More on suffering!

I came across two variants of the 'does God suffer' question in the same day, one from a womanist perspective that wants to take seriously the real suffering of slaves and blacks in the US and show us what we can learn from such strong witnesses, and one from a Christian-exploring-Buddhist perspective raising questions about creation ex nihilo.  I find it interesting that those strands of thoughts could coalesce into (what I have learned) can be called open theism.  "Could", I say.  There's some flexibility in the final reading of those two sources, I think.

So much of this seems motivated by a particular understanding of love that sounds like this: Love must entail suffering.  To love something is to become so intimately involved in it such that the danger and risk of the beloved becomes the worry and danger of the loved.  Love means mess.  Love means involvement.  And if God is love, we need to take this seriously and give up certain older stands of theology that insist on God's transcendence at the expense of God's connection to reality.

There's something to this 'love critique,' especially in the way we conceptualize "perfection."  The ancient Greeks thought of perfection as unity, stillness, and constancy.  Maybe what is really up for grabs is our notion of perfection--Greek white men imagined that perfection looked infinite, simple, unified, power, and that does indeed sound like a conditioned notion of perfection.  Really, it sounds like a dictatorship.  Where is perfect relationship?  Where is perfect love?  So from that perspective, I can get right on board.

Where I find myself pausing is when the next step is made into the suggestion that God really isn't different from creation.  If God loves us, that love means God is involved with us, suffers with us, is down in this mess with us together.  Hm.  Does love mean dying in a ditch next to the one we love?

Maybe it's my experience with ACoA and Al-Anon, but I wonder about any description of God that makes God sound co-dependent (which, for those Buddhism-watchers out there, is amusingly quite different from dependent co-arising).  We could boil down the lesson from those groups in this way: a person can learn to be okay whether or not an addicted person is still using.  That's what healthy, connected relationship looks like.  Connected, but 'okay' in themselves whether or not  someone they love has become enthralled to something dangerous.  Connected, and yet separate.  Loving, and sometimes sad, but also okay.  That is a far different vision of love--it mingles individuality and relationship.

Love might entail suffering, but perfect love might entail both suffering and okay-ness.  I think that's fundamentally what I find so dissatisfying about questions about God's suffering, or knee-jerk reactions against those questions.  Both of them seem to me to have missed something mysterious about relationship, where neither the relationship nor the individual has the final word

Pain and Suffering

Probably one of the funny things about pain--which, let's be honest, there just aren't that many funny things about pain, and this might not exactly qualify as humorous--is that even studying risks invoking it.  It reminds me of that old medieval sense that invoking a name might summon something terrible, as if talking about pain might somehow summon it.

My sister and I were speaking of accustoming our hands to pain for the sake of cooking and making candy--for her, that's a far more immediate and economic concern, but we were speaking about how we have to undo years of training to learn to cook.  "It's hot--don't touch!" has to give way to hot but able to be handled.  Pain has to faced, prepared for, in the course of being able to something well.

One of the most helpful things I have ever learned is that pain and suffering are different.  Pain is immediate--it can be psychological or physical or perhaps even spiritual, but it hurts.  It's the sensation of something wrong.  Which is why pain can be so frustrating--like phantom pain, that pain that people who have lost a limb feel from a non-existent body-part.  Pain is supposed to tell us something is wrong, but sometimes we're inclined to say, "Thanks!  I got it!  No need to remind me!"

Suffering, though, is what I want to reflect on for a moment, because I've been wondering about something.  I learned once that "suffering is pain we feel at our own limitation."  That's why, for example, some people suffer much while confined to a hospital bed, and others much less so, because the second group finds different ways to accept the limitation.  Elsewhere, recently, someone suggested to me that "suffering is the pain we feel between what we imagine/want and what is."  It seems to me that those definitions are interestingly different.

It's funny that the pop-conception of legalese is that we can sue someone for "pain and suffering," when, if either of these definitions is correct, pain might be the fault of the perpetrator, but suffering is as much the fault of the one suing.

