It's a strange wrap-up to the Christmas season, news-wise. Sure, there's the usual report card from business people about whether we're spending enough, a whole project about which I'm growing increasingly dubious. Sure, there's the usual human interest stories that percolate this time of year: snow, stolen goods, charitable giving. Sure, there's the usual movie reviews, top 10 book lists, and general ranking of things that happened in the last twelve months.
But to end up, right before Christmas, hearing so much about lame ducks (a phrase that still brings me joy to hear), don't ask don't tell, and nuclear disarmament? Hm. What an interesting world.
Mostly, it reminds me of how complicated the world is. A lame duck congress is supposed to be good for nothing, and yet its very finitude (they're all going home, and some of them for good) spurs them on to try and work through difficult things rather that strategizing and manipulating. The very thing that makes it 'lame' (and, I suppose, a 'duck') is the very thing that finally let them dialogue and debate. Despite what the news media is saying today as it tries to sum up everything into big headlines, like "Christmas has come early (NPR)" or "Republicans back down (NYT)" or, "From Shellacking to Success (Washington Post)" or "Season of Progress" (Fox), I don't think any of it sums up well. The narrative here is not nearly so brief, punchy. It's complicated, a triumph of persistence in part, but also the only time of year no one is campaigning. I could make similar comments about Don't Ask Don't Tell--an ambiguous success on some level (really? Is our life so bad that we have to applaud ourselves for allowing gays to state their identity before we let them die for us? Really? And yet, it is progress for us), and I could say something similar about nuclear disarmament--a foot in the door is great, but it's also only a foot in the door.
As we run up to Christmas, I find myself grateful for all these things. Our faith informs and transforms our politics as Christians, and these are causes worth being involved in--the treatment of one another as human beings, the dialogue necessary to govern a nation, the tiny steps toward peace. And yet, as I reflect on the complexity of these stories, I find myself thinking again and again about the role of the church in the modern world. Specifically: what if our stories don't fit in bullet points? What if complexity is necessary to human life, to human community? How can media teach complexity?
I wonder if we could all give ourselves a Christmas present and turn off the media for a few days this year. Not because media is bad, not because staring at a screen is bad, not because learning is bad--but because maybe life is not as simple as what fits on my monitor, because life requires reflection and not only action. Because we need some time to reflect, and not only to move on to the next human interest story (alligators in the sewer!). And most of all, because God is surprisingly bigger than the talking points.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Not even fools
A thought or two on preaching the lectionary this Sunday, Advent 3.
From Isaiah:
What a simultaneously puzzling and hopeful passage. The idea that Israel would have public works projects, a kind of pre-Roman interstate, is interesting, and it's probably even more interesting if it's not a literal highway that runs to Tel Aviv. More particularly, a few words in it offer odd and fascinating windows on our faith.
What do we do with this mention of the unclean, those not allowed on it? This doesn't sound like a very Jesus-y claim, as he seemed rather fond of opening the holy to the unclean as well as recently showered. But of course this is Isaiah, not Jesus. He seems to be envisioning a road without traffic.
After all, imagine if we bumped all the unclean people off the road we commute on, whatever our means of commute. How wonderful it would be to have the road/train car/sidewalk to ourselves! To have all those whose driving we mock in popular jokes removed, which would include: low-riders, beat-up pickups with confederate flags, old people generally, young people generally, all soccer moms, business people on cell phones, and of course, women. Finally! A pure road, clean of bad driving! <--That's a fairly ambiguous picture, one that simultaneously shows us our petty intolerance and captures the feeling of free travel. We can imagine what that kind of driving would be like, but hopefully we might all recognize how it shows us our own bigoted selves, selves which come out almost exquisitely when we drive. Perhaps, in other words, Isaiah is exactly like us--and we should recognize the feeling Isaiah is speaking of, that of unencumbered travel, and also recognize the good old sinful humanity that, like us, imagines success at the expense of those who are different from us.
But more interesting to me is the passage closer to the end: no one, not even fools, shall go astray. I find this to be one of the most optimistic pictures of life offered in all of Scripture. How wide, exactly, would a road have to be so that no one would go astray? Exactly how large are the guard rails? And even more: 'fool' turns up in a few strategic places in the psalms, namely, where it reads: "The fool says in his heart that there is no god." Could this passage be speaking of that same fool? Can God craft a road so large that even the most foolish, those who don't believe in the road they're walking on, can still reach home?
Whether that sort of reference is a legitimate one here, I am uncertain, but I find it intriguing. I think a more helpful way to approach the verse is to notice that once someone has gotten on the way, no matter how foolish, they won't go astray. What this might mean for Christians engaging in radically different cultures, learning about other faiths, to me seems fairly obvious.
But more interesting to me would be if we could seriously ponder what this might mean for how we treat each other. In our own era, to disagree is to cut relationship. It happens with news channels, among families, and in friendships. A few stand the test of serious disagreement, but these days, most relationships ignore disagreement or break it off--witness, for example, the divorce rate, which is caused by many things (a confusion about what marriage is for, inter alia), but surely also by the confusion of agreement with relationship. In other words: when we think someone's acting like a fool, we stop being their friend.
But how might we look differently if we saw that not even fools can go astray? If nothing so foolish can happen that it severs relationship? How could we respond to others if we saw their foolishness as only one moment in a whole lifetime of walk along the Holy Way?
From Isaiah:
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God's people;
no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
What a simultaneously puzzling and hopeful passage. The idea that Israel would have public works projects, a kind of pre-Roman interstate, is interesting, and it's probably even more interesting if it's not a literal highway that runs to Tel Aviv. More particularly, a few words in it offer odd and fascinating windows on our faith.
What do we do with this mention of the unclean, those not allowed on it? This doesn't sound like a very Jesus-y claim, as he seemed rather fond of opening the holy to the unclean as well as recently showered. But of course this is Isaiah, not Jesus. He seems to be envisioning a road without traffic.
After all, imagine if we bumped all the unclean people off the road we commute on, whatever our means of commute. How wonderful it would be to have the road/train car/sidewalk to ourselves! To have all those whose driving we mock in popular jokes removed, which would include: low-riders, beat-up pickups with confederate flags, old people generally, young people generally, all soccer moms, business people on cell phones, and of course, women. Finally! A pure road, clean of bad driving! <--That's a fairly ambiguous picture, one that simultaneously shows us our petty intolerance and captures the feeling of free travel. We can imagine what that kind of driving would be like, but hopefully we might all recognize how it shows us our own bigoted selves, selves which come out almost exquisitely when we drive. Perhaps, in other words, Isaiah is exactly like us--and we should recognize the feeling Isaiah is speaking of, that of unencumbered travel, and also recognize the good old sinful humanity that, like us, imagines success at the expense of those who are different from us.
But more interesting to me is the passage closer to the end: no one, not even fools, shall go astray. I find this to be one of the most optimistic pictures of life offered in all of Scripture. How wide, exactly, would a road have to be so that no one would go astray? Exactly how large are the guard rails? And even more: 'fool' turns up in a few strategic places in the psalms, namely, where it reads: "The fool says in his heart that there is no god." Could this passage be speaking of that same fool? Can God craft a road so large that even the most foolish, those who don't believe in the road they're walking on, can still reach home?
Whether that sort of reference is a legitimate one here, I am uncertain, but I find it intriguing. I think a more helpful way to approach the verse is to notice that once someone has gotten on the way, no matter how foolish, they won't go astray. What this might mean for Christians engaging in radically different cultures, learning about other faiths, to me seems fairly obvious.
But more interesting to me would be if we could seriously ponder what this might mean for how we treat each other. In our own era, to disagree is to cut relationship. It happens with news channels, among families, and in friendships. A few stand the test of serious disagreement, but these days, most relationships ignore disagreement or break it off--witness, for example, the divorce rate, which is caused by many things (a confusion about what marriage is for, inter alia), but surely also by the confusion of agreement with relationship. In other words: when we think someone's acting like a fool, we stop being their friend.
But how might we look differently if we saw that not even fools can go astray? If nothing so foolish can happen that it severs relationship? How could we respond to others if we saw their foolishness as only one moment in a whole lifetime of walk along the Holy Way?
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Change of life
This is not the first interesting technological crowd-sourced thing I've seen, but surely it strikes me as unique.
Its premise is delightful. Human beings are simply better at pattern recognition than computers. So, rather than having an enormous binary-based machine try out exponential numbers of possible combinations, make it fun. Give it a point system. Tell people how they score against their neighbors (I made the second highest score ever on one of the puzzles! No really!), and then help them to recognize that their 'gaming' is doing some research for various genetic disorders linked to various pathologies. It's a winning nexus, it seems, and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go play a game and save lives. Really. It's worth 15 minutes of your time to learn and play a few.
It does raise one question for me, though. Certainly, Phylo is ingenious. It's wonderful, sitting at a convergent human psychological spot of competition, success, altruism, and the raw desire everyone seems to have to match little glowy things in the right order. I think it deserves all kinds of kudos for that.
