Event Horizon

This time of the semester is awful for writing; I notice that last spring there was a similar midsemester lull in my blog entries. Life is full of rhythms, which has been something of a theme with me lately. There are microrhythms and macrorhythms, daily routines and seasonal variations. We can dance with time gracefully or we can wrestle it for a blessing. And maybe that choice, too, has its own rhythm.

One of those rhythms, in my life, is the rhythm of depression. I don't struggle with depression because struggling doesn't help. I don't suffer from depression because as corny as it sounds, suffering really is optional. I prefer to say that I have some experience with it, assiduously avoiding any kind of value judgment. Mine is admittedly mild; I'm remarkably productive, even when I'm in a funk, and I'm not (currently) on medication. There are steps I take to help manage it, but the reality is, in my experience, that it comes in waves and rhythms, and I'm learning to recognize them.

The idea that I might be depressed came as a shock to me when I first confronted it -- or was first confronted by it. I'm rarely sad, so it never occurred to me that I might be depressed. Stressed out? Sure, sometimes. Unstable? Duh -- have you met me? (I'm a musician, for God's sake. We are not normal.) But depressed? This did not come to mind, at least not to mine. I equated depression with sadness, and I had elaborate mechanisms for keeping negative emotions, like sadness and anger, at bay. It certainly didn't occur to me that this might itself be a symptom.

What I've discovered is that, for me, being genuinely sad is a luxury, and this is precisely what makes me susceptible to depression. Depression is not sadness but a kind of affective fog, a numbness that nothing breaks through. An insuperable case of the blahs. And my normal emotional baseline is relatively inert. I'm not easily moved. What this means is that it's not really a far cry from here to a bona fide depressive episode, where the fog rolls in and I feel like I'm staring into a gaping existential maw.

It's easy to think, in these cases, that what I need is something to believe in, some kind of hope, but that does not seem to be true. What works better, for me, is to simply roll with it. To embrace it. To lean into the rhythm when it comes: Yes, I'm depressed right now. Yes, it's quite possible that life has no intrinsic meaning. Yes, it's kind of hard right now to maintain the patina of social acceptability. But if life is meaningless then it always has been, and I've felt better in this meaningless universe and will feel better again. And if it's not meaningless, then what I'm experiencing now is simply the perception of meaninglessness, and it will pass. If it gets too bad, I'll get some help; in the meantime, let's not make any major decisions.

One of the things that has helped me a lot is to give up the quest to find meaning and accept responsibility for the task of making meaning. To embrace the gaping existential maw, to fling myself into the void and reverse my assumptions: depression is not some exception to my usual and better-adjusted self but a quite understandable response to my apprehension of our utter contingency. It's not that life is meaningless but that we can't know, and therefore have no way to tell which kinds of meaning might actually obtain and which bits we just made up. In which case, what we consider the normal range of human emotion is basically an arbitrary response to the vagaries of life based on a sense of meaning that has no foundation. A flattening of affect is a perfectly reasonable response, if you ask me.

Except that it's really no fun, and not that interesting, and all other things being equal I prefer the times that I can ignore that and appreciate the wondrous diversity of life. Being in a depressive episode simply means I've temporarily lost my mojo, that I'm off my groove a little bit. It is my psyche at rest, and maybe sometimes I need that rest. It is indeed a rhythm, and maybe somehow I need that rhythm.

I'm also a very religious person, so this has (of course) manifested in how I think about God, and something I've found very helpful is to recognize that I'm what's called a theological non-realist. This marks a kind of détente between my atheist and believing selves, mostly by denying either of them the last word. The gist of it is that none of our God-talk apprehends the "really real." We're all shooting in the dark. God could not exist at all, or God could exist and be nothing like what is taught by our favorite religions.

There could be an infinite number of Gods, creating each other like some nested set of ontological Russian dolls. Our universe could be utterly and starkly alone, a cosmological fluke. The "really real" could be God, or not-God, or any number of variations of God or not-God. We have no way of knowing, no vantage point that allows us purchase on the answer. Some of our speculations could be correct -- even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes -- but we're still clueless as to which bits those might be.

Instead, our God-talk is usually about something else, often having to do with ethics or justice. We bind up our sense of what is right and good and true and we project it into the ether and call it God. Sometimes we do it almost that baldly. And yes, even my theological non-realism is likely a product of something else, some artifact of my personality or upbringing or cultural conditioning -- and this might tank my assertion if it didn't follow so neatly from that assertion. That's actually one of the things I love about it.