Clearly, the two definitions are related--but I wonder, which is true?  Is the pain we call suffering because of our limitations, or because of what we imagine?  If the latter is true, the pain we call suffering is eradicable.  If the former, some kind of suffering is inevitable.  It makes me think of Jesus on the cross and the poem in Philippians 2--by choosing to be limited as human is limited, Jesus truly suffered the pain of those limitations.

Can we escape all suffering?  I'm simply not sure.  Certainly how we respond to our limitations affects--or quite possibility effects--our suffering.  But maybe the more important lesson is that, while suffering can be eased and it's not clear to what extent, pain sometimes is simply part of our experience.

Maybe confectionery has more to teach us than simply avoid sweets.

Video games and impermanence

"Absorption in a movie or in Nintendo does not reveal the momentariness of phenomena.  We do not see the impermanence and insubstantiality of all things and events, nor do we notice the empty nature of awareness itself."  Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation, p. 37.

"Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."  The Collect for Proper 20 in the BCP.

Goldstein uses 'Nintendo' to talk about the kind of focused awareness that develops in meditation.  Let's do him the courtesy of forgiving his use of a company name for the whole of the art form--many people used such metonymy freely a few decades ago, when he wrote this piece, without lightning strikes.  The image is helpful.  Imagine the archetypal 1980s complaint of the concerned suburban parent, afraid of the vacant looks that overtake gamers in front of the screen--their insensitivity to the world around home, how everything else vanishes, their eyes staring into the middle distance at some partly seen illusion.  But anyone who has ever really played a game--from the prolific Solitaire through the PopCap geniuses all the way to more "AAA" or "Indie" titles--can remember that such a state is one of intense focus.  One could blithely call it "the zone" or some such.  It's quite different from general television watching, although probably not different from watching something really good.

Gaming makes a terrific analogy on that level, as Goldstein suggests, to someone who is meditating, or we could even say praying.  They, too, stare into the middle distance, focused in awareness on a reality that is both present and absent.  They, too, are both here and there.

I would contest him, though, that absorption in a game does not reveal the momentariness of phenomena, or the impermanence of all things.  In an obvious way, if all things are impermanent, than surely games evidence that as well.  But in a deeper and more subtle way, video games teach impermanence.  Why?

1.  Because they end.  We could finish the game, complete the story, fail at the game, or even simply turn it off.  But unlike so much else, we actually experience the end of video games.  Video games are easy to see as impermanent.

2.  Because their limited nature helps us reflect on the limits in our life.  Video games can be exciting, but each game has a limit to what I can do.  That's part of what makes it a game.  And in that limitation, we can see it at once as a game that we are playing, and a game that we are immersed in.  We experience this probably most profoundly with game controls, which distance and unite us to the action in a game simultaneously.  Even in the controller-less examples (Kinect), it's simply the case that our body has become a controller, making the experience if anything more distancing and uniting.

So, I don't know.  I seems to me video games make terrific spiritual practice if we use them well (the same requirement as all other spiritual practices).  If we are going to hold fast to things that shall endure, as the Collect asks, we will have to accustom ourselves to impermanence.  Video games teach that lesson beautifully.

Abject and small

I've been reading a fair amount of Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton in the last couple of weeks--largely on prayer-life.  And I've been thinking about the material world.  Cue the Madonna song.

Teresa and Merton, like many spiritual writers, emphasize the "abject nothingness" of our existence.  Both commend not only begging to God as essential to contemplative prayer but also recognizing our 'beggar-hood,' our 'beggar-nature.'  Perhaps too much religious parody has entered this broken-down living room I call my mind, but they each seem to argue, essentially, "we suck," followed by the smacking of a book against the forehead.  Primarily, they say, we suck when compared to God--who is so big, so good, so suave.

