Irritable Reaching

Christmas Time Is Here

2011-12-25T08:26:00.000-05:00

It's Christmas morning. Three of our four kids are up, and they've opened their stockings. This is the rule in our house: you can get up any time after 5am and open your stocking. You are then free to play with or consume anything in the stocking, but you can't open any of the proper presents until after everyone is awake and we've had breakfast. This year, though, things are further complicated by the fact that I'm playing at church; we'll have to do the presents afterward.

The service goes well. It's just me and our worship leader, Ben, on acoustic guitars. I play in DADGAD and sing harmony. Ben asks me to play piano for the prelude and for offering/communion and I whip up a medley of "Christmas Time Is Here" with a jazzy rendition of "Angels We Have Heard on High" for the prelude. ("jazzy" meaning styling the rhythms and laying it over a I-vi-ii-V progression with lots of extensions). For communion I do a quartal harmony improvisation and for offering I treat "Go Tell It on the Mountain" to a sloppy stride. They love it.

Our pastor, Jason, preaches a sermon on the politics of the birth narrative in Luke. He does a good job of hitting the major points, allowing us a glimpse into the subversive rhetoric of the Christmas story that we too easily gloss over out of familiarity. For fun, he lets a clip of Linus from "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" set up the reading, and I'm glad I did the Guaraldi thing for the prelude. People who notice (all three of them, I suppose) will think we planned that.

He does an okay job of connecting the dots for us in the here and now without freaking people out. This is a church that still has both the American flag and the Christian flag (ugh) on the platform -- though Jason would love to ditch them both and makes every effort to hide them. Things move slowly, and since he's very nearly been preaching anarcho-communism the past few weeks without getting lynched, he seems to be balancing things well. I'd have been more direct, but then again I don't get asked to preach. There are reasons for that.

I have coffee with Jason once a month, and mostly we discuss his sermon plans. I'm usually good with some historical and/or political context, and to point to resources. I don't consider myself his mentor in any way, just a friend and fellow thinker who's good for bouncing ideas off of. We agree about the radical political ramifications of the Gospel but we disagree as to its transcendental and eschatological backing. He asked me once if it was uncomfortable for me to have these conversations, since they mostly take place on the level of the scriptures themselves, which affirm a cosmology I don't share. I told him no -- I don't have a problem taking the texts at face value, and I like the politics we're deriving from them.

Actually it's the music that bugs me more. It can be fun at times, and given my background it certainly seems the logical place for me to be plugged in. Moreover, it's a good place for me to fly under the radar as a skeptic. I don't have to teach or pray or put on airs; musicians are used to singing things they don't mean, or don't mean literally. But it's not all that interesting to me, from a social or political standpoint. We're not terribly discerning about the songs we pick on an intellectual or theological level though I have to admit Ben seems to avoid some of the more egregiously trite or banal offerings out there. It seems pointless to me, but it's part of who we are and people like to see (and hear) me involved. It's good discipline for me to submit, I suppose. I'm not in charge -- this is not about being in charge.

Once home, we open presents. The kids take turns, and we watch. This year is fairly modest by American standards, but of course luxurious in global context. They enjoy the gifts and we have some laughs and life is good. Kate's boyfriend Caleb and our friend John came with us after church and I deal some blackjack to John until he has to leave to meet another friend. He's got a system, and it works fairly well. He's up 315 dollars (of fake money) by the time he has to go, and I tease him that we should have gone to the casino if his luck is that good. He only has five dollars in his pocket, though, and neither of us really wanted to go out anyway.

Lunch is a ham we found in the deep freeze and spent the last three days thawing. It turned out fine. Since we had a sit-down dinner on Christmas Eve we opt for buffet style, with everyone getting their own place in the midst of whatever Christmas enjoyment they happen to be involved in. I drink coffee and lose at online poker and read a little of Todd May's book on Deleuze. I'm not allowed to study today -- no Milbank, no dissertating, it's Christmas, dammit -- but I figure May on Deleuze is like the anti-Milbank. He's helping me understand the ontological issues from the other direction. I still hate ontology, but I'm starting to get it, and why it's crucial to understanding Milbank's project.

The kids take turns watching new movies and playing new video games. I text my mom and my brother with holiday greetings (my dad had texted earlier in the morning). I surf Facebook. We make hot cocoa and I make a fake eggnog by stirring some vanilla, nutmeg and sugar into whole milk. I tried to make eggnog earlier in the week, but not being interested in eating raw eggs, I cooked it and it turned out more like a liquid custard. This was not entirely unpleasant, but not really what I had in mind. The flavored milk is tasty, and I find myself wondering what it might be like if I just put egg yolks in. An experiment for another time.

Two of our new movies won't play apparently, and/or one of our DVD players died. First world problems. But the day is winding down. Later we'll have cheesecake, maybe, and finish the current disc of The West Wing so we can return it. I'll put The Father Christmas Letters away for another year, and tomorrow it's back to work, wrestling Milbank until he blesses me or wrenches my hip out of its socket or both.

Mr. Jones and Me

2011-11-14T07:48:00.001-05:00

Believe in me

'Cause I don't believe in anything

-Counting Crows

I like to think of myself as a fun guy. I crack jokes, I'm easygoing. And I'm not just fun, but funny as well: I go for laughs and I get them, if not every time. But there's also an edge to my humor. I can be sarcastic, sardonic, cynical. I sneer at nearly everything. I was once accused of being The Joker -- why so serious? But it's true there is not a lot I take completely seriously. I have a hard time getting worked up about anything. It might be the flattening of affect that comes with my depression issues -- my affectation of cynical nihilism is a compensation for lack of affect. There's a nice wordplay there. At least not taking myself seriously serves to attenuate my narcissism.

But partially I sneer because I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope. I'm afraid to believe, not because there aren't good reasons to believe or things to believe in but because I fear the failure of my own capacity for belief. I once went out for a date with a girl and high school and never called her again because she was too nice. I wasn't looking for someone trashy, necessarily, but I liked this girl as a friend and didn't want her to become just another one of my ex-girlfriends. At least that's what I told myself -- I've never been a romantic genius. But in the same way that I did not want to add this girl to that list, I'm tired of contributing to the fetid pile of things I used to believe.

I'm an atheist because I don't believe in God. I'm a theological non-realist because I don't believe in atheism. I'm an anarchist because I don't believe in top-down solutions to oppression and injustice. I'm a nihilist because I don't believe in anarchism. And it's not like I really believe in nihilism. The list goes on.

So I don't believe in anything, but what this really means is that I only believe in things that I haven't identified as beliefs yet -- things that are, in some sense, believed for me by the wider culture of which I am a part. Things that have been constructed as part of my upbringing. Things that are at least partially the product of my experiences and relationships. The scorched-earth tactics of my skepticism have left me with beliefs I have not chosen. I've rooted some of them out, but there is always a remainder, the dangerous bits of the tumor that couldn't be removed.

All of this colors my reaction to Occupy Wall Street. On one hand, I'm fascinated by what appears to be a leftist populist uprising. The sheer scope of it -- the number of cities and countries in which this has sprung up -- makes it difficult to dismiss. The general dissatisfaction with the status quo of neoliberal capitalism is heartening. The fact that the authorities in some places are reacting violently speaks to the timeliness of the message. I don't know what they'll accomplish, but something is getting itself said here.

On the other hand, I'm not a joiner. I don't believe. Anarchists and conservatives are panning the movement as a bunch of whiny liberals, and there's some truth to that. The movement is loosely grounded in the consensus-based decision-making process (General Assemblies and all that) associated with some forms of contemporary anarchism (and anarchist David Graeber played a role there), but their agenda, such as it is, is largely reformist: they want capitalism to play nice.