I don't why being here would bring with it such a palpable sense of peace, but it does. The fact that I love working for a church does not need to make some kind of deep ontological sense because there isn't any such thing. There are any number of very human reasons that I love it and those are good enough. Being on a church staff is not, at the end of the day, intrinsically any more ironic than getting up in a good mood -- or getting up at all. I'm not there to undermine or challenge what they're doing, but to help them do it, even if I can't sign off on the metaphysical assumptions behind it. People need it, and I need it, for various and varied reasons most of us don't think about and don't want to. And none of us gets to be in charge of what those reasons are supposed to be.

A 14th-century English mystic described God as being within a "cloud of unknowing, " which is quite possibly a bridge between my skepticism and the mystical path. For the author of the Cloud, the way forward is direct experience of God rather than the pursuit of knowledge, and I'm just as skeptical about direct experience as anything else. On one hand, I recognize the validity of the mystical experience and there are a number of my own experiences I'm rather fond of.

On the other hand, I'm a lousy mystic. I've dabbled in centering prayer and even chanted Psalms, but I'm not interested in the kind of discipline required to take the mystical path seriously. Plus, I find some of it a bit dubious; as sympathetic as I am to the value of the experience, I don't usually buy the explanation of what the experience is supposed to be. Union with the Godhead -- or an induced brain-state? Transcending the self -- or suspending the process by which we define the boundaries of self? Tell me that meditation helps you cope with the world, and I'll believe you. Tell me that you've seen the face of God or become one with the universe and I'm liable to change the subject.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing assumed that there was a "really real" God in the center of that cloud. I'm not so sure, though of course I can't rule it out. Years ago, as my conservative theology began to break down, I could feel my assumptions about the Bible slipping away. It dawned on me that if the Bible were true, it was in the sense of pointing to Something Else, and at the time this Something Else presented itself in a kind of vision, of something stark and terrifying -- not exactly malicious, but not warm and cuddly either. Somehow I knew that if I continued to play out my curiosity, it would mean facing whatever this was. Later, when belief in God failed me as well, it was like I looked to the place where God used to be and there was nothing there, just a stark desert landscape -- which is why I use a desert landscape for my Facebook profile.

Scientists use "event horizon" to describe the theoretical boundary of observation, a place beyond which we cannot see or measure or explore. It's the point in a black hole where light bends in on itself and can't escape. It's almost as if the the universe insists on keeping certain mysteries to itself. I feel the same way about this "cloud"; it's not so much that God is hidden behind it as that we simply can't see or know what lies beyond. When I first encountered the desert landscape of my soul I thought maybe I'd just call the empty place "God" and get on with things. Robert Jensen, in All My Bones Shake, says that God is the name we give to the mystery of the universe. This is not, for Jensen -- who is both an atheist and a Christian -- a "God of the gaps," but a way of recognizing our inclination, in the face of wonder, to form praises on our lips.

And maybe, in a nod to my English mystic, I can decide that the "really real," whatever it might be, is God -- even if God doesn't exist. I'm not sure I'm ready to go there, but it's an option. It might serve as a way to remind us of our smallness, our contingency, our unknowing. Most of us strain, somewhere, for a glimpse of the numinous. I can't tell you how you're supposed to do it, or where. But sometimes, on that desert landscape, I can see a bit of a breeze, if I don't try to look too hard.

And that's enough.

Canning Pickles

Had coffee with a friend of mine last week, whom I hadn't heard from in awhile. He's a (very) part-time music minister at a small church not far from us, and while we're not exactly close, he sometimes seeks me out for counsel. In the right conditions, it's something I do pretty well, and I enjoy it. Part of my psychological makeup is a need to feel useful and competent, which I don't think is terribly unusual, but since I'm being transparent about my dysfunctions I might as well confess that I often enjoy the feeling of being useful (which includes the feeling of being very smart and insightful) more than the person's company. Sick, I know. This is my life.

My friend has a Yoder-inspired "radical discipleship" kind of theology similar to the one I tried to have before I stopped bothering. This tends to get him in trouble. There's a bit of a game to navigating an evangelical church when your theology doesn't quite match up, and he's so adamant that there shouldn't be a game that he refuses to play it. Plus, his situation is interesting: he gets a very meager stipend to lead music, which he thought was basically a staff position, until he learned recently that the elders mostly think of him as a benevolence case. That has to hurt a little.