The problem here lies not so much in something about self-esteem as it does in a mistaken notion of infinity.  If God truly is infinite, without boundary, or even if God really is that great, then God is not limited by seeing things from our perspective.  God isn't "big" to our "small"; God is everything to our limitedness.  It's not like Andre the Giant standing next to me, where my petty concerns are squashed by his might.  It's more like Flatland, where my two-dimensional self has its flat little problems about left and right, but God has a much deeper sight.  As the famous poem in Philippians has it, greatness is not about lording power over smaller things--rather, it's about the ability to step in anywhere.  We are quite different from God--incapable even of maintaining our own being for one, and involved in all kinds of evil for another.  But it seems somewhat mistaken to tell us to get in touch with our beggar-hood, abject-ness.  God doesn't see us that way--maybe we shouldn't see ourselves that way.

Recognizing our dependence on God doesn't, it seems to me, require seeing that we suck.  Rather, it means being realistic--which is not some codeword for pessimism, but instead a plea for getting in touch with reality.  We are not gods--and maybe that is painful, and makes us feel like beggars, if we really paid attention to the way we think and act.  But for most of us, learning that we're not gods is as much relief as abject horror.  It's a terrific blessing to realize I don't have to control everything--like traffic, or whether my airplane stays in the air, or how my family behaves.

For both Teresa and Merton, prayer begins on some level when we see our insufficiency and start hunting around for what would fulfill us.  That seems true to me.  But maybe insufficiency doesn't mean abject.  Maybe insufficiency means interconnected, dependent, communal.  Maybe prayer begins in those quick moments when we see ourselves as we are.

Fantasy Flight

The title reflects the name of an excellent board game company, whose work my wife and I are enjoying when we have two hours to devote to a game.  The name of the company, however, reveals a partial untruth.

Fantasy has become mainstream.  And by fantasy, I don't mean any particular sexual or dress-up habits, although they may approach the more mainstream as well.  I mean the genre fantasy, often rolled up with science fiction, and tucked into the back of your favorite commercial bookstore.  That fantasy has become common.  It's hard to say how it happened--the Lord of the Rings movies?  Battlestar Galactica?  Or did all of us who grew up believing that were nerds, ostracized from the mainstream, turn out to be a sizable market?  Hard to say.  But in the milieu when A Game of Thrones has become a many-Emmy-nominated phenomenon, I'd have to say that fantasy hangs out at the edge of the party no longer.  Something has changed.

Why has this happened?  I wish I knew--I could sell it to marketers.  After all, even football has a 'fantasy' component for monetization these days.  But maybe it's a nice moment to remember why fantasy is important, and maybe that can teach us something about why it appeals to us.

Contrary to the name of the board-game geniuses, fantasy usually is not flight.  Sure it can be--like anything else, and I do mean anything.  Politics and news can be flights from reality; so can children; science has become a rather entitled flight from reality, although economics still seems to me to be everyone's favorite flight at the moment; and everything else.  Nothing is definitely real when it interacts with us--reality is cooperative event, if it is to happen.

Fantasy the genre, or  science fiction, is fundamentally about flight.  It's about the externalization of character, emotion, or idea into a living world to see what happens.  That's why Battlestar Galactica is, in many ways, a political commentary.  A Game of Thrones is an examination of human nature, if we were to consider its true complexity.  It may also be about the idea that life has no inherent fairness.

In any case, what this teaches us is that fantasy is about learning reality, not fleeing from it.  It's about finding convincing ways to re-examine what we or other people think.  And if we have fun doing it, well--maybe we all think reality should have a fun component.  Fantasy is how we grow into something particular and not all over the place.  Without a fantasy, or a role model or ideal or faith (which are different ways of saying 'fantasy'), we look like the sweet potato vine in my backyard, growing everywhere quickly but nowhere in particular.

If fantasy is on the rise, it might be because we want out of this place we all live.  It might also be because this place we live needs to grow up.

Padre shot the television last night

Probably not all of you grew up listening to, "Bubba shot the jukebox last night," which is the obvious (only to me) reference of my title.  To understand the full depth of the song, you need only also see the second song of the chorus.  "Said is played a sad song, made him cry."  Should you choose to listen to it, you will know one of the sounds of my childhood.