The itch it raises for me is that it tacitly plays into the sense that seems to hang around our culture that ingenuity and fun will solve all of our problems. I still guffaw when people comment that science will surely save us from global warming with an intriguing and easy solution, that off-shore oil drilling will have an easy, chemical-free cleanup with just a little elbow grease and human-know-how. I'm sure it's because I sometimes work with people who are dying and addicts, but not every problem has a fun solution. Sometimes, there is only endurance, forbearance, and sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to change, but the situation isn't going to.
That continues to be what strikes me as challenging in our world. It's not that our economic problems and ecological crises don't have solutions. They do, or at least they have actions that would terrifically ameliorate things. We could simply cut our standard of living by half. We could simply turn electricity off for 12 hours a day. We could change--we're like the morbidly obese, confusing "hard to change" with "impossible to change." It would cut into productivity, into our entertainment, and into our god-given-right-to-do-whatever-the-hell-we-please-at-any-cost, which seems to be the demonic way we understand 'freedom'. No one thinks sacrifice is possible, and we all point and laugh at the wackos who choose to live off the grid, set up solar panels, and cut the meat in their diet to a quarter of its previous level.
And yet: what if economic justice and ecological sustainability are not human ingenuity puzzles, but rather ascetic puzzles, or sacrificial conundrums? What if what we need is not a new idea, a brilliant way to make living ecologically more fun, but an actual change of life? Some repentance? A conversion?
Its premise is delightful. Human beings are simply better at pattern recognition than computers. So, rather than having an enormous binary-based machine try out exponential numbers of possible combinations, make it fun. Give it a point system. Tell people how they score against their neighbors (I made the second highest score ever on one of the puzzles! No really!), and then help them to recognize that their 'gaming' is doing some research for various genetic disorders linked to various pathologies. It's a winning nexus, it seems, and I have nothing bad to say about it. Go play a game and save lives. Really. It's worth 15 minutes of your time to learn and play a few.
It does raise one question for me, though. Certainly, Phylo is ingenious. It's wonderful, sitting at a convergent human psychological spot of competition, success, altruism, and the raw desire everyone seems to have to match little glowy things in the right order. I think it deserves all kinds of kudos for that.
The itch it raises for me is that it tacitly plays into the sense that seems to hang around our culture that ingenuity and fun will solve all of our problems. I still guffaw when people comment that science will surely save us from global warming with an intriguing and easy solution, that off-shore oil drilling will have an easy, chemical-free cleanup with just a little elbow grease and human-know-how. I'm sure it's because I sometimes work with people who are dying and addicts, but not every problem has a fun solution. Sometimes, there is only endurance, forbearance, and sacrifice. Sometimes, we have to change, but the situation isn't going to.
That continues to be what strikes me as challenging in our world. It's not that our economic problems and ecological crises don't have solutions. They do, or at least they have actions that would terrifically ameliorate things. We could simply cut our standard of living by half. We could simply turn electricity off for 12 hours a day. We could change--we're like the morbidly obese, confusing "hard to change" with "impossible to change." It would cut into productivity, into our entertainment, and into our god-given-right-to-do-whatever-the-hell-we-please-at-any-cost, which seems to be the demonic way we understand 'freedom'. No one thinks sacrifice is possible, and we all point and laugh at the wackos who choose to live off the grid, set up solar panels, and cut the meat in their diet to a quarter of its previous level.
And yet: what if economic justice and ecological sustainability are not human ingenuity puzzles, but rather ascetic puzzles, or sacrificial conundrums? What if what we need is not a new idea, a brilliant way to make living ecologically more fun, but an actual change of life? Some repentance? A conversion?
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
To listen, or not to listen by stuffing my ears with cotton
So: do you listen to Christmas music in Advent? Or is that cheating?
Advent, for some of you less church-ritual-inclined folks, is the season of preparation before Christmas. Historically, it's something of a "mild fasting time", which is rather oxymoronic. It's a time of preparation, like preparing a room for a guest, or tending a seed, or watching the sun rise--those are some of the traditional images. So each year, we all have the annual debate: is it cheating to listen to Christmas music in Advent?
Given the commercial nature of the Christmas season these days, if you walk into any public space, you will hear Christmas music whether you like it or not. All the contemporary stuff, though, is strangely heartless. It's grown increasingly formulaic, thoughtless, and depressing--like much of pop music, really. The moldy oldie stuff seems strangely disconnected and hollow. White Christmas? Really? That's what we dream of? How about no more wars overseas? Or: Santa Claus is coming to town? That's why we better watch out? What about a broken economic system? That seems like a better reason to watch out--Adam Smith's invisible hand might just punch us smack in the face.
But aside from that awful fluff, that cultural snow, we all have Christmas songs that speak to us, and that's the real heart of the question. Do we best prepare for Christ's coming by fasting from that music? Does listening to Christmas music too early count as cheating, like opening presents too early?
Increasingly, I think it takes an odd mental gymnastics to put off listening to Christmas music. Sure, I love Advent music--probably more than your average bear, and that music is very appropriate for the time of year. But could we really prepare for Christ without knowing what that sounds like? Can we truly clean up our hearts and minds without a vision in front of us, of humanity reconciled to God, of angels singing? The Guest who comes at Christmas is a stranger, but that Guest is also a friend. Listening to no Christmas music ahead of time reminds me too much of false piety. Fasting is important, but Advent is about not much about fasting--when we arrive in Lent we can speak of fasting. Advent is about a light in darkness, about clarity of vision, about refocusing, about letting the unimportant fall away. And Christmas music, for me, is of paramount importance. Nothing speaks in my heart like those old carols. And so nothing inspires my preparation like a taste of what we will celebrate soon.
So keep Advent, I say, by keeping a vision of the Holy before us, knowing what we prepare for, what we will celebrate for 12 days. Something has to fight off all of this soulless wandering in a winter wonderland.
And, in that spirit, I offer you my annual tradition: what may well be my own favorite Christmas hymn. Just click the play button a little down the page. This is tradition. O night divine, indeed.
Advent, for some of you less church-ritual-inclined folks, is the season of preparation before Christmas. Historically, it's something of a "mild fasting time", which is rather oxymoronic. It's a time of preparation, like preparing a room for a guest, or tending a seed, or watching the sun rise--those are some of the traditional images. So each year, we all have the annual debate: is it cheating to listen to Christmas music in Advent?
Given the commercial nature of the Christmas season these days, if you walk into any public space, you will hear Christmas music whether you like it or not. All the contemporary stuff, though, is strangely heartless. It's grown increasingly formulaic, thoughtless, and depressing--like much of pop music, really. The moldy oldie stuff seems strangely disconnected and hollow. White Christmas? Really? That's what we dream of? How about no more wars overseas? Or: Santa Claus is coming to town? That's why we better watch out? What about a broken economic system? That seems like a better reason to watch out--Adam Smith's invisible hand might just punch us smack in the face.
But aside from that awful fluff, that cultural snow, we all have Christmas songs that speak to us, and that's the real heart of the question. Do we best prepare for Christ's coming by fasting from that music? Does listening to Christmas music too early count as cheating, like opening presents too early?
Increasingly, I think it takes an odd mental gymnastics to put off listening to Christmas music. Sure, I love Advent music--probably more than your average bear, and that music is very appropriate for the time of year. But could we really prepare for Christ without knowing what that sounds like? Can we truly clean up our hearts and minds without a vision in front of us, of humanity reconciled to God, of angels singing? The Guest who comes at Christmas is a stranger, but that Guest is also a friend. Listening to no Christmas music ahead of time reminds me too much of false piety. Fasting is important, but Advent is about not much about fasting--when we arrive in Lent we can speak of fasting. Advent is about a light in darkness, about clarity of vision, about refocusing, about letting the unimportant fall away. And Christmas music, for me, is of paramount importance. Nothing speaks in my heart like those old carols. And so nothing inspires my preparation like a taste of what we will celebrate soon.
So keep Advent, I say, by keeping a vision of the Holy before us, knowing what we prepare for, what we will celebrate for 12 days. Something has to fight off all of this soulless wandering in a winter wonderland.
And, in that spirit, I offer you my annual tradition: what may well be my own favorite Christmas hymn. Just click the play button a little down the page. This is tradition. O night divine, indeed.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Preaching kingliness
In one of its former incarnations, this space was taken up with thoughts about the upcoming readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. Today, that old spirit is taking over here.
Specifically, the hymn from Colossians (the spell-check inherent in this blog-device does not seem to believe that 'Colossians' is an acceptable word. Sigh. It does accept Colombians, however, which is a friendly amendment that might make everyone's sermon more interesting this weekend). The passage extols whom we understand Christ to be--firstborn, head of the church, etc. It's interesting how little of that bears on contemporary piety. It's not that some of us couldn't go through and talk about the Christology described here--we could, surely--but would anyone care? It doesn't seem very relevant. The teaching device here isn't nearly as poignant as the parables that Jesus seems to prefer, or the poetry of the psalms, or the insane details of Revelation. In other words, the style of this passage runs counter to most church life these days. If we are going to hear anything from it, we're going to have to work at it.