Recently, his Sunday School class was studying the passage in Numbers about the 12 spies. The spies are sent into Canaan and 10 of them report that the Canaanites are a bunch of preternatural badasses and they might as well turn back, whereas Joshua and Caleb come back convinced that YHWH will fight for them and this will be a cakewalk. 10 were bad and 2 were good, as the old song goes, a conspicuous numbering that probably comes to us (perhaps along with the rest of the story) from the southern tribes somewhere around the 6th century BCE.

One of the obvious take-aways from the story, at the Sunday School level, is to trust in God despite the obvious circumstances. This is the angle my friend took, encouraging them that with God on our side, we can do anything God asks of us. This was met with resistance, however, from a couple of women in the class, who insisted that sometimes life is just too hard. We're human and frail. For good or for ill, they could relate to the 10 naysayers and weren't afraid to say so. When my friend tried to correct their theology on this matter, they began, rather loudly, to discuss canning pickles.

Later, when they got to the part where Moses falls face down on the ground, the class pondered what this might be about. Some suggested that Moses had simply given up, falling on his face out of pure frustration. My friend pointed out that the Hebrew word used in the passage means to prostrate oneself in worship, and that Moses was probably humbling himself before the Lord and surrendering the situation to God's control. He pointed out that it is a corresponding Greek word that is the one most commonly translated "worship" in the New Testament. The pickle canners responded to this by saying something to the effect of "Yeah right. Like we're gonna do that," whereupon they resumed their discussion.

Now, the story comes to me from my friend, so I'm not sure that you or I would have experienced the pickle ladies as quite that rude. Then again, they might have been. I don't know. But I invited him to look beyond both the passive-agressive tactics and the theological content of their resistance and consider their social context. This is a small town in a downward economy. It might not be terribly surprising that they identify more with the 10 "bad" spies. It's quite possible that, however much they might be faithful churchgoers, their religion has never really offered them the sense that they can do anything, and they don't expect it to.

Instead, it offers solace, repose, and a form of community in the midst of a repressive economy -- not just recession but capitalism itself -- that they're not allowed to see for what it is. What I call oppression, from my academic, leftist, nerdy white guy perspective, they call bad luck or hard times. I'm going to guess, and I'm going to sound like I'm stereotyping horribly, that they're probably more likely to have the country station tuned in while they're canning pickles than they are the local Christian pop station. Their theme song is probably less "I Can Do All Things" than it is "Help Me Make it through the Night."

These thoughts are inspired, at least in part, by a book I read for a comprehensive exam called White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans. It's actually a theological work, whose author, Tex Sample (I did not make that up), studied at Boston University and now teaches at St. Paul's in Kansas City. His goal is to help the church understand and minister to working-class culture, using country music as the lens through which to do this, and along the way he offers a challenge to those of us who might look down our liberal bourgeois noses at working-class culture and country fans in general.

I'm totally guilty of this. I remember going to my first demolition derby, on a fluke, and though I admitted to really enjoying it, I qualified this to one of my artsy friends by saying "I felt like I should be eating pork rinds and wearing a wife-beater." The subtext here is that I was allowed to enjoy it only as a form of slumming. I've also made my share of NASCAR jokes. It's true; I confess.

As my friend and I discussed his Sunday School class, "canning pickles" quickly became a trope for the quotitidian, for the daily concerns of people who do not have time for or interest in arcane theological arguments. The pickle canners were saying, to my friend, that his theology was not practical for them. It was literally nonsense. They couldn't see any impact on their daily lives from his reading of things, and being theologically or exegetically correct was not a priority for them. They wanted cameraderie, fellowship, a bit of solace. They wanted their weekly opportunity to check in and be seen, maybe catch a bit of gossip -- to encounter the divine for a moment and then go back home to the roast in the crockpot. This ritual -- from the gossip to the roast, with the numinous in between -- serves to confirm both their perspective on the world and their place in it.

In this, I think they're like most people. Let's face it: the people who go into theology, or ministry, or religious studies, or become militant atheists -- and I submit these people have more in common than they might think -- are kind of weird. They think about religion a lot more than normal people do. It looms large in their minds. I remember listening to A Prairie Home Companion one night and discovering that, as odd as it sounds, I envied the people of Lake Wobegone, not for their idyllic life on the edge of the prairie but because their relationship with religion was so...normal.

Seriously, most people do not think about religion with the kind of frequency or at the level that I do, and sometimes I envy them. In a way, it's been my goal to find a way closer to where they are in spite of the fact that I'm constitutionally unable to be truly irreligious. Hence the turn from theology to religious studies, from being conservative to trying to be radical to admitting that I'm really just a liberal.