There's a pragmatic logic there: if we're going to have capitalism, we should at least try to attenuate its more deleterious effects. The idea that the market -- Smith's "invisible hand" -- will channel self-interest into the public good is a pipe dream. This is not what has happened. In order for capitalism to be responsive to the public good at all it needs to be tweaked. It needs to be regulated. It doesn't actually work. Not for the 99%. What it's very good at is funneling wealth to a handful who know how to work the system. And it's a feedback loop: the more wealth you control, the more of the system you can gank in your favor. It's not a meritocracy. It's not about industry and inventiveness. It's a game, and the people really in the game play it to win.

What this means is that complaining about the 1% is a little like playing blackjack and complaining that the odds favor the house. It's not that it's not true; it's just that the whole system is predicated on it. It is not in the interest of the 1% to give up any of their advantage. It is not in the interest of the 1% to actually encourage the universal upward mobility that capitalism supposedly makes possible. The system needs poor people; "the poor you will always have with you" becomes a command in the capitalist Bible.

What passes for the left in the United States seeks to maintain the compromise between capitalism and the public good. The reactionary right has grown weary of the compromise and wants to unleash the beast of the market on the public. The debate, as we are seeing in Washington, is getting ugly and rancorous, and the right is winning at the moment, mostly by virtue of being bigger dicks about the whole thing.

This is a long way to say that while I'm sympathetic to OWS, I'm not sure what they're going to accomplish. If they get their way, we'll get some reforms, and these will be helpful in the short term, but it will amount to enabling a dysfunctional system. If they fizzle, or get put down, it could set leftist activism back, which is not t o say they shouldn't try. My reticence might just be an unhelpful acquiescence to my own conditioning. Perhaps my imagination has been stunted. Between peaceful protesters and pepper-spraying police, it's not hard to pick sides, even if I'm not going to pitch a tent.

Maybe something more than I'm seeing is taking place. Something is going to emerge out of the dialectical tension between the resistance and the resisted, and we have no control over what that is. It could be something wonderful. Something new. Something unexpected. Something hopeful.

I just wish I could believe.

Santa Fe

2011-10-31T07:05:00.000-04:00

"So, forgive me for not remembering this," Ruthie said to me -- my friends Ben and Ruthie live in Cincinnati and I had a chance to visit recently -- "but you teach...?"

"Yes," I said, "I teach --"

"--Computer Age philosophy," Ben broke in.

"But his students would rather watch TV," Ruthie finished.

I suppose, had I been on my game, I'd have shrugged and said, "America," but at least I knew the reference. This started us on a tack about our mutual love of RENT. They're big fans of the movie, which my wife and I saw a few years ago. We were recently introduced to the musical itself when a friend of ours directed a local production. I got to do a cameo and sit in with the band a couple of nights. Doris was so taken with it that she bought the Best of RENT CD, which we've been fairly obsessing over. I never, ever, thought I'd be grooving to the soundtrack of a musical, but I am.

Tom Collins, who sings the lines we were quoting, is probably my favorite character. For one, he's named after a drink. Granted, he couldn't have been named after just any drink -- "Harvey Wallbanger" wouldn't have quite the same ring to it, for instance -- but still, he's named after a drink. How cool is that? I also identify with him because he's a college instructor. Earlier in the song he has the line "I'm sick of grading papers, that I know." As a writing teacher who gets to grade a lot of papers (and whose "drinking coffee and grading papers" Facebook status updates are the stuff of legend) I'm pickin' up what he's layin' down.

But he really intrigues me because he's identified as an anarchist. We could have a conversation about whether the anarchist elements in RENT are "real" anarchism or just sentimentalized youth rebellion (a little of both -- and what's "real" anarchism anyway?), but either way, I have this thing for anarchism. This has been on my mind recently because one of our grad students approached me about directing an independent study on anarchist theory and history. I applied for graduate faculty status and got approved, so I'll be doing my first graduate-level teaching in the spring semester, and I'll get to do it by immersing myself in anarchist literature. That, as they say, doesn't suck.

It's strange, though, because I thought maybe I was an anarchist for awhile, albeit a Christian one, but I sort of gave up on it, consigning myself to being just another liberal. Then I sort of gave up on the Christian part, consigning myself to being just another godless liberal (I've thought about getting a T-shirt that says "I'm the liberal professor your youth minister warned you about"). So naturally I'm still going to church, at least partially because our pastor is enough of a Yoderian to be taking the church, slowly, in an anarchist direction (one of the tenets of my dissertation is that John Howard Yoder's ecclesiology, taken to its logical conclusion and lived out to its fullest extent, is anarchist) and I find that I like that. That's not confusing at all, right?

I'm reluctant to actually call myself an anarchist, partially because I don't want to be one of those people who co-opts a sexy sounding word because it supposedly has some kind of cachet. Partially, too, because it is a deeply misunderstood designation, owing not a little to all those people who like to co-opt sexy sounding words because they supposedly have some kind of cachet. I'm not saying that people whose political thinking doesn't go much beyond Dead Kennedys T-shirts and a predilection for shouting and breaking things aren't anarchists, but they might be making things confusing for anarchists who construct their anarchism a little differently. I don't want to be that guy.

Mostly, I hesitate to identify as an anarchist because I don't really do anarchist-y things. I lack a taste for the theater of protest. I lead a fairly conventional (if quasi-agrarian) bourgeois life. True, I drink fair trade coffee and have latent suspicions of authority and property -- as well as a deep-seated disdain for capitalism -- but it manifests more in a refusal to take things like authority or property (mine or anyone else's, on both counts) all that seriously than it does any desire or effort to overthrow anything. Mine is a sort of bemused nihilistic anarchism, and I'm not sure that has much street cred.

Another reason I don't really embrace the moniker is that I don't think an anarchist society is practical. I don't mean to say that "anarchist society" is an oxymoron -- one of the horrible clichés people almost instantly reach for -- but that a) there's no way we're ever going to get enough people behind the idea to make significant progress toward it; and b) it seems like the sort of thing that would be all too easy to fuck up if we did. In this I find myself siding with Jacques Ellul in Anarchy and Christianity:

The true anarchist thinks that an anarchist society—with no state, no organization, no hierarchy, and no authorities—is possible, livable, and practicable. But I do not. In other words, I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible. (19)

Ellul's assumption that anarchism means "no organization" strikes me as naive, but the gist of things is that the fight (such as it is) is important but somewhat hopeless, at least in human terms. Here Ellul has a theological resource -- eschatology -- that I don't: Ellul can look beyond our human hopelessness to a God-centered hope that things will turn out all right after all.

Ellul saw Christianity and anarchism as compatible, but he still tended to hold them slightly apart. There are more nuanced and integrated forms of Christian anarchism, such as that which characterizes the Jesus Radicals, and what I find fascinating is how close this anarchism comes to recognizing its own contingency. Christian anarchism seems uniquely poised to recognize that Empire is not going away. It may change -- or merely change hands -- and there may even be revolutions, but there is not going to be some glorious revolution that ushers in, finally and fully, the world we long for. Not, at least, through human agency. Not without a divine inbreaking, one that Christians look toward as the telos of history.

The opportunity here is to recognize that anarchism and radical Christianity and other forms of resistance to Empire are nevertheless parasitic upon Empire as the thing they need to kick against. There is no pristine or primordial anarchist site that has been obfuscated by Empire; there is only the negative space that is always already defined by Empire. The Christian anarchists may not agree with this (it probably doesn't sit well with theological realism), but I think they can nevertheless help us to see it. Christian theology veils this in apocalypse, which allows us to draw closer to it.