So I pick two small parts that have special relevance for us. The first is this bit about "in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell." What, exactly, does that mean? It's a pretty abstract image--God's full presence there in Jesus, and let's just never mind the heresy it seems to suggest about a fleshy outside, with a crunchy and delicious divine interior. Somewhere lurking in the the background is a theology connected to the temple, the arc, and the space between the cherubim--it's not that God isn't present elsewhere, it's that God is somehow especially present in this particular place, namely, Jesus.
But I think what strikes me about it is that God is 'pleased' to dwell there. Do we imagine, much, that Jesus is 'pleased' with our bodies, our physical selves? Go stand naked in front of a mirror and decide whether God would be pleased to dwell there. Is God pleased to dwell somewhere with stretch marks? How about love handles? Does God find much pleasure, which is what it means to be pleased, in me before I've brushed my teeth?
In other words, consciously and un-, we all secretly doubt that God likes bodies very much. They're either good as sex-objects on bulletin boards or properly hidden in stylish clothing. Or, depending on the koolaid we've had to drink, they're holy temples that are redeemed as such only by never doing anything normal and bodily--like balding, sagging, or growing old. And yet, in one of us, a Middle Eastern man of dubious parentage, a man we know didn't wear deodorant, and whose his feet were in desperate need of a pedicure--there God fully dwelt and was pleased to do so. Basically, my point is this: we all suck at recognizing the goodness in bodies. God seems to find them pleasurable anyway. Perhaps we need to revisit how we think about them. If God finds pleasure in them, perhaps we should, too, without trying to make them less like bodies.
And second, Jesus reconciles all things to himself through the blood of the cross. We often struggle with and hassle ourselves with the blood of the cross being a reconciliation--and that's fine. But I'm more interested in a throw-away line--reconciling "all things". Weird, if you pause to think about it. All things? Or more accurately, things?
Jesus' reconciliation happens for all things, which presumably includes but is not limited to: hydrogen, the orange seeds currently on my mouse pad, Herman Melville, grains of sand in Indonesia, Alpha Centauri (both the actual star and the video game), and my memory of how lemonade tastes. That is to say: all created reality is brought into this process of healing and growth through Jesus' work. That's the kind of king that Jesus is, the kind of king celebrated on Christ the King--a king who saves all not through a military campaign but through sacrifice, who reconciles every part of this created reality, including (presumably) those parts of reality about which we know nothing.
So: we are not different from this world, and it is all of it that has entered new relationship to God. If we think that's weird, it's probably because we fail to see our interconnectedness to this reality and dream, instead, that we are unique rather than blessed. And: when God, in Genesis, invites humanity to have dominion over the world, to be kings over the world, perhaps this is the kind of kingship God had in mind. We are not set apart from the world to dominate it; we are set here to exist in servanthood to it. Bluntly: global warming isn't a problem because it might affect our flourishing, although that might be true. Global warming is a problem because is shows that we've abdicated our throne for the hard seat of a petty tyrant, and the only difference between the world and a us is that we currently hold the conch shell.
Specifically, the hymn from Colossians (the spell-check inherent in this blog-device does not seem to believe that 'Colossians' is an acceptable word. Sigh. It does accept Colombians, however, which is a friendly amendment that might make everyone's sermon more interesting this weekend). The passage extols whom we understand Christ to be--firstborn, head of the church, etc. It's interesting how little of that bears on contemporary piety. It's not that some of us couldn't go through and talk about the Christology described here--we could, surely--but would anyone care? It doesn't seem very relevant. The teaching device here isn't nearly as poignant as the parables that Jesus seems to prefer, or the poetry of the psalms, or the insane details of Revelation. In other words, the style of this passage runs counter to most church life these days. If we are going to hear anything from it, we're going to have to work at it.
So I pick two small parts that have special relevance for us. The first is this bit about "in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell." What, exactly, does that mean? It's a pretty abstract image--God's full presence there in Jesus, and let's just never mind the heresy it seems to suggest about a fleshy outside, with a crunchy and delicious divine interior. Somewhere lurking in the the background is a theology connected to the temple, the arc, and the space between the cherubim--it's not that God isn't present elsewhere, it's that God is somehow especially present in this particular place, namely, Jesus.
But I think what strikes me about it is that God is 'pleased' to dwell there. Do we imagine, much, that Jesus is 'pleased' with our bodies, our physical selves? Go stand naked in front of a mirror and decide whether God would be pleased to dwell there. Is God pleased to dwell somewhere with stretch marks? How about love handles? Does God find much pleasure, which is what it means to be pleased, in me before I've brushed my teeth?
In other words, consciously and un-, we all secretly doubt that God likes bodies very much. They're either good as sex-objects on bulletin boards or properly hidden in stylish clothing. Or, depending on the koolaid we've had to drink, they're holy temples that are redeemed as such only by never doing anything normal and bodily--like balding, sagging, or growing old. And yet, in one of us, a Middle Eastern man of dubious parentage, a man we know didn't wear deodorant, and whose his feet were in desperate need of a pedicure--there God fully dwelt and was pleased to do so. Basically, my point is this: we all suck at recognizing the goodness in bodies. God seems to find them pleasurable anyway. Perhaps we need to revisit how we think about them. If God finds pleasure in them, perhaps we should, too, without trying to make them less like bodies.
And second, Jesus reconciles all things to himself through the blood of the cross. We often struggle with and hassle ourselves with the blood of the cross being a reconciliation--and that's fine. But I'm more interested in a throw-away line--reconciling "all things". Weird, if you pause to think about it. All things? Or more accurately, things?
Jesus' reconciliation happens for all things, which presumably includes but is not limited to: hydrogen, the orange seeds currently on my mouse pad, Herman Melville, grains of sand in Indonesia, Alpha Centauri (both the actual star and the video game), and my memory of how lemonade tastes. That is to say: all created reality is brought into this process of healing and growth through Jesus' work. That's the kind of king that Jesus is, the kind of king celebrated on Christ the King--a king who saves all not through a military campaign but through sacrifice, who reconciles every part of this created reality, including (presumably) those parts of reality about which we know nothing.
So: we are not different from this world, and it is all of it that has entered new relationship to God. If we think that's weird, it's probably because we fail to see our interconnectedness to this reality and dream, instead, that we are unique rather than blessed. And: when God, in Genesis, invites humanity to have dominion over the world, to be kings over the world, perhaps this is the kind of kingship God had in mind. We are not set apart from the world to dominate it; we are set here to exist in servanthood to it. Bluntly: global warming isn't a problem because it might affect our flourishing, although that might be true. Global warming is a problem because is shows that we've abdicated our throne for the hard seat of a petty tyrant, and the only difference between the world and a us is that we currently hold the conch shell.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Discernment via Nabokov
A dear friend pointed out to me the wonderful content here. It's a story of discernment, honesty, and the Spirit's movement. It's a familiar story to me as an Episcopalian, but his telling of it is so fresh, in part because of how fresh it is for him, and because of his background. And, really, what makes this story sing out is the that somehow the Spirit is involved there.
How do we recognize the movements of the Spirit? I think that's one hell of a question, and maybe the question that most stumps us in the modern era, but on some level, it's the only one that matters to us. In the old days, you could roll out the urim and thummim to see where the Spirit was moving. Or turn the tea leaves upside down. These days, my rough impression is that only church nerds talk about discernment, about recognizing the Spirit's movement, in personal life. And in our post-modern era, almost everyone is reticent to talk about the Spirit's movement in creation or history--if those are actually different things--because it sounds prideful at best and Third Reich-ish at worst. When we do say "the Spirit was active there," we try to do it only when it seems uncontroversial or unchallenging of the status quo. It's all well and good to claim that MLK was a prophet, speaking with the Spirit, after he's dead. I've always thought that one of the reasons people struggle with liberation theology is because it claims to recognize the Spirit at work, and in the post-modern (and modern) era, we just "aren't supposed to say that."
Is the movement of the Spirit recognizable along the lines of the now-traditional definition of pornography--"I know it when I see it"? Although I find that a highly unsatisfying definition for a dozen reasons, I can't help but think that it's at least partly true. Before I can make a guess about what the Spirit is up to, I have to see what I'm evaluating. I can't just hear about it.
It's like Lolita: if you've heard about it, it might be hard to differentiate it from pornography. But if you've read it, the powerful penultimate closing image of HH standing on a mountain, hearing the tragedy that is the lack of a child's voice, you're much less likely to confuse Lolita with pornography. Seeing is a prerequisite to discernment.
That's not to say that some people might have different readings of the book. Seeing is most emphatically not believing. Not all who saw Jesus, in person or in resurrected person, believed. The gospels are careful to say that.