This doesn't make a lot of sense to my friend (not that I tried to explain it as such), who takes Jesus more seriously than that, to his credit. I don't find it realistic, and he's constantly running up against the realpolitik of a small-town church. I encouraged him to look at it more like a mission field, and to spend the kind of time learning the culture that a good missionary would, and that this includes the religious culture as well -- even when it clashes with his theology. I encouraged him to think less in terms of what he was there to teach than what he was there to learn. I also told him they wouldn't understand his theology until they knew what love looked like as it flows from his understanding of the gospel. Model that, and teach it, I said, and then they'll have a framework in which the theology makes sense.

In the meantime, he's learning how to can pickles.

That Old-Time Religion

No story this time. No miraculous healings recently. I just want to ponder an old cliché:

Christianity is a relationship, not a religion.

Another version that found its way onto T-shirts and bumper stickers is "Please don't confuse Christianity with religion." Or the billboard ostensibly quoting Bono: "Religion often gets in the way of God."

On its face, I suppose this is correct. Our efforts to live up to some standard or another can blind us to the numinous wherever it might find us. A musician who gets too caught up in the details of a performance might miss out on the magic of the music itself. Clinging too tightly to our self-concepts can choke the shit out of wonder.

The flip side of this however, comes down to special pleading. It's a way of claiming exceptionalism: what we have is a relationship with God (or Jesus, or whatever), something good and pure and wholesome -- all those other people are trapped in something ugly called religion. This includes all those other Christians who don't get it. I recently ran across this in a blog discussion. "You're comparing two concepts of God," one commenter wrote, complaining that the blogger was being too theological, "and I'm talking about the need to trust God himself." Which, you know, isn't theological at all.

The irony of this kind of posturing is that in the early days of comparative religion, Christianity itself was the template of what religion looked like, the gold standard against which other religions were measured. This has changed and is changing, which is good, but we might never fully escape the influence of Christianity on our sense of what religion is supposed to be. Christianity holds a unique place in the West by virtue of having enjoyed cultural dominance for so long.

In a sense, Christianity didn't even become a religion until at least the Renaissance, and perhaps not really until the Enlightenment, when we began construing religion as a discrete sphere of human activity and meaning-making. Prior to this, Christianity, in the form of Christendom, was an entire culture, distinct from other cultures and lifeways on an holistic basis, existing in dialectical tension with the construction of non-Christian cultures as Other, on multiple levels. The Enlightenment shift didn't take political shape until the American Revolution, when the successful dissenters set about to construct as secular a nation as anyone could conceive of at the time, a point that gets overlooked by "Christian nation" apologists.

In the letters of Paul, the primary distinction is between church and world, the kingdom of God versus the Roman Empire. Rome and/or the Jewish establishment were the Other against which the church defined itself. This was accomplished partially by rallying those marginalized and "othered" by the reigning domination systems -- slaves and Jews in the case of the Roman Empire, Gentiles and "sinners" in the case of the religious establishment.

This dichotomy collapsed when Christianity became a tolerated (and ultimately fashionable) religion in 313 under Constantine and then the official religion in 380 under Theodosius. Once a dissident movement, Christianity became the establishment. The Goths were so excited by this that Alaric sacked Rome 30 years later, something that hadn't happened in eight centuries. The empire more or less officially came to an end when Romulus Augustus was deposed by a pagan general in 476 -- not quite a century after Theodosius' decree. At the risk of falling into the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (it happened after, therefore it happened because), the timing is conspicuous enough to wonder if Christianity wasn't, ironically, the downfall of Rome.

In a different kind of irony, perhaps, it is also possible to narrate Christianity's coming to power as fulfillment of their eschatological expectation: the last became first, the weak strong, in perhaps a too-literal sense. They asked, and God gave them the nations. Or at least an empire, complete with enemies they could no longer afford to love.

I've given up on the kind of ideological purity that would allow me to see this as a wholly bad thing, a regrettable cul-de-sac of history. Just as Christianity itself has shaped our sense of what religion is, our sense of what Christianity is has been shaped by its negotiation with empire. It is during this time period that the Christian liturgy begins to take shape, as well as the biblical canon. Even the most radically Protestant movements cannot escape the influence because it is this, and not something else, against which they are protesting.

Negotiating the tangled relationship between religion and politics, facing the challenge of these competing claims on the human subject, is characteristic of Christianity and thus of Western culture in general. In fact, I would venture to say that one could write a history of religion in America by looking at how various groups parsed that relationship. It isn't answering this question in a certain way that is the hallmark of the tradition, at least from an historical standpoint -- it's that the question comes up at all.