What this suggests is that if anarchism isn't practical, in conventional terms, it is a least practicable, in small communities and small ways. In fleeting and furtive moments. In the refusal to wield power or the decision to use power outside of approved channels to help those with no access to power. When our pastor was a junior staff member and thought things might be headed in the direction of him taking the helm, he balked a bit; being "in charge" was antithetical to his vision for the church, and even being in the kind of church that had positions of power was already problematic for him. I encouraged him to take the mantle as a way of occupying the place of power, which the community sees as necessary, in order to give power away. It's a little like having an anarchist mayor in Reykjavik; it sounds oxymoronic, but it's not, necessarily.

Another illustration that comes to mind is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [special H/T to Tony Hunt for helping me remember the details of this episode]. In the story, an unfamiliar ship docks at the station in need of repairs. The ship's lone operator, of a previously unknown species called a Tosk, manages to strike up a friendship with the station's chief engineer, O'Brien but also gets in trouble for snooping around the weapons stores (for which he refuses to offer an explanation) and lands in the brig.

Eventually another unknown alien vessel comes looking for the Tosk. They are not the same species, and it turns out they they are hunting the Tosk, not in a law enforcement or bounty hunter kind of way, but in an English-gentlemen-out-with-the-hounds kind of way: the Tosk is their prey. The Tosk are bred, in fact, to be exciting quarry and honored for their cunning in evasion. The captive Tosk is bound by social custom to be the hunted, and in getting caught alive (facilitated, of course, by his being held in the brig) he faces humiliation. The station is prepared to hand him over to his pursuers.

O'Brien is scandalized by this; he realizes that the Tosk was interested in the weapons as a possible hedge against his pursuers, and finds the idea of hunting a sentient race repugnant -- but the Prime Directive (which, in some ways, represents the logical outworking of liberal "tolerance") prevents him from interfering with the social customs of these other races. The Tosk could ask for asylum but he refuses; it would only be further indignity and a violation of his code. He would rather die with honor than evade his fate, even though the means for that evasion are available.

O'Brien takes things into his own hands and launches a plan to help the Tosk escape. The plan succeeds, and the Tosk is freed, in not in O'Brien's sense of what freedom would be, but to continue the hunt without further loss of honor. O'Brien, however, must be reprimanded for violating orders -- for violating the Prime Directive, in fact. He is called into the station captains's office for a dressing-down. As he accepts his reprimand, he pauses to admit puzzlement over one aspect of the plan: at a certain point he was certain it would fail, but the force field system he thought would stop them was curiously slow to engage. The captain, Sisko, says suggestively, "I guess that one got past us," and the two exchange a knowing look.

The Tosk's escape is a violation of the law but not of the social code by which the Tosk lives. He cannot accept asylum but he can accept O'Brien's offer of outlaw justice. He is restored not to freedom as we might think of it but to the life for which he is bred and to which he seeks to return. Sisko is required by the law to reprimand O'Brien and does, but in the process it becomes clear that he not only secretly approved of O'Brien's actions but also played a role in making sure those actions were successful.

Of course, there are ideologies and social constraints that are upheld, to a certain extent precisely through this violation of the law (Žižek would have a field day with this), and in no sense are O'Brien or Sisko enacting an anarchist society or articulating an anarchist theory. But they are working in the negative space of empire to offer aid to the oppressed on the terms of the oppressed. It is a fleeting anarchical moment.

I'm not one for affectation, and I'm a bit stubborn. I'm not going to try to be something that doesn't seem organically a part of the life I'm actually living. But already this is a problem: that life, and my sense of what might be "organic" to it, is already enculturated, already formed and shaped by middle class America, by liberal democracy, by neoliberal capitalism. To go with the flow is to accede to it, to be caught up in it, to be held in bondage.

Maybe I need to take myself a little more seriously as an anarchist thinker instead of hiding behind nihilistic bemusement. Maybe my dissertation can be -- or be parlayed into -- a contribution to anarchist thought. Maybe I need to open myself to praxis: especially those fleeting moments, but also opportunities to show solidarity with other making similar efforts, and even when those efforts make me feel vulnerable or require me to publicly take sides (or, God forbid, a stand on something).

This is the sort of thing I've been thinking about lately. It's not running naked through the Parthenon or anything, but it's something.

Sweet Hour of Prayer

2011-10-12T07:57:00.000-04:00

It's Sunday, and I'm not sitting at home doing the New York Times crossword puzzle -- I'm playing bass at church. Although it has a band, this is not some über-contemporary cutting edge church. The feel is folksy and we mix up old hymns and new stuff and a lot of it is quite pleasant and some of it is banal and vacuous and sometimes those are the same songs. On this particular Sunday I play bass and sing tenor and most of the time I can keep that straight. I usually play drums, so this is a nice change of pace. I feel a little like Sting, actually, only neither so cool nor so incredibly good-looking. So maybe more like the lead singer from Mr. Mister.

I used to be very anxious in church, not least when I was on staff. I had a lot to lose: I felt that if people knew my theological proclivities, I'd be ostracized. Out of a job. Or just out, I guess. I felt fake, and in some ways I was fake, though I was trying really hard. I lived in constant fear of being outed and yet also with a constant desire to come out, to be known, to tell my story. The tension wasn't unbearable, but it was uncomfortable, to say the leas -- especially since the kind of Christianity I thought maybe I could believe in was still not something that would sit well with this crowd. Either way I was on the outside.

I get to rehearsal and don't immediately recognize the drummer -- he's not a regular -- until our worship leader points out that we played together once this past summer at a youth event. We shake hands and make small talk. I wonder why there's no sound coming out of my bass and we check a few things until I realize it's not plugged into the amp. This sparks a round of "absent-minded professor" jokes at my expense, most of them instigated by me. My self-designated role at practice is comic relief, anyway: I play an interminable series of 8th notes on the E string of my bass. "What am I playing?" I ask, grinning mischievously. Nobody has a guess, but they know I'm up to something. "Every U2 song," I say. This gets a laugh. I then stumble upon something that sounds a lot like the bass line to "Crossroads" by Stevie Ray Vaughn so I spend the rest of the warm-up trying to get it right until the worship leader signals it's time to start.

It seems strange that after ten years of tension (and the process began long before that) that now that I've given up on any overt theological project, I'm more relaxed. The pastor knows where I'm at with things. I'm a baptized unbeliever, some kind of sympathetic apostate; do with that what you will. I don't try to talk people out of their faith. I'm no proselyte for atheism. I nod and smile at the right times. Should my preacher friend decide that this is untenable, I'll stop playing. Maybe I'll decide I'm not interested anymore and stop playing on my own. I don't know. I've had my fifteen minutes of worship leaderish fame and I'm good. There's always the crossword puzzle.

We finish practice and I grab a cup of coffee and mingle a bit. I'm not much of a mingler, really, but I know these people. They're my people, even though I confess that kind of embarrasses me. The whole thing has a kind of Lake Woebegone-esque quality to it; we're here in church because this is what we do and where we're from and the fact that I don't really believe in God is immaterial next to the history I have of singing with these people and eating with them and watching their kids grow up (as they've watched mine grow up). As evangelicals, we don't have the rich history of the liturgy behind us, or the communion of the saints, or little bits of Jesus, but there is nevertheless a sense of community, a sense of being a people.

The spunky old widow in the prayer room doesn't want my theological history as much as she just wants a hug and a laugh and a wink, as if getting a hug from me is some kind of guilty pleasure. The worship leader doesn't want to rehearse my epistemological misgivings about evangelical theology as much as he needs me to play bass and kvetch about Chris Tomlin (he doesn't really how much he needs me to do the latter, but he does). The high school kid playing keyboard just needs a crash course on how to voice an added second, which is something I can answer. It's not that they wouldn't care I'm an atheist -- they might well be scandalized -- so much as it seems like bringing it up would just make things more complicated than they need to be.