But it seems to me that the first step in discerning the Spirit is seeing, experiencing, being involved, encountering, beginning a relationship. Discernment walks a fine line between saying "we" and "you," without giving up either. Otherwise, it's just garden-variety judgment, and we know how well that comes off in the gospels.
How do we recognize the movements of the Spirit? I think that's one hell of a question, and maybe the question that most stumps us in the modern era, but on some level, it's the only one that matters to us. In the old days, you could roll out the urim and thummim to see where the Spirit was moving. Or turn the tea leaves upside down. These days, my rough impression is that only church nerds talk about discernment, about recognizing the Spirit's movement, in personal life. And in our post-modern era, almost everyone is reticent to talk about the Spirit's movement in creation or history--if those are actually different things--because it sounds prideful at best and Third Reich-ish at worst. When we do say "the Spirit was active there," we try to do it only when it seems uncontroversial or unchallenging of the status quo. It's all well and good to claim that MLK was a prophet, speaking with the Spirit, after he's dead. I've always thought that one of the reasons people struggle with liberation theology is because it claims to recognize the Spirit at work, and in the post-modern (and modern) era, we just "aren't supposed to say that."
Is the movement of the Spirit recognizable along the lines of the now-traditional definition of pornography--"I know it when I see it"? Although I find that a highly unsatisfying definition for a dozen reasons, I can't help but think that it's at least partly true. Before I can make a guess about what the Spirit is up to, I have to see what I'm evaluating. I can't just hear about it.
It's like Lolita: if you've heard about it, it might be hard to differentiate it from pornography. But if you've read it, the powerful penultimate closing image of HH standing on a mountain, hearing the tragedy that is the lack of a child's voice, you're much less likely to confuse Lolita with pornography. Seeing is a prerequisite to discernment.
That's not to say that some people might have different readings of the book. Seeing is most emphatically not believing. Not all who saw Jesus, in person or in resurrected person, believed. The gospels are careful to say that.
But it seems to me that the first step in discerning the Spirit is seeing, experiencing, being involved, encountering, beginning a relationship. Discernment walks a fine line between saying "we" and "you," without giving up either. Otherwise, it's just garden-variety judgment, and we know how well that comes off in the gospels.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
The end of the world, and other exciting conceits
I wonder how many sermons, preached in the last decade, have been titled: "It's the end of the world as we know it/ and I feel fine."
Does eschatology hold any real claim on us these days? I doubt it. I sense rather that two basic poles anchor our brains when we think about the future. Well, three basic poles, with the third being 'De Nile,' that lengthiest of psychological rivers. The two other two poles are apocalypticism, which is quite different from eschatology, and the 'I am a rock/ I am island' mentality, quoting the wise Paul Simon parodying the great Donne's 17th.
Apocalypticism is probably the most obvious, the sense that the end of the world is a "bad thing" with much destruction, whichever side of Robert Frost's Fire/Ice line we might decide on. It does come in several varieties, though, that lurk around our consciousness. It appears in things like The Left Behind Series, which is essentially revenge pornography directed against those who disagree. It also comes in the bizarre news coverage of asteroids that might destroy us--sooner or later, it will happen, we are assured, but we do not know the hour the thief is coming to steal our comfortable temperate climate and turn us into earth's new dinosaurss. Apocalypticism arises when we think about "mutual nuclear destruction," or even global warming. It even comes up with the end of the Mayan calender, because clearly the calender ended at that spot because all created reality was going to explode, not because someone ran out of wall space. The world will end and it will be unpleasant. This alternately terrifies and delights us, rather like a roller coaster. We don't hold an eschatology--a belief that God might become all in all, that creation might be redeemed, that new life might extend in all directions. We're more like voyeurs hoping to catch a glimpse of something really nasty, hopefully at someone else's expense. And apocalypticism does not orient us in a particular direction--it's a little too busy glorifying in the Big Crunch/Cool, as the case may be. It doesn't move us toward anything--mostly, it turns us into viewers.
The 'island' mentality is essentially the sense that, whatever may happen to our world, I don't care because I am not the world. You can hear this from bankers who received the bailout money from the US government in the wake of the global economic meltdown. By and large, they are not thankful or penitent--hey, they tend to say, it's survival of the fittest. This stance is not unique to them--we also drift that way, like when we all make our individual plans about what to do in the zombie apocalypse. It's like we've developed a perfect predator gig: hunt to extinction, and then have the prey apologize for not reproducing fast enough. But it's fundamentally a stance about the end of created reality--even as economic worlds collapse, the predators cultivate new pray. It is, in effect, a belief that the world will never end for sufficiently excellent economic predators, because they will always escape. Global warming? They can afford air conditioning, not only for themselves, but for their crops. This is the island mentality, the belief that changes in the ecosystem won't ever kill an infinitely adaptable predator--never mind the impossibility of being infinitely adaptable. The 'Island' mentality, the belief that I am an island and not a part of a whole created reality, orients us anywhere but toward the end of the things.
So: what would it mean these days to live into an eschatology, a belief in 'final things' that we hope would come to pass, that would be a new creation, God having become all in all? One or two thoughts about that. First, we would have to rediscover the importance of 'surprise' in our theology. Foundational to our contemporary problems is our sense that we can no longer be surprised, or we will shortly reach a time in human history when surprises will be gone. We've got to give that up. Interestingly, though, it's incredibly hard to construct an argument, or an article, that doesn't somehow abrogate surprise inherently. It seems to me that if we are all going to be eschatological people, we will somehow have to redeem 'surprise' in our discourse in a way that is currently nowhere on our maps.
Second, we need to take seriously the insistence that we are not judges of ourselves or each other. This is not a polemic against fundamentalism. Rather, I intend it as a guide to the idea that, given the radical diversity of life within traditions, much less among them, different communities may need different visions of the future, potentially irreconcilable visions, and we might all have to live with all of us not having the same vision. If that sounds abstract, how about: people in California may need a different theology than people in Chicago for visioning the end of the world, and those two communities are in close to the same tradition. In other words, we might have to recognize that each of us inhabits many traditions at different depths. More on this another time.
And third: we need to claim and explore our profound interconnection. John Donne is more right now than ever. Each of us is part of the main, and the loss of every part of the world affects us all. Therefore, we might consider as Donne does that every time the environment takes a hit, every time poverty is strengthened and oppression reinforced, we won't have to send to know for whom this is bad news--it's bad news for us.
Surprise, reserved judgment, interconnection--I think those are the building blocks that might reconnect us to a real hope for new creation.
Does eschatology hold any real claim on us these days? I doubt it. I sense rather that two basic poles anchor our brains when we think about the future. Well, three basic poles, with the third being 'De Nile,' that lengthiest of psychological rivers. The two other two poles are apocalypticism, which is quite different from eschatology, and the 'I am a rock/ I am island' mentality, quoting the wise Paul Simon parodying the great Donne's 17th.
Apocalypticism is probably the most obvious, the sense that the end of the world is a "bad thing" with much destruction, whichever side of Robert Frost's Fire/Ice line we might decide on. It does come in several varieties, though, that lurk around our consciousness. It appears in things like The Left Behind Series, which is essentially revenge pornography directed against those who disagree. It also comes in the bizarre news coverage of asteroids that might destroy us--sooner or later, it will happen, we are assured, but we do not know the hour the thief is coming to steal our comfortable temperate climate and turn us into earth's new dinosaurss. Apocalypticism arises when we think about "mutual nuclear destruction," or even global warming. It even comes up with the end of the Mayan calender, because clearly the calender ended at that spot because all created reality was going to explode, not because someone ran out of wall space. The world will end and it will be unpleasant. This alternately terrifies and delights us, rather like a roller coaster. We don't hold an eschatology--a belief that God might become all in all, that creation might be redeemed, that new life might extend in all directions. We're more like voyeurs hoping to catch a glimpse of something really nasty, hopefully at someone else's expense. And apocalypticism does not orient us in a particular direction--it's a little too busy glorifying in the Big Crunch/Cool, as the case may be. It doesn't move us toward anything--mostly, it turns us into viewers.
The 'island' mentality is essentially the sense that, whatever may happen to our world, I don't care because I am not the world. You can hear this from bankers who received the bailout money from the US government in the wake of the global economic meltdown. By and large, they are not thankful or penitent--hey, they tend to say, it's survival of the fittest. This stance is not unique to them--we also drift that way, like when we all make our individual plans about what to do in the zombie apocalypse. It's like we've developed a perfect predator gig: hunt to extinction, and then have the prey apologize for not reproducing fast enough. But it's fundamentally a stance about the end of created reality--even as economic worlds collapse, the predators cultivate new pray. It is, in effect, a belief that the world will never end for sufficiently excellent economic predators, because they will always escape. Global warming? They can afford air conditioning, not only for themselves, but for their crops. This is the island mentality, the belief that changes in the ecosystem won't ever kill an infinitely adaptable predator--never mind the impossibility of being infinitely adaptable. The 'Island' mentality, the belief that I am an island and not a part of a whole created reality, orients us anywhere but toward the end of the things.