The "relationship not religion" trope is ultimately disingenuous. It's a little like me saying that I don't have a job, I have a relationship with a university. And of course I do, it's just that the relationship in question is something most of us call a job: I do certain things for which they pay me. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. Of course Christianity is a relationship. In fact it is a complex web of relationships on a number of levels, one that most of recognize as religion.

Insisting that Christianity is a relationship and not a religion sets up a false dilemma. Without sounding too trendy, it's a both/and. Furthermore, if Christianity is not, or is no longer, your cup of spiritual tea, you most likely have something to which you relate in way that an anthropologist or religious studies major would describe as religious. And chances are, if you live in America, that relationship is colored in some way by Christianity. I'm not saying that's good or bad or that it proves anything in particular. It just is.

But the claim does make sense. Given the tiny bit of history I've offered here, it is no surprise that evangelicals (who seem most likely to make the "not a religion" claim) don't want their belief system characterized in such a way that it must take a backseat to the claims of democracy in framing public discourse. I must check the claims of my religion in the interest of the common good, but my deep, personal relationship with God surely trumps all that, no? Haven't we noticed a difference in, say, a public leader willing to admit that his or her faith informs decision-making but cannot override democratic ideals, and one who takes marching orders directly from God?

So when someone says that Christianity -- or whatever their religion of choice happens to be -- is a relationship and not a religion, we should nod and smile. We should be polite. We should recognize that they are simply telling us how important their religion is to them. It's like the rabid fan who tells you that their favorite performer does not make music, he or she performs magic. Or something like that.

But we know the truth, and there's really no sense in denying it: of course Christianity is a religion. It functions in the lives of its adherents the way that all kinds of other religions function. Sometimes it is liberating. Sometimes it is oppressive. Sometimes it is life-giving; sometimes it is soul-crushing. Sometimes it just depends on the day. Calling it something else doesn't change that. Claiming exceptionalism doesn't change that. Rejecting it precisely because it is a religion doesn't change that.

But I don't want to be too much of a wet blanket; of course it's special.

Just like all the others.

I Sing the Mighty Power of God

"So," our guitar player said at the next rehearsal, "it turns out my first MRI was a false alarm." His aorta is not dilated, though he still needs to be treated for a blockage. He offered this matter-of-factly -- and our usual group does not have the same charismatic flavor as last time -- but nevertheless attributed the results to the power of prayer.

And why wouldn't he? While the doctor's impression is that the first test was simply mis-read, and nobody is freaking out over a "miraculous" healing, the simple truth for my guitar player is our prayer was answered. Ever the skeptic, I find myself wondering: if God was going to take the trouble to heal my friend's aorta, was it too much too ask for the blockage to be taken care of, too?

As we listen to this story, our accepted role is to affirm this narration of divine providence. "Yes," we say, "that's right." "Mm-hmm." There is a kind of gnostic quality to this exchange: we are in the know. It may look like a simple case of a misread MRI, but the doctor doesn't know that this man was prayed for. Doctors and others with their scientific, rational explanations don't know what's really going down. The story and our affirmations play a part in a larger system of mutual reinforcement. For me to bring up my aorta vs. blockage rejoinder would be a serious breach of linguistic ethics, a violation of code.

My guitar player's experience could be narrated a number of different ways, some of which might make more sense than others but none of which can claim the final say on the "really real." I can't claim with absolute certainty that, ultimately, this was mere coincidence and the prayer had nothing to with it. My friend can't prove that it was all a God thing. But how he narrates this to himself, and to his church family, must take into account both the shared belief of the group and the fact that he was prayed for. Attributing the outcome to the power of prayer makes perfect sense within that system.

So does prayer itself, of course. I had prayed earlier that night, as part of my duties in running the rehearsal. I actually enjoy praying out loud, because prayer is, for me, a kind of oral poetry. I don't say this dismissively or even all that cynically. Prayer, even if there is no discernable outcome (or one expected) is itself a part of that system. Praying to the Christian God (in Jesus' name, of course) marks us as Christians in much the same way that saying the Pledge of Allegiance marks us as Americans.

But there's more to it than that. The Pledge is more liturgy than discourse (which is not to deny that liturgy itself is discourse), resembling the Creed more than anything else, and mine was not a liturgical prayer. I declared our thankfulness for being called and being allowed to play music. I prayed that God would be pleased with the offering of our talent, time and effort. I prayed for a blessing on our rehearsal, and that our voices and instruments might join the saints and angels in a song begun before creation.