We take to the stage and play our set and people sing along, not exactly lustily, but at least earnestly. There are two services. I sit through the first one, and during the second I hang out with the other musicians in a back room, sort of like a green room. We talk in hushed tones and stop nervously whenever there's a lull in the sermon, wondering if the preacher is headed into the final prayer -- our cue to go back up. (If you get the urge to get up and move whenever someone prays publicly, you might be a church musician.)

It seems odd to me that, in the wake of finally owning up to being an atheist, or something very much like one, I would find myself digging in to church a little more rather than less. This is not quite what I had expected, though I must confess I've stopped expecting much at all because it doesn't seem to do me much good. But I think I know what's going on; I've externalized that tension I've borne for so long. In a way, it's somebody else's problem. The fact that I'm an atheist and a church musician is no longer a conundrum to be resolved or a question to be answered. It just is, and I'm coming to terms with it.

The preacher starts into the prayer and we take our spots. As he's praying I look out at the congregation to see who else is looking up, or looking around. I like doing this for some reason; I'll catch someone's eye, and maybe smile a bit. Some people just pray with their eyes open, but others look strangely guilty, like they think they should have their eyes closed, but for some reason they don't, and there's a story in that reason. I don't know the story, and it's unlikely that it's the same as mine, but still -- I like to think that my smile lets them know that they're not alone.

Highway to Hell

2011-09-08T15:00:00.001-04:00

An old boss of mine was fond of saying that he was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, a metaphor that was never entirely satisfying to me. For one thing, while the one-legged man in question might be working harder than his fully bipedal competitors, that's not usually what we mean when we speak of being busy. But the real problem for me is that this aphorism assumes a literal understanding of ass-kicking that doesn't pertain to real life.

This metaphor, like "blown away," is one for which there isn't exactly a real-life referent (which is why "literally blown away" is almost never true). This is the kind of thing one would imagine making Baudrillard happy. Mostly we use "ass-kicking" and its variants to mean some sort of profound defeat, and what we might be tempted to consider its literal meaning -- a sound physical beating -- could obtain without anyone's foot actually making contact with anyone else's gluteous maximus. Moreover, this literal meaning is something for which we wouldn't even use the phrase in question, largely owing to the fact we almost always use it metaphorically -- or, to put a fine grammatical point on it, metonymically.

To wit, if Tim kicks Joe in the rump, we probably would not say that Tim kicked Joe's ass, unless we also meant that the event marked some sort of significant defeat for Joe, or that the cumulative effect of Tim's assault on Joe's hindquarters was particularly debilitating or humiliating for Joe. But we would say the same thing even if Joe's posterior remained relatively uninvolved, or entirely so. In other words, when we speak of ass-kicking, "ass" is a metonymy for the person. In still other words, I think about this sort of thing way too much.

It's been almost three months since I blogged anything, which I suppose isn't bad considering I pretty much said I was going to stop. It doesn't actually seem that long since June, and that has me fighting the urge to say pedestrian things about how fast the summer seems to have gone. Time flies, apparently, when you're cleaning dorms, teaching two classes, and trying to write a dissertation, and I imagine that won't change now that I'm teaching six sections and still writing that damned dissertation. I've considered having one leg amputated and finding an ass-kicking contest, just so I can relax.

In the June post I finally just came out and admitted I'm basically an atheist. We can quibble over the details and definitions, but there it is. What I really mean by this is that I've given up thinking that: a) being a theological non-realist -- which is how I actually identify my position -- is different from being an atheist in any way that isn't hopelessly arcane or academic, and b) being a theological non-realist Christian makes sense in a way that doesn't involve more work than I'm willing to put into it. There are people doing it, or something close to it, and there are resources for doing it, but basically they've stopped being interesting to me. The resources, I mean.

My thinking didn't really change that much. I've probably been a theological non-realist (aka atheist) for at least ten years, give or take some moments of trying really hard not to be. Then again, in those moments I've described myself as believing in God give or take moments of trying really hard not to. At any rate, the change was on one hand rather slight, having less to do with a shift in thinking than with a shift in how I reckoned the ramifications of that thinking, and on the other hand the difference has been huge.

I'm basically a lot more relaxed. I shared my shift in thinking with my pastor friend at Old Church, at which I've been playing drums, and his reaction was that's all well and good but I should keep playing drums, so I am. But now the way I narrate this to myself is not as some deep conflict begging for resolution but as the simple if slightly absurd fact that I'm an atheist who happens to like spending the occasional Sunday morning beating the hell out of something in church. It was that or the New York Times crossword puzzle and I'm all out of pencils. It doesn't need to mean more than that; it's perfectly explicable in terms of my background, the friendships I maintain, and the fact that I'm not the sort of atheist who thinks everything about religion is stupid and we'd all be better off spending Sunday mornings doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

In fact, the problem I have now is trying to find my voice without being all angsty about religion, which has been my schtick for a long time. I took my journal (a real one) on vacation, and the entries were utterly mundane: did this, did that, still pretty much an atheist, blah blah blah. I went to pour out my soul but found I don't have much soul to pour out. I used to read voraciously, hoping to find "the answer"; now I only read things because they pertain to my research or seem interesting for some other reason. A lot of them I thumb through listlessly and return half-read, because there's no itch there for them to scratch. I haven't blogged much, not just because I'm busy but also because I haven't had any of my usual material. I'm like a one-trick pony who lost his one trick. I'm like a Tommy Tutone concert right after playing "Jenny": now what?

I used to follow a blogger whose posts were poignant and profound. I don't follow today, for a number of reasons, but one is that the blogger was diagnosed with depression and put on medication -- and this was probably a really good idea, let me be clear -- after which the posts became less interesting. Again, there are other reasons I don't follow the blog anymore, and it's perfectly conceivable that this writer found a new, less depressed groove and is writing great stuff. If not, the tradeoff was probably worth it. But it struck me as funny, and not a little cliché, that I thought the blog was more interesting when its creator was suffering from untreated depression.

I haven't cured my depression, which I never thought was terribly generative anyway, but I have come to what I honestly think is a healthier attitude toward my own lack of belief, and this takes away what I realize now was quite generative: my struggle with belief. I'm really surprised at how much less crazy I feel having come to that, for whatever that might mean. But it's also a little disconcerting, because it means letting go of something I leaned on pretty heavily in constructing my identity and especially my voice as a writer. That's very important.

I don't quite have a new schtick yet, and I'm getting worried that the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest is not only less busy than I am, but also more interesting.

Prone to Wander

2011-06-19T10:22:00.008-04:00

As I begin this essay, I'm skipping church. When I left my gig at what we're going to call the Big Church, I thought -- and told a few people -- that we'd probably end up going back to what we'll call the Old Church. This is somewhat true, since I've been doing the occasional drumming (and even some bass playing) at Old Church. There's a certain familiarity there, and the preacher is a friend of mine. But our two middle children are pretty active in Big Church, and somebody has to take them. The rest of the family consists of inveterate church skippers, so when I'm not playing drums (or whatever), I chauffeur.

And then, instead of going to church, I come to my office and write, or I run errands, or both, because to be perfectly honest I don't need another "worship set" of sentimental Jesus-songs or three points on how to be a better middle-class suburbanite. I don't want to go, and I don't. This is part of a constellation of things that have got me thinking maybe my run at some kind of "genuine" faith (whatever that means) is pretty much over. No, I'm not exactly an atheist -- I remain a theological non-realist, which is not the same thing -- but in the spirit of Derrida I rightly pass for one.

So I submit to you my three witnesses: the first is myself. I'm tired of church, tired of arguing theology (which is not to say I'm tired of talking about theology; I'm just tired of pretending I have a coherent theology I'm willing to defend as such). I tend to roll my eyes at theological pontifications. A lot. I try not to let on. Actually, maybe it's better to say that I enjoy trying to understand the theological conversation, as it is taking place right now in parts of the Christian world, but I don't have a dog in the hunt of getting theology right.

My second witness is the redoubtable John Milbank. He wrote this in an interview with the Immanent Frame:

If you are going to be an atheist and nihilist, then be one. Only second-raters repeat secular nostrums in a pious guise. Such theology can never possibly make any difference, by definition. It’s a kind of sad, grey, seasonal echo of last year’s genuine black. All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church, which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man, who is the presupposition of all Christian thinking.

I don't exactly agree; I don't think what Milbank is railing against is somehow not theology, especially inasmuch as we can't really escape the theological anyway. And I don't accept the logic that says if this is the case, then we're all just parasitic upon (orthodox) Christian theology proper and should get back to the real deal. Just because Western thinking is still colonized by Christian theological thought-forms doesn't mean we have to tow the party line.

Nevertheless, Milbank's words here hit me rather powerfully. They seem to be saying: stop pretending. Be what you are (become what you are?). I don't read this in the sense of a misguided quest for "authenticity," as if there's a "real me" apart of from the circumstances in which I find myself, and I certainly don't think every one in every circle of my life needs to know everything I'm thinking all of the time. But the truth is that, as far as I can tell, I'm something of an atheist and nihilist. The problem is that once you describe yourself as one of those things people totally get the wrong idea, and/or they seem to immediately know what you should or shouldn't be about. It's not much different, I suppose, from being a Christian or an anarchist (which is related to what I've been trying to be).

The third witness is actually me again. I realized, in a conversation with some Facebook friends, that my latest attempt to come to terms with my relationship with the Christian faith was essentialistic. I was trying to find some essence of Christianity, some secret key, that I might actually be willing to believe in. This would have the two benefits. It would allow me to flesh out that core belief with the contents of the Christian narrative, those bits I don't believe anymore (at least not at face value), reanimating them now that I've found the secret. It would also give me bragging rights -- if the essential secret is, say, anarcho-pacifism (that's the angle I was working), then I could be more Christian than those people who signed off on the other stuff but weren't properly anarcho-pacifist, if I myself were willing to fully embrace it. The problem is a) I'm not sure I really was, though it sounded cool, and b) this is a philosophical move that I would not assent to in any other area of my thinking. It is a rather bald form of essentialism, though I hid it from myself.

[This is not to suggest that all Christian anarchism is reductionistic in this way, or essentialist. What I was doing is not the same as having a robust faith that also happens to look like anarchism.]

There is no essence of Christianity. There is only Christianity as it manifests in a given time and place practiced by people who are always already themselves contextually situated. Even things that look like internal reductions -- Jesus' take on the shema, or his invocation of the Golden Rule, or James' "true religion" of looking after widows and orphans -- are set deeply within a particular sociopolitical/religious context, birthed within a particular milieu. Whatever it is that I might find interesting about Christianity, or worth hanging onto, is irreducibly bound up in all that stuff I find less tenable. Even Jung realized that Christianity was something of a package deal.

I'm not suggesting that there is no room for critique; in fact, internal critique is largely what has been generative of Christianity's sacred texts, not to mention its history and even its origins as a Jewish apocalyptic sect. Nor am I suggesting that there's no room to forward some idea of what might be getting said through Christianity even if that doesn't line up with what the authors of its text were (or have been) intending. In fact, that's just it: I can do any of those things --those moves are available -- but what I can't do is pretend to be assessing the "truth" of Christianity on the basis of something outside the Christian narrative that is "more true" and thus able to validate it.

I'm off track, however; what essentialism is and why it's a problem are not the issue here. The issue is that I was indulging in a philosophical luxury I deny on other fronts. I realized this as I was typing a comment; seeing it print made the structure suddenly clear to me, and there was the sound of squealing brakes and breaking glass. This was disconcerting to me, and then, eventually, freeing. No, I haven't been liberated from the bondage of religion nor have I cast off the shackles of skepticism. I'm not "post-Christian," which implies I've somehow gotten over Christianity; I'm just a garden-variety apostate.

No, I'm just free now to call things as I see them. Is this the way things are? I have no idea. But I think I can honestly say that I'm fascinated by theology even though I don't believe much of it. I still bear a connection to the faith of my youth and most of my adulthood, and pretty much because it's the faith of my youth and most of my adulthood. I'm not trying to be a pacifist, though I don't like violence, and I'm not trying to be an anarchist, though I have no idea how to run a nation-state and am suspicious of the whole enterprise. I'm not even trying to be an atheist, though if I pass for one that's fine with me (I have no idea how one would try to be a nihilist; I assume it's not that hard).

If I might invoke Zaphod Beeblebrox: I'm just this guy, you know?

When the Roll Is Called up Yonder

2011-03-02T06:55:00.007-05:00

[Cross-posted at Religion at the Margins]

If it weren't for Facebook, I would have missed the flap over Rob Bell this past weekend.

Here's the story in a nutshell: Bell's publishing company released a trailer for Bell's forthcoming book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Everyone Who Ever Lived (one assumes he is speaking generally), in which Bell makes universalist-sounding noises and wears a fluffy turtleneck. Justin Taylor, yet another self-appointed watchdog of orthodoxy (they are legion), wrote a blog post outing Bell as a universalist based on the video -- despite Bell not actually saying this in the video, and Taylor not having actually read the book -- and denouncing him as a heretic. This is probably a win for Bell, since it will drive book sales and heretics tend to be more interesting anyway. It is also meaningless in an evangelical culture where getting pissed and starting your own church is the normative response to conflict, but I digress.

Taylor's take on things was picked up by John Piper, who now-famously tweeted "Farewell, Rob Bell," despite not having read the book, either. It would be really fun if he also hadn't watched the video, but I don't know that. At any rate, this has launched a social media firestorm, with people lining up on either side and tweeting and posting links and blogging and I told myself I'd stay out of it.

Fail.

I don't really care if Bell is a universalist. Universalism is not new, nor is its introduction to evangelical culture, though Bell's video is certainly generating some fresh discussion. And it remains to be seen if Bell really is a universalist or if, as one blogger predicts, he's going to end up affirming some combination of conditional annihilism and inclusivism. He may end up somewhere completely different. This will presumably be made clear when the book hits the shelves (and subsequently flies off of them).

What I find interesting, however, is the hullabaloo itself, because I think there's more at work here than just the (all-too) typical heretic-hunting. Universalism is uncomfortable because it takes away the evangelical sense of calling -- particularly Calvinist election -- but also because it exposes and betrays one of Christianity's dark secrets: there is no justice.

Heaven and hell are artifacts of apocalyptic, and apocalyptic arose as a response to injustice; if, as seems to be the case, the wicked are not always punished and the righteous are not always vindicated, then perhaps this will be rectified at some later date. At first this was national, and largely temporal: faced with exile and oppression, Israel looked forward to a time when God would come in and make things right. Later, this became personal as well: God would not only restore the nation, but also individuals. Individualism is not solely the product of modernism or liberal democracy -- it has its roots in the doctrine of resurrection.

Jesus' followers proclaimed him as the agent of justice, the one who had come to set them free. But national justice did not materialize. In fact, almost the opposite happened. Rome did not fall; Jerusalem did. This was vindication, of a sort, for those who opposed Herod's temple, but did nothing to speak to Roman oppression. It makes sense, then, that attention would turn away from national identity and the fate of a people (especially as the church became less Jewish, though there may be a dialectical chicken-or-egg dynamic here) and more toward the fate of individual souls, leaving justice in the here-and-now to be worked out amongst ourselves. Whatever the perceived injustices of the temporal order, they will be sorted out in the afterlife.

Belief that God would judge, finally and fairly, the immortal soul meant that we could be much more cavalier about life itself. Kill 'em all; let God sort 'em out. The doctrine of resurrection, which offered hope to the martyrs who were willing to die rather than perpetuate injustice, was perverted into a justification for killing with impunity. God's righteous judgment ironically made something like the Inquisition thinkable.