So: what would it mean these days to live into an eschatology, a belief in 'final things' that we hope would come to pass, that would be a new creation, God having become all in all? One or two thoughts about that. First, we would have to rediscover the importance of 'surprise' in our theology. Foundational to our contemporary problems is our sense that we can no longer be surprised, or we will shortly reach a time in human history when surprises will be gone. We've got to give that up. Interestingly, though, it's incredibly hard to construct an argument, or an article, that doesn't somehow abrogate surprise inherently. It seems to me that if we are all going to be eschatological people, we will somehow have to redeem 'surprise' in our discourse in a way that is currently nowhere on our maps.
Second, we need to take seriously the insistence that we are not judges of ourselves or each other. This is not a polemic against fundamentalism. Rather, I intend it as a guide to the idea that, given the radical diversity of life within traditions, much less among them, different communities may need different visions of the future, potentially irreconcilable visions, and we might all have to live with all of us not having the same vision. If that sounds abstract, how about: people in California may need a different theology than people in Chicago for visioning the end of the world, and those two communities are in close to the same tradition. In other words, we might have to recognize that each of us inhabits many traditions at different depths. More on this another time.
And third: we need to claim and explore our profound interconnection. John Donne is more right now than ever. Each of us is part of the main, and the loss of every part of the world affects us all. Therefore, we might consider as Donne does that every time the environment takes a hit, every time poverty is strengthened and oppression reinforced, we won't have to send to know for whom this is bad news--it's bad news for us.
Surprise, reserved judgment, interconnection--I think those are the building blocks that might reconnect us to a real hope for new creation.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Dining alone
Sacred time happens for me when I dine alone.
Certainly, that's not an exclusive statement; sacred times occur on other occasions for me. But there is no time so full of God's presence as when I am able to dine alone with a book. It helps if the music is forgettable--it almost always is, whether it's New Age vibrations or alternative whines. It's better if the restaurant is locally owned and cheap. I prefer Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese--nothing beats a pho shop--although large, commercial burrito chains can do in a pinch. Eating spicy soup, grateful for my existence, talking in my head to the characters and writers through the page, enjoying the restful silence of the brain so often denied us in the loud, loud West. This is holy time, sacramental time. The shoulders ease, time changes texture, and silence seems mingled with the sound.
And I'm not alone. Today, I saw four or five other people, outrageously doing nothing: eating, reading, staring into the distance, solitary in the crowd. It was oddly like being in church.
Traditionally, in the history of the faith, meals are festive and sacred occasions for the community. Eucharist is a ritualized community meal as well as a sacrament. Agape and Seder meals happen in families and communities. Meals are shared affairs, and sacred meals are especially shared. Or at least, they happen only with others.
But in our own time, I wonder about the need for solitude. Thomas Merton doubts that true solitude is possible in a city--he thinks solitude is replaced with loneliness and alienation. Maybe there's something to Merton's comment, but mostly, it sounds like good old fashioned aesthetic preference inflated to ontological status. He didn't like cities and they didn't work for him, and so he extrapolated that, therefore, cities must be bad. Solitude is as accessible in cities as elsewhere--even the suburbs have solitude. It's a matter of temperament.
Even more, many people lament the loss of communal meals, with more dining alone, as one symptom of our alienating culture. There's something to that critique. But for me, well, I like dining alone as well as with others. It speaks to me.
But what about sacred meals alone? Are they sacred because tacitly they embrace a broader communion, one with all the saints, and in fact, while sitting alone, we are dining with God, writers, literary characters, and other presences that make it a kind of silent community? Or, are they sacred because of their "solitude in company"? Are they made profound by the silence in the midst of others, tables empty and full? I'm more inclined to think of it in terms of solitude, that sacred space is more than a designated area.
Perhaps sacred space would best be understood as that space, in time and physical space, which frees us to be ourselves.
Certainly, that's not an exclusive statement; sacred times occur on other occasions for me. But there is no time so full of God's presence as when I am able to dine alone with a book. It helps if the music is forgettable--it almost always is, whether it's New Age vibrations or alternative whines. It's better if the restaurant is locally owned and cheap. I prefer Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese--nothing beats a pho shop--although large, commercial burrito chains can do in a pinch. Eating spicy soup, grateful for my existence, talking in my head to the characters and writers through the page, enjoying the restful silence of the brain so often denied us in the loud, loud West. This is holy time, sacramental time. The shoulders ease, time changes texture, and silence seems mingled with the sound.
And I'm not alone. Today, I saw four or five other people, outrageously doing nothing: eating, reading, staring into the distance, solitary in the crowd. It was oddly like being in church.
Traditionally, in the history of the faith, meals are festive and sacred occasions for the community. Eucharist is a ritualized community meal as well as a sacrament. Agape and Seder meals happen in families and communities. Meals are shared affairs, and sacred meals are especially shared. Or at least, they happen only with others.
But in our own time, I wonder about the need for solitude. Thomas Merton doubts that true solitude is possible in a city--he thinks solitude is replaced with loneliness and alienation. Maybe there's something to Merton's comment, but mostly, it sounds like good old fashioned aesthetic preference inflated to ontological status. He didn't like cities and they didn't work for him, and so he extrapolated that, therefore, cities must be bad. Solitude is as accessible in cities as elsewhere--even the suburbs have solitude. It's a matter of temperament.
Even more, many people lament the loss of communal meals, with more dining alone, as one symptom of our alienating culture. There's something to that critique. But for me, well, I like dining alone as well as with others. It speaks to me.
But what about sacred meals alone? Are they sacred because tacitly they embrace a broader communion, one with all the saints, and in fact, while sitting alone, we are dining with God, writers, literary characters, and other presences that make it a kind of silent community? Or, are they sacred because of their "solitude in company"? Are they made profound by the silence in the midst of others, tables empty and full? I'm more inclined to think of it in terms of solitude, that sacred space is more than a designated area.
Perhaps sacred space would best be understood as that space, in time and physical space, which frees us to be ourselves.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
"In the strong name"
I once heard someone end a prayer that way--"in the strong name of Jesus Christ our Lord." God knows where I first heard it, but now, in my own public prayer improvisation, I tend to end all my prayers this way.
Strong name. I listened to an excellent political commentary on This American Life this week calling Democrats to account, not for their politics but for their refusal to let their message be a strong one. Their lunch gets eaten by bully Republicans, who then call them names and make rude comments about their mothers. The Democrats don't exactly turn the other cheek, a posture which requires a defiant sense of integrity--instead, the apologize. So, Democrats have been "shellacked" in the election, in Obama's phrase that has now entered the long media echo chamber, even though their policies are potentially far more popular with most Americans and have spared us what could have been a far worse economic crisis.
I am struck, not for the first time, that we Christians have a similar problem. We tend toward an apologizing Christianity, when we ought to be an apologetic Christianity. We fear offending others, when we ought to respond to our truly offensive culture. We have words and ideas and relationships that can heal the world, but we allow our culture to beat back our voice. Fundamentalist Christians clearly do not share our issue, as they proclaim their violent and half-baked gospel. Worried and scared, we find their confidence frightening and a further reason to shut our mouths--if that's what being confident sounds like, we fearfully mutter to ourselves, perhaps we should just give them our lunch money and language about God and start over somewhere else.
The need for us to be strong, precisely because Jesus is still strong, is starting to sink home with mainstream Christianity. Well, it's sinking in a little, anyway, and rumor and religious sites carry to us news of great strength--emergent churches, rule-of-life communities, whole mainline churches reborn as mission-minded communities supported, rather than hindered, by their establishment history. I do notice that for most of us, the strong messages of Jesus Christ always seem to happen somewhere else--in the rural areas for urbanites and vice versa, up the road, in Africa, and so on, and many places of hope seem dogged by personality issues.
What makes it all more complicated, of course, is that the culture war is also an internal war, and we Christians--even excluding the fundamentalist ones--are having our own quiet war about the best way to speak Jesus' name and ministry in this particular era. Some think the best way is to give up historic theology and remythologize ourselves; others believe we should reclaim different ideas from our history for this one; still others believe we should simply restate our claims with more confidence; and still even others believe we should abandon current institutions and go underground. And of course, even more alternatives present themselves, from withdrawing from society to covering our ears and pretending nothing has changed, which continues to be the posture of many. And, weirdly, the successes that happen elsewhere also undermine us when, because their context is so different from ours, those successes make it seem like speaking the strong name of Jesus is impossible in this context.
So how do we speak the strong name of Jesus in this time, in this place? Today, I'm not sure--but I do sense that if we don't work it out, something terribly important is being lost.
Strong name. I listened to an excellent political commentary on This American Life this week calling Democrats to account, not for their politics but for their refusal to let their message be a strong one. Their lunch gets eaten by bully Republicans, who then call them names and make rude comments about their mothers. The Democrats don't exactly turn the other cheek, a posture which requires a defiant sense of integrity--instead, the apologize. So, Democrats have been "shellacked" in the election, in Obama's phrase that has now entered the long media echo chamber, even though their policies are potentially far more popular with most Americans and have spared us what could have been a far worse economic crisis.
I am struck, not for the first time, that we Christians have a similar problem. We tend toward an apologizing Christianity, when we ought to be an apologetic Christianity. We fear offending others, when we ought to respond to our truly offensive culture. We have words and ideas and relationships that can heal the world, but we allow our culture to beat back our voice. Fundamentalist Christians clearly do not share our issue, as they proclaim their violent and half-baked gospel. Worried and scared, we find their confidence frightening and a further reason to shut our mouths--if that's what being confident sounds like, we fearfully mutter to ourselves, perhaps we should just give them our lunch money and language about God and start over somewhere else.
The need for us to be strong, precisely because Jesus is still strong, is starting to sink home with mainstream Christianity. Well, it's sinking in a little, anyway, and rumor and religious sites carry to us news of great strength--emergent churches, rule-of-life communities, whole mainline churches reborn as mission-minded communities supported, rather than hindered, by their establishment history. I do notice that for most of us, the strong messages of Jesus Christ always seem to happen somewhere else--in the rural areas for urbanites and vice versa, up the road, in Africa, and so on, and many places of hope seem dogged by personality issues.
What makes it all more complicated, of course, is that the culture war is also an internal war, and we Christians--even excluding the fundamentalist ones--are having our own quiet war about the best way to speak Jesus' name and ministry in this particular era. Some think the best way is to give up historic theology and remythologize ourselves; others believe we should reclaim different ideas from our history for this one; still others believe we should simply restate our claims with more confidence; and still even others believe we should abandon current institutions and go underground. And of course, even more alternatives present themselves, from withdrawing from society to covering our ears and pretending nothing has changed, which continues to be the posture of many. And, weirdly, the successes that happen elsewhere also undermine us when, because their context is so different from ours, those successes make it seem like speaking the strong name of Jesus is impossible in this context.
So how do we speak the strong name of Jesus in this time, in this place? Today, I'm not sure--but I do sense that if we don't work it out, something terribly important is being lost.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Vocation, failure, and resurrection
News reached me this week that an old friend had died. Trey was someone I hadn't spoken to him in many years. Growing up, we lived a few houses apart, and in high school, we ran in the same social circles. He died too young and entirely unexpectedly, before he had even half-begun what he hoped and dreamed to accomplish.
Wanting to know more about where his life had taken him, I did a bit of cyber-stalking. I poured over an old MySpace page, through some old articles and notes. How strange, it seems to me, the way that the internet inadvertently becomes a cemetery. There's no one to pull the plug, and so sometimes, for years, "social networking" links us with those who have died. Dare we 'unfriend' someone who has died, fearing a kind of zombie? But perhaps the internet is simply teaching a dreaded truth: we are always connected directly connected to the dead. Unfriending makes no difference.
The most difficult emotion to face, at least for me, in the death of someone in their young adult years is the possibility of failure. By dying, through no fault of his own, my friend failed to achieve everything he wanted to accomplish. His vocation is, in an important sense, unfulfilled. Surely he contributed much to the world--my mother commented that she had been sure that Trey would become a senator, with his ability to befriend a whole room in moments. And surely in (literally) billions of other ways he contributed to our world, altering it, at least in my experience, significantly for the better. But surely Trey feels that his vocation is unfulfilled. Surely, if we asked him, he would have a thing or two to say about the terrible injustice of death come too soon. I would certainly feel that way.
There is something primal and terrifying about failing to fulfill a vocation because it is 'tragedy' in the truest sense of the word. It is real and absolute loss. I myself fear that loss not out of some sense that God, a cruel-taskmaster, demands a certain list of things accomplished for each of us. Rather, I fear it because the loss of an incomplete vocation is as real as the loss of a limb, a pain over a healthy object no longer there. I mourn the loss of Trey's vocation, its failure to come to fruition; and I fear the same loss for myself.
Rowan Williams reflects on this topic in his book on Dostoevsky. The freedom of our world means that inherent in it is the possibility of failure. Any of us may fail at our vocations--and even more than that, we may fail through no fault of our own. Living in this world of mutual dependence means both that we might fail, and that it may not be our fault. What a terrible truth this speaks to us in America: not only may we fail at doing what brings us peace and joy, but it might be someone else's fault. This would be no surprise to anyone who has ever been truly oppressed, but to so many of us, it's damn surprising.
However, we should also see one other thing, also discussed by both Williams and Dostoevsky. In Christ, in the possibility of eternal life, the promise is made to us that any of our actions may serve to change what the past actions meant. A confession, while only the first step, is a real change of life. A gift freely shared with a stranger becomes the climax of our past, turning a whole story about selfishness into one where we learned to give.
I believe in resurrection for all the reasons that have inspired me to do so, but what it means to me practically is the possibility that a failed vocation in this life is, perhaps even now, being brought into line by later action. Even now Trey continues his work and vocation as an artist and counselor, even if we won't see its fruits till the fullness of the kingdom. Even now the love of his family and friends takes that partially complete vocation and redeems it. Neither resurrection erases the loss, but both show it to be one stage on a fuller journey, a story that has room for both cross and empty tomb.
In memory of Trey and Adam
Wanting to know more about where his life had taken him, I did a bit of cyber-stalking. I poured over an old MySpace page, through some old articles and notes. How strange, it seems to me, the way that the internet inadvertently becomes a cemetery. There's no one to pull the plug, and so sometimes, for years, "social networking" links us with those who have died. Dare we 'unfriend' someone who has died, fearing a kind of zombie? But perhaps the internet is simply teaching a dreaded truth: we are always connected directly connected to the dead. Unfriending makes no difference.
The most difficult emotion to face, at least for me, in the death of someone in their young adult years is the possibility of failure. By dying, through no fault of his own, my friend failed to achieve everything he wanted to accomplish. His vocation is, in an important sense, unfulfilled. Surely he contributed much to the world--my mother commented that she had been sure that Trey would become a senator, with his ability to befriend a whole room in moments. And surely in (literally) billions of other ways he contributed to our world, altering it, at least in my experience, significantly for the better. But surely Trey feels that his vocation is unfulfilled. Surely, if we asked him, he would have a thing or two to say about the terrible injustice of death come too soon. I would certainly feel that way.
There is something primal and terrifying about failing to fulfill a vocation because it is 'tragedy' in the truest sense of the word. It is real and absolute loss. I myself fear that loss not out of some sense that God, a cruel-taskmaster, demands a certain list of things accomplished for each of us. Rather, I fear it because the loss of an incomplete vocation is as real as the loss of a limb, a pain over a healthy object no longer there. I mourn the loss of Trey's vocation, its failure to come to fruition; and I fear the same loss for myself.
Rowan Williams reflects on this topic in his book on Dostoevsky. The freedom of our world means that inherent in it is the possibility of failure. Any of us may fail at our vocations--and even more than that, we may fail through no fault of our own. Living in this world of mutual dependence means both that we might fail, and that it may not be our fault. What a terrible truth this speaks to us in America: not only may we fail at doing what brings us peace and joy, but it might be someone else's fault. This would be no surprise to anyone who has ever been truly oppressed, but to so many of us, it's damn surprising.
However, we should also see one other thing, also discussed by both Williams and Dostoevsky. In Christ, in the possibility of eternal life, the promise is made to us that any of our actions may serve to change what the past actions meant. A confession, while only the first step, is a real change of life. A gift freely shared with a stranger becomes the climax of our past, turning a whole story about selfishness into one where we learned to give.
I believe in resurrection for all the reasons that have inspired me to do so, but what it means to me practically is the possibility that a failed vocation in this life is, perhaps even now, being brought into line by later action. Even now Trey continues his work and vocation as an artist and counselor, even if we won't see its fruits till the fullness of the kingdom. Even now the love of his family and friends takes that partially complete vocation and redeems it. Neither resurrection erases the loss, but both show it to be one stage on a fuller journey, a story that has room for both cross and empty tomb.
In memory of Trey and Adam
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Holy space, with salmon
It's been a tough week for buildings so far this week--or at least a few of the buildings in my life. One burned, and now a Presiding Bishop who is suggesting, somewhat brilliantly, that perhaps marriage to an overpriced office building in Manhattan was the way of operations for the 1950s, and not in our own day. If I worked at 815, my heart would be in my throat, but as someone who simply wants our church to succeed, I have to say that once again, our PB is on to something.