What I meant, beyond playing my prescribed role, is that I hoped we would settle down and not be scattered, that we might have a good and productive rehearsal, that we might have some sense of a greater purpose that impels us to do well. That we might listen to one another. If we were a sports team, and not a church music group, I might have given a pep talk. And I could have just said those things, or given a pep talk, but to do so would fail to take into account the collective belief of the group and our shared experience of faith. For me to invoke a common vocabulary of faith by praying is no more cynical, I submit, than ordering in French at a Paris café, especially if you happen to be fluent in French.

Of course that analogy breaks down. But I don't think it's as simple as thinking I'm just praying insincerely in order to not blow my cover, or as a mockery of Christian prayer, which is certainly not my intention. I pray because prayer is part of what makes us Christian. I pray because I genuinely desire the things I pray for. I pray because I don't claim to know, ultimately, what prayer does and doesn't do. I pray because I'm not in charge.

Still, I don't always know how to act when faced with the faith of others. And the sort of thing I just wrote is pretty much what goes through my head, which of course I can't say out loud.

"Well," I said eventually, genuinely happy for my friend's good news, "how about that."

Just Another Line in the Sand

There's a well-worn Buddhist aphorism that compares truth to a boat that you might use to cross a river but don't need once you're on the other side (and certainly don't need to go toting across the desert). I think many of us can attest to things that felt true at the time -- things that we desperately needed to be true at the time -- but now don't seem as important. Some of them seem downright silly. And yet, in the moment, they felt very, very real.

I'm intrigued by the "emerging church" and particularly its elder statesman, Brian McLaren. I like McLaren's work. I've read nearly all of it. I'm impressed with his record of activism and his passion for social justice. He seems like a quintessentially nice guy, and very bright. His work is part of my dissertation, especially inasmuch as The Story We Find Ourselves In and Everything Must Change borrow heavily from radical rhetoric and theory (even if McLaren himself is more of a reformist). And at one point in my life this work was a lifeline, a boat to carry me, a beacon of hope that I wasn't crazy so much as I might be a "new kind of Christian."

Except I'm not.

I am fascinated by the varied and various experiments that constitute the "emergent" movement. I think they're doing good work and are a necessary voice in what they rightly understand as an ongoing conversation. There are many, many ways in which my own thinking might land me in the "emerging" camp (what British researcher Katherine Moody calls the "emerging milieu"). I even like lattes. The emerging church represents the front line in a necessary renegotiation of Christian belief in light of postmodernity. I can dig that.

But I don't want to go. I am more comfortable passing as an evangelical of a fairly mainstream variety. If I stop being okay with that, I'm much more likely to spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle (well, not really, but you get the idea) than I am to join a house church or an emergent cohort. Hell, I'm more likely to start going to Mass or finally satisfy my jones for being Episcopal (I think it's all the Madeleine L'Engle I read as a kid).

At least part of it is that I'm really not that into intimacy, and it seems to me that a lot of the emerging milieu's ecclesiological experiments are predicated on cultivating it. I don't want to "share my life" with people. Bare my soul in writing? Sure. In my living room? Not so much. I'm okay with being vulnerable and open and honest but not with just anyone, not up close and personal. On the page it's different. To be perfectly honest I kind of like going to a big(-ish) church where I pretty much determine how involved I want to be.

This may seem strange since I'm on staff, but I agreed to that. I'm not even a member, actually, and I have no intention of becoming one. In fact, being on staff is interesting because people pretty much assume that a) you're theologically on board, and b) too busy to get involved in a bunch of other stuff, with the end result that I almost get bothered less than if I were Joe Pewsitter, plus I get access to goings-on that other people don't, which can be interesting in and of itself.

For at least a decade, I've tried to find a way to bridge my skepticism and my apparent inability to escape the orbit of evangelicalism. I've tried "really believing" other things that were tangential but still related, but that didn't work. I've tried being a Christian radical of the kind I'm studying (which is part of the reason I started studying it), and then ended up trying to pass as a Christian radical passing as a regular evangelical. I've tried various configurations of that. There are a lot of resources for doing this sort of thing in the "emerging milieu." Lots of very interesting resources. In a way, though, it seems like too much work.

I think maybe I've finally reached the point of (pardon the language here):

Fuck it.