Medieval Christianity, with its invocation of purgatory and the possibility of mortal sins, retained the sense of eternal judgment, even for the saved. But Luther's articulation of justification by faith changed this, and Calvin's soteriological codifications brought it home even more forcefully. Justice is not apprehensible by the human mind, certainly not the unregenerate mind. Justice is meted out according to some inscrutable divine plan. This life and the next are governed by God's unassailable sovereignty. It is not so much that God is going to set things right in eschaton or balance the scales in the afterlife as everything has been decided and we didn't get any say in the matter.

This is functionally no different than an agonism of fates. On one hand, there's a refreshing candor that can be cultivated here: yes, of course the universe seems random and unjust. God's in charge and we don't get to look at the playbook. Face up to it. On the other hand, it's functionally nihilistic: ultimate meaning is bound up in that inscrutable divine plan to which we are not privy. It leaves us in the same place apocalyptic started from, only now with a guarantee that we're not going to make sense of things. Whatever justice there might be must be wrested from the fates. This is why evangelicals can condone torture and call for spending cuts on poverty relief.

What does this have to do with universalism? Universalism is threatening to evangelicals, especially to people like Piper, because it brings us even closer to full circle. The afterlife now has nothing to do with any kind of differential justice -- that is, a separation of "good" and "bad" or "believer" and "unbeliever" or "chosen" and "not chosen." But Piper can't complain that Bell is watering down justice because Piper's theology has already done that. To argue that there should be a hell for someone like Hitler to go to is to capitulate to works righteousness.

It seems that things could have gone the other way; if God is righteous judge, then we should get out of the judging business, particularly that aspect of the judging business that lays claim to the lives of others. Maybe universalism -- or whatever Bell cooks up -- will get us closer. That remains to be seen. At any rate, "Love wins" is too optimistic for me; my take on things is more like "everybody dies." But on my better days I'm willing to believe that evil does not have the last word.

Faith of Our Fathers, part 2

2011-01-02T05:00:00.010-05:00

Earlier this fall I met semi-regularly with a couple of friends -- historians, actually, which prompted me to joke on Facebook that I was hanging with a rough crowd -- to discuss Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. One of the fruits of this conversation was an article for Religion at the Margins, but another was an offhand comment by one of my conversation partners. We were discussing what seems to be a trend toward evangelicals going to one of the big-time liturgical traditions, venturing out on the Canterbury Trail or the Roman Road or, um, whatever clever thing we might come up with for going Orthodox (I tried to conjure something involving Constantinople, but you'll have to settle for this).

The general idea, I think, is that in the wake of epistemological uncertainty, the answer is to ground oneself in a tradition, an idea that has gained traction in the past few decades, owing not a little to the work of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. My friend may have been repeating something he'd heard, or he may have been speculating on his own, but his comment was that if they were really wanting to ground themselves in a tradition, they shouldn't be trying to glom onto Catholicism so much as embracing "their mom's Baptist church on the corner." I think that's how he put it. Like it or not, home is not the Eucharist and the "Ave Maria" but potlucks and "Just As I Am."

I pointed out that one of the problems with this is that evangelicalism's stated theology doesn't lend itself easily to this kind of thinking. Officially, you're not born into evangelicalism but born again into evangelicalism. I'm not saying that a familial connection is what defines a tradition, and I'm not suggesting that evangelicalism is not a tradition in its own right. I do think, however, that the "big three" liturgical options have both a greater sense of history and a more robust ecclesial culture than evangelicalism, making them attractive targets for evangelicals seeking something different.

Myself, I've been enamored with the Episcopal church for a long time, and I tried the local parish not too long ago. It was...church. It was beautiful and interesting in certain ways, but boring and alien to me in others (as liturgically literate as I like to think myself -- I once wrote a Mass -- the experience of being a participant was kind of disenchanting). There was a kind of coffee time afterwards (with real china cups!) and that was actually more fun. The priest -- who looks and sounds a little like Tim Gunn -- is very cool. But it wasn't home.

I think the liturgy would make more sense if I were really a part of that community, or thought I was going to be. I used to be attracted to liturgy because of a sense that the liturgy was more "right" than the usual evangelical fare. In other words, my interest was partially was an artifact of my Stone-Campbell heritage, just trained in a different direction. At this point, I can appreciate it for what it is -- I love the language and the poetry and the ritual -- but I know it's not magic. There is no "right," at least not on the terms I grew up with. For those who are a part of that tradition, the liturgy is both a shared language and a shared experience, and that's important, but it doesn't make much sense abstracted from its communal context.

Another conversation -- and this is my third witness -- was with a friend who had heard Greg Epstein interviewed on the NPR program Speaking of Faith. Epstein is a humanist chaplain at Harvard, and was on the show describing what he calls the "new humanism." I listened to the podcast, and I like a lot of what Epstein has to say. He seems like one of the good guys.

The humanism bit is interesting but what really intrigued my friend was his self-identification as secular Jew. At one point he describes his mentor, a man named Sherman Wine, who

became a rabbi, knowing that he was an atheist, because he loved the idea of community. And he loved the idea of serving the community of his cultural background, which is Judaism.

"If there were a sea like secular evangelicalism in which one swim," my friend told me, "I might try a lap or two." I don't want to dwell on what Epstein means by "new humanism" or the use of the word "secular." I think what my friend means is: what if there were a way to stay connected to the tradition into which we were born -- or born again -- even though we can no longer sign off on the big platform beliefs, the metaphysical underpinnings of evangelical faith? What would that look like?

I confess I don't know. I certainly don't think an outpost of evangelicals who all think like my friend and me is even remotely possible or even desirable. But maybe it's possible to live among evangelicals, to observe their customs and honor their beliefs, to claim them as our people without identifying as one exclusively (as if any of us is one thing, and one thing only, to begin with) but also without feeling compelled to constantly add disclaimers.

So I'm still a Christian. I still feel a sense of calling. Am I still an evangelical? Hard to say. It's where I'm from, definitely. For good or for ill, these are my people. I'm even growing leery of efforts to "rethink" Christianity, to defang theology so that it makes sense to (post)modern sensibilities. Of course there's some good in that.

But what about retaining the ungainlier elements precisely as myth? Why "rethink" ourselves into some "emerging" Christianity rather than learn to take our existing tradition both less seriously (as metaphysics) and more seriously (as myth and literature)? It seems to me the same kind of logic by which cessationists reject the charismatic gifts; here's the literal meaning, and we don't like it, so it must mean something else. This misses the point of how such myths operate in the communities for which they're foundational.

I'm not knocking the emerging types. When I read Kevin De Young and Ted Kluck's Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Probably Should Be), I found myself just as much under attack as the book's targets. I agree more with emergents than their critics. One comment by De Young -- "The reason I love Christianity and the Bible is that I think they are really the only things in this world that don’t need to be periodically ‘repainted’ or reframed" -- particularly had me coughing "bullshit" into my hand. Demographically, philosophically, theologically -- I fit the profile. I think all this emergent business is, really, an important part of the, er, conversation.

I guess what I'm wondering is if there's a way to embrace Ricoeur's "second naivete" not only with respect to the Bible but also with respect to our Christian heritage in general -- and, for some of us, our evangelical past in particular. That for some the way to embrace the kenotic, self-emptying posture of God in the incarnation and Jesus on the cross is not to seek out liturgical fabulousness or cutting-edge "emergent" worship in a house or a bar, good as those things might be, but to bring a dish to pass and head down to the Baptist church on the corner.

Faith of Our Fathers

2010-12-26T06:02:00.005-05:00

There's a recurring joke in my life that goes something like this: I don't believe in God, but somebody keeps fucking with me. I've also had a kind of rule of life in which if something comes up in three places, I should probably pay attention to it. It's kind of a "two or three witnesses thing," however hermeneutically suspect that might be.

A few weeks ago, my Methodist pastor friend dropped a hint that their piano player might be leaving. It's a small church, and they do a mixture of hymns and contemporary stuff -- not, I think, out of any particular strategy so much as by default. I have zero regrets over leaving the staff at our usual church (the closest thing in the area to a megachurch), and I assumed this meant I was done for good with church music.

But then there are those protestant guitars (kind of expensive ones) lying idle, and my chops not getting much exercise, and I wonder about that musical gap that doesn't get filled anywhere. And then one day, when I was running errands and decided to drop in on my pastor friend, he told me their music guy was definitely leaving, and the woman who picks out the music was fretting over having to pick up his load, and gosh I'd be a good fit if I decided to come out of retirement. I told him no.

The next day, I felt, in evangelical parlance, "convicted." It would probably be an easy volunteer gig: show up on Sunday morning, run through the songs somebody else picked, and be home for lunch. This would help my friend, and I wouldn't have to spend Sunday morning milling around church being fidgety, which is what I do now. I know. I'm a mess. Don't judge me. So I called my friend and told him I was in, which I think made his day.

This is one of the "witnesses" that have me thinking lately about what it means to remain not just Christian, to which I'm already committed, but an evangelical Christian, about which I've been (um, understandably) on the fence. This prospect makes me a little nervous, though the truth is I'm still at an evangelical church anyway. My blogging friend Peter Walker calls himself a "liberal evangelical," and my friend (and Religion at the Margins co-contributor) James McGrath is a liberal and, I assume, an evangelical -- he teaches Sunday School at a Baptist church, for crying out loud. He's probably a Veggie Tales DVD away from having more evangelical cred than I do. So this is not an impossible task. For the other witnesses, we need some background.

As I've mentioned before, I grew up Church of Christ, and there were three things -- three C's -- we were definitely not: Catholic, Calvinist, or charismatic. I've dabbled in all three as a result although none of them took. The CofC is the bastard stepchild of the Scottish Enlightenment, and despite some of the irrational content of faith, all those metaphysical truth-claims that are invariably taken literally, the structure of that faith is very rational and formalistic. An offshoot of Presbyterianism, we rejected predestination and church hierarchy but we kept the iconoclasm and the systematic theology and the largely disenchanted world.

On the frontier (and the CofC is very much a frontier phenomenon) Calvinism and the charismatic ran much closer together than they do now, inasmuch as charismatic ecstasies were among the signs that one might be offered to confirm they were among the elect. The Stone-Campbell movement, or Restoration Movement, out of which the CofC sprang, had no time for such nonsense. Salvation was a free choice, simple as that. Stake your claim and be done with it.

In the movie Cannery Row, Debra Winger plays a prostitute in a coastal California town in the 1940s. At one point, she's with one of her first, er, clients -- a tough, no-nonsense guy with a crew cut -- and he says "Aren't you going to take off your dress?" She replies, "I thought maybe you wanted to do it, as a lead-in." He retorts, "Lead-ins are for guys who can't cut the mustard."

That's the Stone-Campbell approach to soteriology: enough whining about whether or not you're saved, or waiting for a sign, or going to the mourner's bench and praying through, and blah blah blah. Come to Jesus and get your ass baptized. What we really needed, besides baptism (baptism is a really, really big deal for us), is to get back to the New Testament pattern of faith. We tended to read Acts 2:42 as a clip from a first-century church bulletin:

The apostle's teaching -- that's the sermon
The breaking of bread -- that's communion (and by God you better do it ever Sunday)
Fellowship -- this, depending on how the Greek gets parsed, is the offering
Prayer -- so we have a prayer for everything.

In Acts, this is really a reference to the kind of life the early disciples shared: doing the things the apostles had taught them, eating together, sharing their goods, and praying together (probably the Psalms, but that's another story). But in the CofC, these are things that you have to do every Sunday or it doesn't count as church. As far as I can tell, it wasn't about church growth or spiritual formation or creating communities of character or being "relevant" (though it was certainly a product of the times) so much as it was about getting it right.

It was also about Christian unity; they saw the divisions among denominations as running counter to Jesus' prayer in John 17 that all his followers should be one, so they were checking out of that system. If believers would give up their denominational allegiances and just get back to basics (see above), Jesus' prayer would be answered. If not, well, they could burn in hell with everybody else.

The rejection of charismatic gifts was not just based on the notion that such things were for people who couldn't cut the mustard; it was also predicated on the idea that such things were wrong; they were not part of the "getting it right" that the restorationists (so named for their desire to restore the New Testament church) were on about. After the rise of Pentecostalism in the early 1900s, it wasn't just frontier revival ecstasies that were at issue, but specifically glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. In reaction to this, we came up with new theological reasons for keeping a stiff upper lip.

For this we employed a passage from St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians in which he says that "when the perfect comes," prophecies will cease and tongues will be silenced. The "perfect," in our reading, was not the eschatological horizon that frames most of the New Testament, but the compilation of the New Testament itself. Once people had NT canon, they didn't need prophecies and ecstasies, tongues and interpretations. Or miracles. Those things fell away.

What humors me is that the charismatics and the cessationists, at least of the variety I'm familiar with, are pretty much using the same logic. They both assume that glossolalia is unique to first century Christians; for the charismatics this means a sign of God's favor, and in some cases evidence that we are living in the end times, whereas for the cessationists this means the charismatics are either faking it or possessed of the devil, a perspective that does not lend itself well to interdenominational dialog. What does not seem to occur to either camp is that religious ecstasies, including glossolalia, are found in a variety of religious traditions, and may not be "supernatural" at all.

The humanism bit is interesting but what really intrigued my friend was his self-identification as secular Jew. At one point he describes his mentor, a man named Sherman Wine, who

became a rabbi, knowing that he was an atheist, because he loved the idea of community. And he loved the idea of serving the community of his cultural background, which is Judaism.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

2010-12-24T16:01:00.006-05:00

So I'm driving my 12-year-old daughter to church for Christmas Eve, where she will be playing in the bell choir and and following in her father's footsteps on keyboard for the family service. One of the songs they're doing is "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and she's looking at the lyrics as we drive. Here's the first verse, familiar to most of us:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
"That doesn't make sense," she says. I explain the conceit of the song: "We're singing to the town of Bethlehem," I say. "The city is sleeping, but the light of Jesus is shining because that's where he is born." This seems to satisfy her.

We look at the second verse:

For Christ is born of Mary
And gathered all above
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love
O morning stars together
Proclaim the holy birth
And praises sing to God the King
And Peace to men on earth

It's the syntax of the first part that throws her. "It's the angels that are gathered all above," I explain. "Keeping watch."

"Of wondering love," she says.

"Right," I say, "and the stars are proclaiming the birth and praising God."

"Peace," she says, almost contemptuously. "There is no peace. There will never be peace."

This seems to come from nowhere. Wow, I think to myself, that's a little dark, though I am not unsympathetic. "That's why," I say, "we need to keep the hope of the peace of Jesus." That sounds Christmas-y, right?

"But Jesus already came," she says.

"Well, yeah." I am not sure where to go with this.

"So he's coming again?"

We've been through this before. "Well, I don't think so," I say, "but that's not what I think hope is about."

"Did they think that?" They, I think, means whoever wrote the song.

"Well, maybe," I say. "But Jesus comes to us wherever we seek that peace. There are times where the bad thing we're sure should happen doesn't, and the good thing we think is impossible happens anyway. Where we find ourselves capable of peace and surprise ourselves. Times when we share bread with a neighbor, or take the time to listen. When we forgive even though it's hard, when we refuse to repay evil for evil, or when we let go of what we think should be ours because someone else needs it. Those moments come to us sometimes as a gift, when we're not expecting it, like Jesus came to Bethlehem."