I would shoot the television, however, for a very different reason.  God knows TV shows that provided acting, much less writing, moving enough to induce tears would be phenomenal.  And that does happen from time to time, which is well worth celebrating.  It does seem to be a new kind of golden age for television.  No, I would shoot the television for this reason: the way clergy appear.

Probably this doesn't bother most of you.  Likely you barely notice when yet another 'pastor' or 'father' or 'reverend' wanders across the screen--the controlling Roman Catholic, or ineffectual Anglican, or the woman liberal pastor.  But for me, every word that comes from their lips makes me die a little inside.

Clergy on television are one of the following: insipid; emotional wrecks; pedophiles; secretly disbelieving; blinded fundamentalist jerks; extremists; or pontificating at an irrelevant worship service.  Some shows manage to cram more than one of these categories into a single episode, or more unfortunately, into a single character.

I have known very few clergy who fell into these categories.  Sure, some of them are jerks.  There are clergy I don't like.  Hell, I may fall into some of those traps.  But really, the clergy I know are by and large reasonable, faithful, practical, and interesting people.  They are, in fact, many of the deepest people I've ever met, some of the most introspective, and certainly the most socially aware.  The greatest advocates for societal change that I have ever met are clergy or, what is for television an even rarer bird, faithful lay people.  Strange that shows occasionally delve into religious themes in deep ways--but their ability to show faith in the life of a person is almost always abysmal.

I could speculate about why clergy have such a shallow reputation on television.  Would people who watch television put up with clergy, from any religion, who weren't one dimensional?  Is it writing or producing that's the problem?

But maybe more to the point for me: I'm sad to live in a culture so out of touch with religion that its standard currency reflects very few religious people worth pondering.

Who do we become? A word or two on video games

"When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."
Matthew 28:17

I often think we undervalue the depth of this verse, and the others like it in the other gospels (I often argue this point, so I won't belabor it here).  Jesus appears in resurrected splendor--eating fish, walking through walls, touching people, breathing on people, letting people touch his innards--funny that splendor sounds more like a circus performance than a kingly procession.  I wonder if Jesus also juggled, swallowed a sword, and sawed Mary Magdalene in half.

But really, the verse is about how despite all those tricks, despite meeting God face to face in a special way, people doubted.  I think that should be comforting for us who worry about what we believe in, much less what we trust in, thousands of years later.  It wasn't much different for the first folks.  And, the verse also teaches: we make decisions about how we interpret things.

We interpret.  What a boring sentence!  That's like saying, "we chew."  No one is surprised.

Except that we behave so often like there is no interpretation, like things simply change us.  Seeing is not, in fact, believing--it's just one prerequisite.  But because we confuse seeing with believing, we have trouble with many things--liturgy, news, and art.

Video games are art, or at least the primitive forms of a developing art form.  Playing video games at the moment is like watching the first cave paintings happen and thinking: there's something cool happening here! without even really being able to imagine the concrete examples of the future, things like cubism or the Sistine Chapel or Rembrandt.  The National Endowment of the Arts thinks so, opening their grants up to digital games.  The Supreme Court of the US recently ruled that video games are free speech and thus not subject to censorship.

While there are many dimensions to a debate around video games, not least among them the wide diversity of games on the subject--as different as my stick drawings and Picasso's--, I think what we forget first is that we interpret what happens to us.  Seeing violence in a movie does not necessarily make me violent.  Often, quite the contrary--Dead Man Walking, or The Hurt Locker, offer graphic violence.  Both screech through my humanity and challenge me--they make me want to wear only hemp, hug everyone I see, and play more guitar.  Also, work for the healing of the world.

The same for video games--if anything, their participatory nature invites a more complex interpretative experience.  Some of them reduce violence to cartoon ridiculousness--jumping on a goomba in one of the Mario games, for example.   Some, like Call of Duty, turn killing into a game.  The effect, though, is something a little odd--it raises the question less if killing people could become a game for a player (it doesn't for the millions who play it weekly--the feeling of killing and a control pad are quite different), and rather whether we already think too much of politics and warfare like a game.  There are outlier games, so horrible that's hard to see much good from them.  But then there's Grim Fandango.  And the strange culture of Eve: Online, which led to riots over unfair business practices.  And the strangely beautiful and horrifying tale of Planescape: Torment, whose bizarre name masks a story on which I still find myself wondering.

In other words, life is not as simple as banning the influences we don't like, despite the great temptation this presents in the modern world.  We don't need to burn books--we could simply choose not to read them.  We have to learn to interpret those influences, reflect on them, challenging them, revisit them.  Our faith, in fact, requires it.

The Real Housewives of the Episcopal Church!

Someone--I will not cast aspersions on them by saying who--was recently watching The Real Housewives of some Affluent-Place-or-Other on a television near me.  The accents of the women on those shows seem to vary, but thick makeup appears the universal unity at a certain socio-economic class.  One of the women was trying to make a theological point, something about loving a person in her same-sex relationship and yet also broadly condemning all such relationships.  That's a conversation I have witnessed a million times, although the tawdriness of the show gave a certain flat tabloid-ness to the exchange.  If this series of trash-TV is anything, it is most certainly not "real," which makes it a rather poor place for a discussion of theology.

As I watched, I wondered: what would it be like to have a Real Housewives of the Episcopal Church? (with an emphasis on the 'real').  Husbands who stayed home with the children; same sex couples who were so healthy and happy as to be utterly dull; families who struggled to make sense of their faith; communities dedicated to social justice; people young and old who spend time in meditation and prayer.  Perhaps the show editors could arrange scenes in such a way as to belittle any reality, smash it to an easily digested pulp of animal conflict and herd instincts.

Strange that our fictions show the highest truths, and our realities are pale imitations.

"I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique

Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking
I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me."
--Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

There is such a nice dichotomy in this song, one that captures something about growing up in America today.  Or maybe it's even something universal about growing up.  Life is not a virtuoso performance by me.  It's a work I share in, a process of which I am one ingredient, a community of which I am a member.  We learn to make a difference by belonging to something that matters, something larger than ourselves.  

I do slightly disagree with the song.  We don't give up our snowflake-dreams to become cogs--or if we have, we have accidentally sold part of our souls.  If anything, to strain these metaphors, we find our unique crystalline snowflake shapes fit together like cogs--and it's probably true that we're not eternally fixed identities, either, needing sometimes to find new places in the world.  But: the emotion of the song is just right.  It's an empowering thing to stop worrying about how I fit in the world and just start serving something.  I think that word choice in the lyrics, "serving," is not an accident.

I see this everywhere in the secular world these days.  People sign up to make their contribution to the world not by hoping to become a famous star adopting scores of international children, but instead people join many small NGOs, for-profit companies, and even governmental agencies with dull names because they believe that they can make a difference.  In my tiny sphere of awareness, I'm watching with some interest the Games for Change Conference, where the brightest video game designers are talking about the ways that games have, can, and may in the future bring about positive change.  I'm sure that sounds wacky to some--I'll spare you the preaching about video games here.

All of that to say: perhaps the largest question facing us is the same one we have spoken of in faith for a long time.  It is a question of vocation.  How our snowflakes combine to make a difference to something larger than us, and how serving makes us more than we are.

Tempus Fugit

I remember being in an advanced Latin class in high school close to the summer, when all real work has gone out the window.  We were talking through an "enrichment" activity where we looked over a variety of well-known Latin phrases and offered their easy translations.  Caveat emptor, e pluribus unum, etc.  And finally, tempus fugit came up.  Normally, we translate that little phrase as 'time flies.'  But, as I had become aware in my laborious work in that class on The Aeneid, 'fugit' really means something like 'runs away', or 'flees', as when an army has lost and is routing.  It wasn't until that moment that I understood that time does not fly--like when we had fun--but that time actually runs away from us, with our hopeless attempts to catch up to it.

All of that to say: I'm overdo to post on this blog, but life has been fleeing.  While I likely won't catch it, perhaps some more posts will appear in the coming months.

I do often wonder about our conception of time.  Is it something that runs away from us?  Does it progress rapidly while we have fun, escaping our notice?  Does it actually always move at the same speed, as our physical processes seem to insist, or does it sometimes pool and eddy, stuck in a stagnant pond?  Is time a schedule to be filled?  Does it demand things from us?  Is time our master?  And of course, what I really want to know: in what way can we see time as a gift?  And maybe even more: how could we treat time like a gift when the world around us sees time as a monster, a mechanism, an opponent?  Can we treat time as a gift without fleeing to the hills?  I wonder.

On gender

I have been questioned about this once or twice, so here's a short reflection.

When we read the Nicene Creed and come to the Holy Spirit, rather than using the pronoun 'he', I use the pronoun 'she.'  Why would I misread something so clearly printed in black ink?

This whole problem that underlies my decision to read this way arises because we have all become far more attuned to the subtleties of language and gender.  Our cultural language has inherent in it assumptions about gender--strong men, beautiful women; violent men, nurturing women, etc--that influence our thought-world.  It's hard to know how much of gender is biologically determined and how much is culturally constructed--I tend toward strong notions of cultural construction--but it is clear that however it arrives there, our language carries freight

Because of the weight of language, churches do much more serious reflecting about how we talk about God.  After all, if our language doesn't think of men as nurturing, always calling God "he" is misleading because God does have a nurturing quality.  Consider the Hebrew "El-Shaddai," one name for God in the Hebrew scripture, that is often translated 'Almighty.'  Literally, however, El-Shaddai means "God of the breasts."  Translating it 'Almighty' means thinking of strong pecks, but given the locations of its use in Scripture (like in Ruth), it seems to have the more nurturing feminine connotation.  Translating El-Shaddai as 'Almighty' is probably not a good translation.  It's a nit-picky detail, but over years, it really affects us whether we think of God as the one with big pecks or the one with a baby at the breast.

This all came home for me when a friend of mine once told me that she never really understood church as a child because she had a terrible relationship with her father.  When people said that God is like a Father, she thought, "Well, that sucks."  One day, in her teens, someone told her that God was also like a Mother, and for the first time she said, "Oh!" and understood some of who God is.

It matters, I think, that we use a diversity of language about God.  If we leave God gender-less all of the time in worship, it's strikingly impersonal.  If we always call God 'he' or 'she', we gradually let our mind be weighed down by language.  If we shake it up a bit, it keeps striking us new.  Surely God is more than one particular gender, encompassing and going beyond all genders rather than avoiding them.

All of that to say: that's why I use 'she' during the Creed.  Not because I think the Holy Spirit is a woman--surely She is more than a woman, just as He is more than a man.  And if we're going to talk about "God, the Father almighty," and because Jesus as a human being had a gender, it just makes sense to me to say 'she' when we plod along to the part on the Holy Spirit.  It keeps God a little fresher in my heart, running me into the parts of God I might otherwise avoid.

And as a side note, I wouldn't change the words of the Creed to reflect my quirk.  In fact, I like seeing one word and saying another; I value the juxtaposition that the seen word and spoken word create.  But I'll leave that for another time.

Ships don't pass in the night--they sideswipe each other and yell curses.

Trying to have a true conversation with someone, one characterized by honesty, thoughtfulness, and open-heartedness, is about the most frustrating thing in the world.  It almost never works right.  I make a lame joke, and I see in their eyes it falls flat.  They assume we know the same songs and like the same music, but they've never even heard of what I listen to, and I wonder if they actually like music.  There is no 'we' in the conversation, not ultimately.  I try to make a connection, utter an honest word.  Maybe the other does, too, but they seem to speak such a different language that I can't tell if they are saying "Hail", or "Hell," or "Hale," and really, they were just talking about the weather.  When a conversation like that comes about, it's about the most wonderful thing in the world--'getting someone,' feeling like 'someone gets us.'  The rest of the time, it's like perpetually being on a first date.  People tell me all the time about how asking a potential friend to get together for the first time is exactly like hitting on someone at a bar, minus the cultural acceptance.

These divides don't exist only among people of different cultures--although we have that in plenty, too.  The divides exist even among people we are supposed to know, supposed to understand, and with whom we are supposed to have some common cause.  It's not that I say to-mate-to, and you say, to-mot-to.  It's that I say: Don't you love the Beatles?  And you say: Who the hell are the Beatles?  And we do that, over and over again.  The most extreme cases are, in some ways, the least interesting, like when I say: We should provide healthcare for everyone--because it's better for everyone, but even more because that's the kind of people we should be.  And you say: Liberals are assholes who are destroying our country.

Is it politics, race, our different generations?  Is it a sound-byted culture?  Is it a time and era when we hear only what we want to, increasingly self-selecting smaller media pools?  Maybe all of those are reasons for the divides among us, like dogs sniffing each other.

But maybe, too, we are becoming less and less human.  Not because of technology--sometimes, it looks to me like technology might be one of the only things that helps.  Not because of dissolving families and communities.  But because we have come to take life so for granted that we think we can easily despise our neighbors, one at a time, and hold on to the two people we like.  We grow tired of reaching out in honesty, trying truly to know someone.  And what's worst of all: we can always find new people.  We'll never run out of people to meet, even if it slowly strangles the very best parts of who we are, as we become less and less interested in being vulnerable to honest conversation.

If spirituality really looks like mature humanity, I wonder if it really means that we would all become more comfortable being vulnerable?  Which is really another way of saying: I wonder if spiritual maturity makes every day feel like a first date.

Violence

I attended an ecclesiastical gathering last week.  These things are strange, which would be no surprise to anyone who has ever attended one: part frat party, part monastic praying, part "activity time at the retirement home," and much heavy structure weighing down a group of people that would like to do something else.

As the whole body deliberated on a bill condemning bullying, a member of the gathered assembly suggested that the church consider its own texts before seriously discussing bullying.  The speaker pointed to Psalm 2 because it will soon be read on a Sunday, and Psalm 2 includes language like:

9

You shall crush them with an iron rod * and shatter them like a piece of pottery."

10

And now, you kings, be wise; * be warned, you rulers of the earth.

11

Submit to the LORD with fear, * and with trembling bow before him;

12

Lest he be angry and you perish; * for his wrath is quickly kindled.

The implication from the speaker was that we were subtly endorsing bullying on some level.  Even more, the speaker worried how this language would appear to a newcomer in church.  Of course, we could make his case stronger with other parts of Scripture.  Psalm 137 always springs to mind, whose bitter words adjure us to smash babies against rocks in revenge for the loss of those carried into Exile.  And I would contend that the end of Judges is probably the most disturbing story in the whole thing: a nameless prostitute abused and carved into mail-order pieces to prove a point.

While I do have some sympathy with the speaker, who was stating what I take to be a commonly held belief in our society that our media shapes us, I would offer a counterpoint.  While our media does shape us at some level, we need to be clear about how it shapes us.  Namely, we need to recognize our participation in being shaped by what we encounter.

Certainly, these violent texts service a purpose in their context--we could go through any of them and see that.  And I could point out how they continue to serve crucial functions for us: Psalm 137 has at the very least an important pastoral function for anyone who has ever been betrayed, and it captures a crucial picture of the human spirit, even if we choose not to follow the injunction to infanticide spoken in anger.  We can see that pain, know that Scripture cries out in a pain we may have known, know what it is like to cry out in anger--all without seeing it as advice for how to make decisions.

But I want to call to mind two other objections.

First, we interpret texts.  They are not dropped into our brains and hearts in whole cloth.  Part of what is at issue, it seems to me, is that we are bad at remembering this, especially with the Bible.  We sometimes like to pretend that we read the text, affirming every word and sentiment.  This is bogus, in no small part because in pretending that it magically appears in us, we fail to notice that we are in fact interpreting it, and by failing to notice how we read it, we are instead covertly smuggling our own assumptions in.  If we fear reading violent texts in worship because of the way it looks to newcomers, we need to pause and reflect seriously on the manner in which texts are read (lay readers, choirs, congregational mumblings--should a violent text be read in the same boring monotone as the Song of Songs?), on their interpretation (does the preacher always dodge these supposedly 'harder' texts?), and on the role of the church in this society.  I'm inclined to think that we owe it to this culture to provide a deeper way to interpret texts/experience/our lives.  Simply because our culture thrives in shallow communication from self-reinforcing sources doesn't mean we should.  I think one of the most important things the church can do, in its connection to the Spirit, is teach us all to read.

Second, the text interprets us.  Part of what it means to be the Church is to be the people who hear their own story in Scripture.  It reflects us back to ourselves.  It is no wonder, then, that the book is filled with sex and violence--our lives are filled with sex and violence.  We Americans like to pretend that those things are relegated to the developing world and developing adolescents, and furthermore, we imagine that our faith must carry us away from this life.  Scripture, though, resists that flight.  It constantly reflects back to us our tendency to resort to power to win; our hunger to reduce human relationships to sex.  Scripture even shows more positive possibilities for contending with violence and sex--the possibilities of friendship and love, not cheaply won but in lifetime accomplishments.  Not reading violent texts in worship seems to me like refusing to look in the mirror, choosing (as we often do) the God we imagine rather than the Incarnate God.

I would say violent texts aren't the main ingredient of regular worship--but if we start avoiding them (which we already sometimes do), we are missing the very grist for confronting the harsh reality of bullying.

Language and church

Commenting that "Language is important" in our own post-modern context is like saying "It's all about Jesus" in Sunday school.  You might get a gold star for your comment, but it's hardly news.  But that hasn't clarified things for us one lick.  Our imaginative horizons continue to be our most significant barriers, whether we're talking about not believing that humans are responsible for climate change, or family feeling painful dysfunction. 

How we understand church 'to be' matters.  If we imagine it's a brand-name, we'll never be anything other part of the culture that surrounds us.  If we imagine that we are what we've always been, we circle around the drain of that tautology.

A friend mentioned today in a conversation that in sharing with his community that his church was an Episcopal mega-church--by having more than 150 people on a Sunday, thereby being in the top 10% of Episcopal churches--he neatly blobbed together the language people thought so clear.  They were neither mega-, nor parochial--they were both.

You can see this same kind of 'blobbing,' a fairly admirable technique, in things like the unwieldy subtitle of  McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy.  (Click through the link if you want to read the thing--Amazon eventually truncates it after using ellipses, which seems a little heavy handed.  Surely one grammatical smackdown should suffice.)  By gumming up terms, we can force things out of the contemporary contextual limits and invoke other meanings, ones that don't fall back on consumerism (or at least try not to).

Other techniques work, too.  Introducing something that doesn't fit into pre-established categories--like "emergence"--is one (although we're good categorizers these days, so it can be tricky).  Another is to act with integrity, which has become so unusual as to become headline-fodder--by even trying to do what we say in the public sphere, we undermine our modern Victorian era sensibilities.  Another language trick is to break language, pushing language-symbol beyond its value.  We usually restrict this to discussion of the cross and Jesus, who have become fairly broken images in the contemporary context, but we also do it with the very words 'church' and 'worship.'

I wonder if it's possible to transform our imaginative horizons with an apophatic language trick, understanding the apophatic not to be a rejection of being but a turning to 'more than' being, a 'not only . . . but also.'  Certainly, this is tried in various venues these days--centering prayer, Thomas Merton-ish stuff, etc--but I always wonder if the apophatic theological lessons could apply more broadly.  Can we change our vision of church be seeing that it is never merely, never only 'church', but also something more powerful, something more?  I wonder.