Not in the sense of being all pissy and walking away. Not in the sense of writing angry diatribes and making fun of evangelicals, though I sometimes do that. Just in the sense of no longer trying to pretend that I'm anything but a deeply skeptical kind of hyper-agnostic who happens to like religion and can't seem to stop going to church. For all my eye-rolling at evangelicalism, I like evangelicals, the flesh-and-blood people I rub shoulders with at church.

These are my people. I'm from here. And I keep trying to understand this place I come from, to the point that doing so might actually be my vocation (if I can say all of that and still use the word "vocation" meaningfully -- I think I can). I can't really be one of them anymore and yet I can't really claim not to be one of them, either. The only way to peace with this is not, for me, a new theology or new way of "doing church" or a new vision for the future.

It is, I think, to just keep writing.

Indulging in the Random

One of the disadvantages of being (in temperament if not by trade) a writer is that you tend to live on the page. This in itself is not troubling; I'm a writer, I live on the page, what's to get? The troubling bit is that, with any addiction, there's this damning trail of evidence -- the gambling receipts, the liquor bottles, the indiscreet phone messages. In my case, there are essays, mini-manifestos (it is just me, or is "manifesto" getting an awful lot of traffic these days?), lines drawn passionately but indiscriminately in the sand, criss-crossing each other in a testimony to my own scatteredness.

I recently had a bout of what I think was bona fide writer's block, where I felt like writing but didn't know what to write, or write about. I didn't freak out about it, especially since I didn't have any kind of deadline (and have really needed to be reading anyway) but it was there. I managed to toss off my pseudo-review of The Road, which I've been kicking around for awhile, and finally my last post broke through the fog, inspired as usual by something that happened to me at church.

During my writer's block I read through old blog entries and decided that there are definitely some threads of consistency, and that if I have a voice as writer (in my non-academic work), it seems to be telling stories and making observations as someone passing as an evangelical. I'm not sure what that says about me, but one of my book ideas is The Agnostic's Guide to Christianity, based on those stories and observations. [I'd like a better word than "agnostic" -- "heretic" might work, but I'm undecided. No hurry.]

As most of you know, I recently created a new Facebook identity for this blog, because every once in awhile I'd think of a potential status update that I couldn't share with the rest of the world. And pretty much everyone accepted my friend request, which I find interesting because it means that while the "Irritable Reaching" persona is technically anonymous, being Irritable's "friend" is, for the rest of you, sort of public (in a Facebook kinda way). You could go to my Irritable profile and see everyone I'm friends with. Not that it makes any difference. I just find it interesting. The funny thing is, I don't think I'm all that mysterious.

But it raises questions for me: who is Irritable, and what is his relationship to my IRL self? What intrigues me is that it seems like the answer is actually the inverse of internet anonymity. Irritable is me at my most honest, my most vulnerable -- to some extent, the "real" me. I have, a couple of times, thought maybe my "real self" is more of a believer and Irritable was just a way of blowing off a/theistic steam, but this never turns out to be the case for very long. My attempts to be or become a true believer inevitably feel like betrayal.

I mentioned on Facebook that I might be an "ironist" in the Rortian sense, and though I need to really dig into Rorty to know for sure (and this won't happen for awhile), I do know that he thought ironists needed both "public" and "private" personas, as the general public probably wasn't going to be all that smitten with the ironist's radical indeterminacy -- and Rorty wasn't even running in religious circles. So, in what seems like utterly appropriate irony, in a world where people create various and varied online personae to escape who they are IRL, I created one to be myself.

Standing in the Need of Prayer

"I need prayer," our guitar player said as we wrapped up a rehearsal the other night. Apparently his aorta is dilated to (if I heard correctly) 3 or 4 times its normal size, and he's having an MRI to confirm the findings. If confirmed, he could be facing open-heart surgery. Understandably frightened, he turned to his friends and his faith for comfort. Our church is not terribly charismatic -- they're Presbyterians, for God's sake -- but this particular crew was. There's a bit of self-selection to that; we had planned an anomalously gospel-oriented service, and once again I'm involved by virtue of being the only resident gospel piano player (and also by virtue of being a staff member who can maintain a certain element of quality control). Anyway, the upshot is that the deck was stacked on the Pentecostal side that night.

"Well," said our bass player matter-of-factly, "we need to lay hands on you." And we did. There was definitely some namin'-and-claimin' going on. Satan was bound, and demons cast out. Victory was proclaimed. The doctors would, we declared, be astounded and mystified at the healing that took place that very night.