When Lauren heard that the chapel burned, she went through the modern five stages of grief, rather than the traditional Kubler-Ross five stages: 1. phone calls, 2. website, 3. local news, 4. press releases, and 5. facebook, trying desperately to find out what was happening, what it meant, how the institution was responding. At the same time Lauren was making these frantic connections, she happened to catch a friend of ours on the phone, another graduate of "The Seminary", who, when asked to comment, said: "oh, that's only a building."
I am probably closer to the 'only a building' opinion than to Lauren's. While I can sympathize with those for whom a building is a loss, and even recognize the reality of the emotional loss, for me, it's just a building. I too buried friends from that space, and I too was ordained there. But for me, it's a building--it comes, it goes.
How we react to the loss of a building, whether it is a church or a home, has to do with how we pre-reflectively conceptualize "holy space." Exactly what we mean by that term can be a little fluid, both in the sense that we think 'holy space' is probably subjective rather than objective (the mountains, or a gothic cathedral, or a white-washed Protestant prayer hall might equally be holy spaces, depending on the person), and in the sense the word 'holy' might mean anything from "liminal" to "a place where I remember a powerful thing happened to me." If anything, it seems to me that 'holy space' has grown more important in our own suburban, industrialized world--a thin space that links to the beyond.
For me, 'holy space' in a traditional sense is of minimal importance--which is probably nigh-heresy for an Episcopalian. I long neither for the great outdoors nor for some particular building. Maybe it's the nomad plains where I grew up, all dead grass and blowing sky, or maybe it's my general restlessness. But for me, the holiest space happens at about 9:30am on a Saturday, alone in front of a computer, drinking Keemun black tea, and eating smoked salmon on a perfectly toasted bagel. Now that's holy, a time of communion beyond myself, a small glimpse of the heavenly places.
When Lauren heard that the chapel burned, she went through the modern five stages of grief, rather than the traditional Kubler-Ross five stages: 1. phone calls, 2. website, 3. local news, 4. press releases, and 5. facebook, trying desperately to find out what was happening, what it meant, how the institution was responding. At the same time Lauren was making these frantic connections, she happened to catch a friend of ours on the phone, another graduate of "The Seminary", who, when asked to comment, said: "oh, that's only a building."
I am probably closer to the 'only a building' opinion than to Lauren's. While I can sympathize with those for whom a building is a loss, and even recognize the reality of the emotional loss, for me, it's just a building. I too buried friends from that space, and I too was ordained there. But for me, it's a building--it comes, it goes.
How we react to the loss of a building, whether it is a church or a home, has to do with how we pre-reflectively conceptualize "holy space." Exactly what we mean by that term can be a little fluid, both in the sense that we think 'holy space' is probably subjective rather than objective (the mountains, or a gothic cathedral, or a white-washed Protestant prayer hall might equally be holy spaces, depending on the person), and in the sense the word 'holy' might mean anything from "liminal" to "a place where I remember a powerful thing happened to me." If anything, it seems to me that 'holy space' has grown more important in our own suburban, industrialized world--a thin space that links to the beyond.
For me, 'holy space' in a traditional sense is of minimal importance--which is probably nigh-heresy for an Episcopalian. I long neither for the great outdoors nor for some particular building. Maybe it's the nomad plains where I grew up, all dead grass and blowing sky, or maybe it's my general restlessness. But for me, the holiest space happens at about 9:30am on a Saturday, alone in front of a computer, drinking Keemun black tea, and eating smoked salmon on a perfectly toasted bagel. Now that's holy, a time of communion beyond myself, a small glimpse of the heavenly places.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Rummage sales
For those who like schedules, I imagine I'll be updating this page on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For those of you who don't like schedules, come by sporadically or click 'follow.' That's what I do.
Phyllis Tickle's idea that Christianity has entered the stage of "rummage sale" in its history has a funny resonance when reading stories like this one. I wonder what kind of rummage will appear at that sale?
It's hard to read stories like this and not feel some schadenfreude. For years, megachurches have offered an informal and occasionally overt critique of other churches, as if to say: "we megachurches are the future (or the present). You all will accomplish nothing like we do." I've always wondered if, over time, they would turn out to be exactly what they look like, namely, churches, and therefore subject to all the fits and starts of economy and attendance and soccer and a commercialized public. Seeing one of the original megachurches run itself 55 million in debt seems like exactly the kind of evidence I thought might one day appear. The head pastor's claim that God has led them to be 55 million in debt, and then write it off through bankruptcy seems to me a little, um, ... well, let's just say that praising the Divine for your poor business decisions, while leaping to place red-tape in front of you to protect you from creditors, seems ridiculous as a theology.
So, if Tickle is right and we are in The Great Emergence, rummage sale and rebirth of our faith tradition, what does that look like? What does that mean? Certainly, and I think this is important to say, it may mean that some of what's going to happen is what we might class as 'material rummage sales,' like the one that comes when you go belly up. One way to answer the question, and perhaps the best, is to attend one of the quote/unquote "emergent" groups, perhaps even of our particular denomination. The future may indeed be mystic, practical, life-commitment-oriented, down-to-earth, and afraid of real estate
But more and more, I think the future might still be being written even more radically than 'emergence' language might lead us to believe. In part, as someone with an academic bent, I think this is because Tickle's suggestion that history moves in 500 year increments is terrible and untrue--I'm not much for idealistic stages of history, and something about the very idea of 'stages of history' smacks exactly counter to the sense I have of postmodernism and emergent church, two concepts inevitably bound together. But more, what if, in fact, the future is not always knowable from the past?
I wonder if the metaphor for the 'emergence' should be part rummage sale, sure. But shouldn't it have a counter-metaphor, one that doesn't involve consumerism, materiality, modernist stages of history, and an eternal-return-of-the-same as necessary parts of the metaphor? Perhaps we need a metaphor like that of Saint Francis, stripping naked before his father in refusal of his birthright, and wandering into the forest with only a sense of vocation, one that that said "this past life ain't it"?
Phyllis Tickle's idea that Christianity has entered the stage of "rummage sale" in its history has a funny resonance when reading stories like this one. I wonder what kind of rummage will appear at that sale?
It's hard to read stories like this and not feel some schadenfreude. For years, megachurches have offered an informal and occasionally overt critique of other churches, as if to say: "we megachurches are the future (or the present). You all will accomplish nothing like we do." I've always wondered if, over time, they would turn out to be exactly what they look like, namely, churches, and therefore subject to all the fits and starts of economy and attendance and soccer and a commercialized public. Seeing one of the original megachurches run itself 55 million in debt seems like exactly the kind of evidence I thought might one day appear. The head pastor's claim that God has led them to be 55 million in debt, and then write it off through bankruptcy seems to me a little, um, ... well, let's just say that praising the Divine for your poor business decisions, while leaping to place red-tape in front of you to protect you from creditors, seems ridiculous as a theology.
So, if Tickle is right and we are in The Great Emergence, rummage sale and rebirth of our faith tradition, what does that look like? What does that mean? Certainly, and I think this is important to say, it may mean that some of what's going to happen is what we might class as 'material rummage sales,' like the one that comes when you go belly up. One way to answer the question, and perhaps the best, is to attend one of the quote/unquote "emergent" groups, perhaps even of our particular denomination. The future may indeed be mystic, practical, life-commitment-oriented, down-to-earth, and afraid of real estate
But more and more, I think the future might still be being written even more radically than 'emergence' language might lead us to believe. In part, as someone with an academic bent, I think this is because Tickle's suggestion that history moves in 500 year increments is terrible and untrue--I'm not much for idealistic stages of history, and something about the very idea of 'stages of history' smacks exactly counter to the sense I have of postmodernism and emergent church, two concepts inevitably bound together. But more, what if, in fact, the future is not always knowable from the past?
I wonder if the metaphor for the 'emergence' should be part rummage sale, sure. But shouldn't it have a counter-metaphor, one that doesn't involve consumerism, materiality, modernist stages of history, and an eternal-return-of-the-same as necessary parts of the metaphor? Perhaps we need a metaphor like that of Saint Francis, stripping naked before his father in refusal of his birthright, and wandering into the forest with only a sense of vocation, one that that said "this past life ain't it"?
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
A Practice for Owen Meany
This space has lingered blank a while, but it's time has returned.
I recently completed, by superb audio book, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I picked it up purely because Ira Glass told me to, and if anything, I am surprised that I had never before crossed its path. Its distinctly religious character is doubtless evident from its title, but I was still surprised when only a few minutes in the narrator proclaims his connection and affinity for the Episcopal Church. It's not every novel that begins in such a way. It manages to be a highly fascinating religious apology from a non-religious writer, simultaneously deep (the ambiguities of religious life and symbols) and also slightly wooden (surely the miraculous must precede faith!).
Reading it in this time and place, what leaps from the page, or rather mp3 file, is a whole mess of still-poignant observations about being faithful in an unjust world--a topic perhaps for another time--and the question about how we come to faith. (In point of fact, with the free interview that came with the book, Irving and the interviewer seem to think that what leaps forth is the frustrated homosexual relationship, so your own experience may vary.). I've always been unduly fond of the Phillips Brooks response about how we come to faith--he replied that it had to do with his aunt--but the book revolves around the question of the miraculous, and in particular, how our practices do or do not remember in us the miraculous past, be it Jesus' birth or a friendship from our childhood.
