, considering an I win, you lose approach the right approach for engaging in the world, exercising autocratic leadership rather than servant leadership, purposely taunting and turning on our neighbors in communities and on our country’s neighbors— in the name of Christianity—makes my head spin, my heart ache, my blood boil, and my soul cry.
So, to this situation and in this Holy Week, what can be done to resurrect those Judeo-Christian values that Christian Nationalism would claim to own while its movement instead tramples over those values with greed, power, lust and self-interest?
From scripture, I suppose one could make an argument that in this time we need to trust that God is in charge, relying upon Jesus’ do not be anxious message as shared in the Gospel of Matthew in verses 6:25-34 (NIV): "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
On a meta-level, yes.
But were one to follow the values of Judaism and Christianity, one must engage in this world. For Jews, repairing the world, or Tikkun Olam, means taking action to improve and heal the world; for Christians, embedded within the two greatest laws is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.
From our country’s inception we have held dear to the separation of church and state, which is threatened by the rise of Christian Nationalism. The Judeo-Christian values of taking action in keeping with Tikkun Olam and caring for our neighbors, however, can and do transcend religion.
As for me this Holy Week, personally I feel inspired by the example of Jesus, told in the New Testament story of what Christians call Holy Week, when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem at the Temple. I share these words from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 21, verses 12-13:
‘Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.”’
Jesus literally turned the tables over. He threw them. Because what was happening in the name of his religion, Judaism, was antithetical to its teachings.
In the spirit of my values and what I would argue are our country’s highest values that transcend religion, I believe it’s time to turn over the tables. For me, writing this for whoever may read it was a Holy Week act of observance and table turning. I know my sharing this is not without risk. In keeping with the debt I owe to those who have gone before me and my hope for those who will come after me, and in keeping with what my own values require of me, I cannot be silent.
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If you are dispirited by current events, consider trying this to help you clarify how you might engage constructively:
Identify and write down your most important values, picking three to five values.
Consider current events through the lens of each one of these values.
Pick a value among those several you’ve chosen that you want to give expression to in the coming days.
Plan for one thing you can do to give constructive and productive expression to that value this week.
(Note: Though staying informed is important, doomscrolling doesn’t count as a constructive or productive expression of your value.)
Look for an opportunity to band with other people. No one of us is an island, and we are stronger together.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash