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:

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

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

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

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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.