Is "remembering" the purpose of ritual, of practice, of meditation, of prayer, of Eucharist? Surely these things have a memory-function that is involved, a-calling-to-mind of a more numinous reality. Perhaps they even transport us to those miraculous events--mangers, crosses, or even pilgrimage sites we visited long ago. Perhaps they "remember into the future" as I heard an SSJE brother argue last year.
But it seems to me that as powerful a role as memory plays in shaping our religious practice, the more powerful orientation must come from imagination, from hoping that God is present when we cannot see God, from believing that God will act in our future. And even though memory is not so separate from imagination, our ritual opens us up to what we cannot put together from fragments of memory, what cannot be assembled from past actions. Somehow, I think, our religious practice must always leave in it a powerful vacancy for what we do not yet have.
I recently completed, by superb audio book, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I picked it up purely because Ira Glass told me to, and if anything, I am surprised that I had never before crossed its path. Its distinctly religious character is doubtless evident from its title, but I was still surprised when only a few minutes in the narrator proclaims his connection and affinity for the Episcopal Church. It's not every novel that begins in such a way. It manages to be a highly fascinating religious apology from a non-religious writer, simultaneously deep (the ambiguities of religious life and symbols) and also slightly wooden (surely the miraculous must precede faith!).
Reading it in this time and place, what leaps from the page, or rather mp3 file, is a whole mess of still-poignant observations about being faithful in an unjust world--a topic perhaps for another time--and the question about how we come to faith. (In point of fact, with the free interview that came with the book, Irving and the interviewer seem to think that what leaps forth is the frustrated homosexual relationship, so your own experience may vary.). I've always been unduly fond of the Phillips Brooks response about how we come to faith--he replied that it had to do with his aunt--but the book revolves around the question of the miraculous, and in particular, how our practices do or do not remember in us the miraculous past, be it Jesus' birth or a friendship from our childhood.
Is "remembering" the purpose of ritual, of practice, of meditation, of prayer, of Eucharist? Surely these things have a memory-function that is involved, a-calling-to-mind of a more numinous reality. Perhaps they even transport us to those miraculous events--mangers, crosses, or even pilgrimage sites we visited long ago. Perhaps they "remember into the future" as I heard an SSJE brother argue last year.
But it seems to me that as powerful a role as memory plays in shaping our religious practice, the more powerful orientation must come from imagination, from hoping that God is present when we cannot see God, from believing that God will act in our future. And even though memory is not so separate from imagination, our ritual opens us up to what we cannot put together from fragments of memory, what cannot be assembled from past actions. Somehow, I think, our religious practice must always leave in it a powerful vacancy for what we do not yet have.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Under Construction!
I'm in the process of re-working the blog to, well, start using it again. The constant shiftings will pass.
October Newsletter
A few days ago, I nearly screamed at someone.
The man was only “doing his job,” as he pressed again and again to sell me some tea in a little retail store in the mall. He shoved a steamy cup into my hand, crooning on about the great quality of what was a fairly mediocre and over-sweetened plastic cup of tea. I tried to browse the teapots, and he regaled me with the many benefits of an under-sized plastic thermos. I asked to purchase 2 ounces of tea; he tried to impose 4 ounces on me, which of course would have doubled the price. He had the gall to look confused when I didn’t pay the extra amount.
We are all, I suspect, tired of being asked for money. Day after day, screen after screen, page by page people ask for our money, offering us goods, lifestyles, looks, and styles. Radio, TV, billboard, internet, magazines, books—how refreshing it would be to have a week without advertisements!
Even in a recession, people have not stopped asking for money. If anything, I continue to notice a rising pitch in the requests, a demand that we give money. Constantly, we hear about the direction of “consumer spending” and “big ticket items” and “new house construction” and whether they are up or down. The new stories become happier and seem to reward us for spending more, and they threaten more recession if we spend too little. Somehow, we become failures by not consuming at an ever-increasing rate—which in the end is a race toward physical and spiritual obesity that is bound to be fatal.
Amidst all this salesmanship and screaming to spend, I find myself thinking more and more of one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, Isaiah 55, which asks: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Something about the endless cycle of consumption is lie. Something that sates us only temporarily and, like having a sugary snack early in the afternoon, leaves us starving by meal-time. We need real sustenance, real bread to feed our starving hearts, real wine for true celebration of resurrection in the midst of loss. We need real oil to soothe our wounds, and we need real music to buoy up our minds. We need Reality. We need Life. We need God.
Strangely, we cannot buy that Reality at any retail outlet. Instead, we have to re-learn economics as God imagines it. We must learn to see the world not as one of ‘scarcity and taking and spending’ but of ‘abundance and giving and sharing.’ If we want to escape this endless cycle of shrieking consumerism, we cannot buy our way out. We must give our way out, giving of our time, talent, and money.
We will never spend our way out of a spiritual recession. We can only give our way out.
Our stewardship season, as it invites us to share our wealth of time and treasure with our church community and those in need, is not one more request for money. ‘Stewardship time’ is our invitation to escape the fear that we do not have enough and instead bless what we have by giving proportionally of ourselves and our possessions to God.
I truly believe this, or I would not give of my own treasure. I give 10% of my income to the church, to God’s work, and then more to charities in which I believe—and frankly, I have much room to grow in letting go of my possessions that possess me and sharing what I have. I do not give because I am ordained, nor because I am particularly good or compassionate. I give proportionally because I have found that kind of giving to be the only way I can continue to grow in God’s spiritual economy.
For some of us, the hardships of this recession have been very real, but the financial recession damages us most when it traps us in a spiritual recession, a cycle of fear and scarcity. We need what cannot be purchased. We need what only God offers, what is available only in God’s economy. And we can receive it, only by giving.
Peace,
Ryan
The man was only “doing his job,” as he pressed again and again to sell me some tea in a little retail store in the mall. He shoved a steamy cup into my hand, crooning on about the great quality of what was a fairly mediocre and over-sweetened plastic cup of tea. I tried to browse the teapots, and he regaled me with the many benefits of an under-sized plastic thermos. I asked to purchase 2 ounces of tea; he tried to impose 4 ounces on me, which of course would have doubled the price. He had the gall to look confused when I didn’t pay the extra amount.
We are all, I suspect, tired of being asked for money. Day after day, screen after screen, page by page people ask for our money, offering us goods, lifestyles, looks, and styles. Radio, TV, billboard, internet, magazines, books—how refreshing it would be to have a week without advertisements!
Even in a recession, people have not stopped asking for money. If anything, I continue to notice a rising pitch in the requests, a demand that we give money. Constantly, we hear about the direction of “consumer spending” and “big ticket items” and “new house construction” and whether they are up or down. The new stories become happier and seem to reward us for spending more, and they threaten more recession if we spend too little. Somehow, we become failures by not consuming at an ever-increasing rate—which in the end is a race toward physical and spiritual obesity that is bound to be fatal.
Amidst all this salesmanship and screaming to spend, I find myself thinking more and more of one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, Isaiah 55, which asks: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Something about the endless cycle of consumption is lie. Something that sates us only temporarily and, like having a sugary snack early in the afternoon, leaves us starving by meal-time. We need real sustenance, real bread to feed our starving hearts, real wine for true celebration of resurrection in the midst of loss. We need real oil to soothe our wounds, and we need real music to buoy up our minds. We need Reality. We need Life. We need God.
Strangely, we cannot buy that Reality at any retail outlet. Instead, we have to re-learn economics as God imagines it. We must learn to see the world not as one of ‘scarcity and taking and spending’ but of ‘abundance and giving and sharing.’ If we want to escape this endless cycle of shrieking consumerism, we cannot buy our way out. We must give our way out, giving of our time, talent, and money.
We will never spend our way out of a spiritual recession. We can only give our way out.
Our stewardship season, as it invites us to share our wealth of time and treasure with our church community and those in need, is not one more request for money. ‘Stewardship time’ is our invitation to escape the fear that we do not have enough and instead bless what we have by giving proportionally of ourselves and our possessions to God.
I truly believe this, or I would not give of my own treasure. I give 10% of my income to the church, to God’s work, and then more to charities in which I believe—and frankly, I have much room to grow in letting go of my possessions that possess me and sharing what I have. I do not give because I am ordained, nor because I am particularly good or compassionate. I give proportionally because I have found that kind of giving to be the only way I can continue to grow in God’s spiritual economy.
For some of us, the hardships of this recession have been very real, but the financial recession damages us most when it traps us in a spiritual recession, a cycle of fear and scarcity. We need what cannot be purchased. We need what only God offers, what is available only in God’s economy. And we can receive it, only by giving.
Peace,
Ryan
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