I know how this goes. If a healing takes place, there will be celebrating. We will testify to the mighty power of God. If it does not, we won't say much about it. There might be some nod to the inscrutability of God's ways, the suggestion that God has some purpose for dilating an aorta, or at least for not healing one. But for the most part the moment will pass and faith will remain. The Lord moves -- or doesn't -- in mysterious ways. Falsifiability is not on the radar here.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that such healings sometimes take place. I think it's possible. I don't think an agentic deity is condescending to hear some prayers and not others, and the "why doesn't God heal amputees" people have a point, but I think sometimes people get better for reasons that aren't easily explained by medical science and may be related in some way to the belief -- by them and others -- that some outside force is healing them. If there was an historical Jesus, I'm much more likely to believe that he was, in some way, a gifted healer, than I am to believe he was literally born of a virgin or rose from the dead.

It may be that the real good that night was not the possibility of an extraordinary healing, by whatever means such things take place, but the ministration of comfort that came from our being willing to not only pray for our friend but to touch him, to lay hands on him, to declare unequivocally that we are on his side. For this reason, I continue to pray for people when they ask me to. I don't necessarily do so out loud, in the moment, but if I tell someone I'll pray for them, I do it -- even though I have no idea how or why or if prayer actually does anything. Would the people with healing stories have recovered anyway, even if they (or others) hadn't prayed? I don't know. Causality is a tricky thing, and I don't have those kinds of answers.

I recently had an exchange that brought home to me just how "postmodern" I am. I don't really like that word, because it is too easily mistaken for some variant of liberalism (Liberalism 2.0?) or a cultural trend involving diminishing attention spans and a fascination with new media. In the church world "postmodern" is either something we're trying to recover from or something we're supposed to be so that we can reach the lost. This misses the point.

What I mean is that, without consciously seeking to be or not be anything in particular, I've imbibed the Derridean Kool-Aid. I don't think there is any intrinsic meaning. No self-interpreting events, no self-evident truths (apologies to Mr. Jefferson). Not all interpretations are created equal, but none has the privilege of a pristine purchase on reality. There is simply no such thing. And it's not about whether or not there is absolute truth; there might be, but how would we know? I might believe ardently in some particular truth as absolute -- even if it is the denial of absolutes -- but I have to face possibility that any change in my personal or cultural history, or genetic makeup, or brain chemistry, or social context, could alter my perception of what is true and what is not. All of our interpretations are, as it were, suspended over the void.

This void is not the absence of God. To declare God present or absent is just another suspension over the void. The void -- and to what extent this corresponds to the Nietzschean abyss or the Lacanian Real, I can't say for sure -- is a singularity, a kind of epistemological black hole where the light of certainty cannot shine, cannot even exist as such. This seems admittedly bleak. I'm fond of phrases like "The cold, hard, reality of it all," which betrays my presumption that reality (to whatever extent we can apprehend it) is cold and hard. The real "cold, hard reality" is that we never see reality for what it is.

I think religion parcels out the void for us in manageable chunks. The same could be said for worldviews in general, but this often takes religious shape. Just as Moses could not look upon the face of God, we can't face the void directly. We are not prepared for the full frontal nudity of our existential nakedness. So, like a striptease, religion uncovers bits of the void for us to see while it covers others. It is a means of self-protection. Whether or not there is a God who abhors a naked singularity, we're not prepared to face one. Even my saying so is not facing it directly, inasmuch as I am simply not aware of what I'm leaving out -- if I were, it wouldn't really be left out.

The negotiation, then, between different forms of religion, and especially different forms of the same religion, is to some extent one of negotiating which bits of the void to expose and which to cover. I realize this is a bold and pretentious claim, because of course the conversation can't take place on that level, which means that I am claiming to understand the religious impulse on terms that are antithetical to that impulse. I am saying to the religious (including the religious in myself), "Your religion is not reality; your religion is a way of dealing with a reality that none of us can apprehend, and of dealing with our utter lack of apprehension." It's not as cynical as proclaiming religion the opiate of the masses, but it's still entertaining the questionable prospect of representing others to themselves. Nevertheless, it is for me the seed of a philosophy of religion.

So what does this have to do with prayer? Prayer is itself a necessary suspension over the void, or a casting of words into the void. Whether or not there is a God, there does seem to be Something Going On that Christians narrate variously as God or the work of God or the Holy Spirit, etc., and prayer is a way of trying to get a handle on that. It is also a practice, one that marks us as part of a particular tradition. What we pray and how we pray and whether we pray is all part of a matrix of habits and assumptions that mark us as a particular people and help us to become a particular people. We pray as a way of modulating our relationship to the void, to the divine, to each other.

We pray to believe.