I am only now beginning to recover fully from my recent flurry of meetings and responsibilities. I moved from Holy Week to wedding preparations in Baltimore to the Alliance of Baptists board meeting to the annual Convocation to the post-Convocation children and youth ministers retreat. All of these events were good, but moving straight through without a break disrupted any semblance of rountine.

It is difficult to eat right, exercise, or pray when traveling. And, more than anything else, all of the meetings were relentless -- one after another after another. I was so saturated that I didn't have the energy to carve out time and space for an inner work.

It's good to break-up the rountine occasionally, but I'm really glad to be back home -- especially at my house where there is no Internet and no cable TV.

On the other extreme, I was reading in yesterday's New York Times that psychiatry professor at Harvard has coined the phrase, "'acquired attention deficit disorder' to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it. Regardless of whether the stimulation is from the Internet, TV or a cellphone, the brain...is hijacked." I hope I never commit to a job that requires me to have a blackberry. I don't want to be tethered to the office.

For now, one of my growing edges continues to be how to incorporate contemplative practices into travel and meetings.

Richard Conniff, the author of The Natural History of the Rich recently wrote an article in The New York Times entitled, "The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me." There he presents a case for why there are so many headlines about “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” He marshalls support for his argument from what he calls the "Cookie Monster Experiment”:

"Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table."

I"t reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light."

"As stupid behaviors go, none of this is in a class with slamming somebody else’s Ferrari into a concrete wall. But science advances by tiny steps." [See Griffin, Eddie]

"The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them."

"Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians)."

Reading this article in the context of Holy Week reminded me of the inverse/paradoxical claims of Christianity that sharing power leads to true, deep, grounded power -- a type power that makes you fully present to each moment, not rich and oblivious. Theologians call this power kenosis. Paul described it in Philippians 2:

"5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God also highly exalted him."

Quote of the day: "I've grown tired of people who pimp God." --Roland Martin

Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has recently published a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Back in 1971, he designed the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed that “anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.” For more information on Zimbardo, check out a recent article about him in The New York Times (3 April 2007).

I bring this up because today is Holy Friday, when we remember that bad things happened (and happen) to good people. It is important to remember, not only the victims/martyrs, but also what caused/allowed human beings to be so cruel. Zimbardo's work details the processes by which ordinary human beings because incrementally evil through the influence of their environment. I also just finished reading Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, where an 18 year old star student from the back country of North Carolina attends an Ivy League college and is corrupted by her environment. The young protagonist's moral fiber is unable to withstand the bacchanalia of a fraternity formal.

Both Zimbardo and Wolfe reaffirmed my commitment to contemplative prayer -- and to teaching contemplation to people of all ages. Without a developed interior life you are left without a ballast -- without any way of defending yourself against the influences of your environment. Charlotte thought she was being set free when she escaped North Carolina; instead, she was cast adrift. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib did not liberate the Iraqis, they captured, tortured, and humiliated them.

The same case could be made on a larger scale for what allowed, in the parlance Daniel Jonah Goldhagen book title, ordinary Germans to become "Hitler's Willing Executioners." Many of those ordinary Germans were Christians, who did not have a sufficient interior life to resist the Nazification all around them. There were notable examples like Dietriech Bonheoffer's Underground Seminary, which took spiritual disciplines seriously -- allowing them to critically examine and resist fascism and totalitarianism. Contemplation and spiritual disciplines are not the only path to individuation, the only way to develop defense mechanisms against "group think," but contemplation is one way, the best way for me.

Incidentally, I use the name "Holy Friday" instead of Good Friday because I don't believe in substitutionary atonement. So, Jesus' death doesn't seem particularly "good" to me. Jesus' death at the hands of the Roman Empire is what almost always happens when God's way meets the way of the world. It is a holy event, a martyrdom that should be remembered. But it is not good or redemptive in the sense that Anselm meant it. To use a vivid image from Dallas Willard, I'm not a vampire Christian: someone who is only interested in Jesus for his blood. John Dominic Crossan has recently published a book on this point: God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now.