"Cool," she says. "Do you think they'll have cookies at church?"

Now Thank We All Our God

2010-11-26T08:58:00.003-05:00

As with most things, I approach Thanksgiving as a spectator sport. There's a cultural battle over the meaning of the national holiday, or least that's what it looks like on my Facebook wall. On one side are my conservative evangelical friends, who with fetching earnestness encourage us to give thanks to God for blessing us, and for letting us be Americans. On the other side are my Christian anarchist friends, and others who lean that direction, who find in Thanksgiving a heinous paean to imperialism and genocide. And I have to admit that being thankful for being an American just means being thankful to be on the dominant side of the imperialistic dyad, which is a little like thanking God that you're not a dog, a Gentile, or a woman.

Some are holding protests against Black Friday, or declaring "Buy Nothing Day" -- and here, too, the earnestness is fetching. I am reminded of Eugene McCarraher's reflection that "talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism," but I suppose I can't blame them for wanting to feel like they're doing something. I'm somewhat sympathetic to their way of seeing things, but I don't share their enthusiasm, or their identification of the problem. I made the following comment in reference to a "wanted" poster of Columbus on Peter Walker's Facebook wall:

On one hand, I feel ya. Violence is not, by any stretch of the imagination, uniquely white or European, but it's hard to get away from the realization that our nation came into existence through genocide, deceit, and oppression.

On the other hand, name for me a society that isn't, at some point in its history, based on conquest, displacement, or treachery. The actions of our forebears were not some anomalous aberration from the norm, but the norm itself in plain relief. White guilt is predicated on a latent ethnocentrism that suggests that our "enlightened" white European predecessors, of all people, should have known better.

Refusing to celebrate Thanksgiving might honor those who died needlessly, and the ways of life and forms of wisdom that are gone to us forever, but feeling bad about the past won't restore indigenous peoples. Moreover, focusing on this one day and this one period in history too easily elides the ways in which our present society is sustained by oppression and violence.

The way to honor the victims of history is not to burn dead white guys in effigy but to work to abolish oppressive structures.

What I find interesting is the way in which these perspectives mirror each other by taking Thanksgiving seriously. In solid agreement that Thanksgiving must mean something, must be invested with some kind of quasi-cosmic significance, they wrangle over that meaning. I suppose in some ways they are recapitulating theological debates over the Lord's Supper.

Like the Eucharist, Thanksgiving is steeped in blood. Like the Eucharist, Thanksgiving is a contested site of theological import. And, like the Eucharist, perhaps what is important about Thanksgiving has less to do with the metaphysics of meaning than with who is at the table.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2010-11-05T21:15:00.012-04:00

It's time.

I started this blog several years ago, on the heels of other blogs, each of which had the same purpose: to be a place where I could share secret thoughts. As my internal world veered farther and farther from evangelicalism while my external world remained an active part of it, I had to extract part of myself to a virtual world where I could say what needed to be said. As I've written elsewhere, some people create virtual personae to escape themselves; I created one to be myself.

The problem is that such a bifurction, however much it served me at the time, ultimately means that neither persona is really me. At some point -- and I think I knew this -- I'd have to come out of the closet, to simply be who I am and let the chips fall where they may.

When my church gig ended a few months ago, I expected a certain freefall, and I wasn't wrong. What I mean is that without the financial pressure to play a particular role, I would be free to explore who I am in ways I haven't been before, but also bereft of a rather significant identity marker. What I'm finding, though of course it's a little early, is that I feel a little less torn between extremes.

The "real me," as he emerges, doesn't need to try so hard to pass as an evangelical. We're still part of an evangelical church (we've never been members, and likely won't be), but I'm no longer on staff and I'm not leading worship. I can float on the edges, hang out in the periphery. I don't feel I need to "set an example" by being more enthusiastic than I really am. I'm not worried someone will discover my "secret," though I see no need to proclaim from the housetops that I'm a liberal heretic (I've been tempted to proclaim it in my Facebook status just to see what happens). I can decide not to show up, or to go somewhere else.

At the same time, I feel less like I need to pass as a "godless academic" (and if my visit to the Episcopal church last week is any indicator, academics really aren't that godless -- depending, of course, on your view of the Episcopal church). What I really mean by this is that I'm more comfortable owning my identity as an aspiring religion scholar and armchair theologian, and while there's a methodological distinction that needs to be maintained (I'm in American studies, not theology), there's also no way to definitively separate the two. In fact, my arguments regarding postsecularity would deconstruct such a distinction.

In light of this, I've done two things: I've changed my Blogger profile to my real name, and I've joined my friend Thom Stark (author of The Human Faces of God) and others in a collaborative project called Religion at the Margins, also under my own name (which we've seeded with content from our respective blogs, though there's also a new piece by me). I thought about taking this blog down or changing the name but I think I'll keep it for now. I want my work for RatM to be a little more serious, inhabiting the intersection between religious studies and theology, and there may be a call to post the occasional more personal item here. Plus, the blog has served me well, and there's the chance that someone will finally get the title and tagline.

But "Ira," the online persona that came out of this blog and the attendant Facebook profile, has served his purpose. He'll live on, of course, inside of me (where he's been all along, really), smoking Chesterfields and drinking vodka and tonics. You'll probably see him peek out from time to time.

Anyway, pop over to the new site. Find us on Facebook and show us some love.

I'm going back to my plow.

One (Is the Loneliest Number)

2010-10-08T08:04:00.010-04:00

God is a red herring.

I have, at several different points, found atheism attractive. I've tried it out, more or less earnestly, on a couple of occasions, but the truth is my world is not quite disenchanted enough to make it stick. I'll feel good about it for awhile, but then I'm faced with the nagging possibility that I might be wrong, that ultimately I lack the capicity for certainty (or conviction) for it to take. This is my life. I'll not infrequently latch onto something with evangelical fervor only to give it a hearty "meh" later on.

There is, on the surface, a structural similarity in atheism's rejection of God, anarchism's rejection of state power, and postmodernity's "incredulity toward metanarrative." I've been attracted to all three, and cannot identify wholly with any of them, largely for the same reason I was attracted in the first place.

[I will admit to being postmodern in the sense that none of us is issued a "get out of postmodernity free" card. But I am leery of most invocations of "postmodern" or "postmodernist," because they're too often tossed around by people using them as gloss for things they don't like (from one camp) or things they think they're supposed to be (from the other), both of which miss the point.]

But there is, on a deeper level, a structural similarity between monotheism and the atheistic argument that we should abandon belief in God, the anarchist call to abolish the state, and the postmodern cry to disabuse ourselves of metanarratives. They share the (largely Platonic) presumption that there is one truth, one world, a universe, that we could all agree on if we would just shed our presuppositions and see this world for what it is. In fact, there is a kind of essential utopianism at work here; if we would all just agree on this One Thing, maybe we could get along.

The three things I've mentioned here each have, as their One Thing, the promise of getting rid of other One Things. If we could just move beyond competing claims about God, or competing nationalities, or competing narratives in general, we could be happier. We could be at peace. We could be one. Or One. We would usher in a new age of tolerance and freedom and maybe even prosperity and -- does this sound like anything?

But this obsession with the One Thing is hardly limited to monotheism or these three that remain which still bear its shape and form and substance. It lies behind every claim to have found a "third way" beyond some existing dichotomy. It lies behind every claim to a "radical paradigm shift" that will "change the world." It is the very shape of the messianic, of the promise of enlightenment.

It's The Secret. It's The Answer. It's The Call. It's The Purpose Driven Life. It's every fad diet, every self-help book, every theology title written by the ecclesiastical equivalent of those famous for being famous. It's the war to end all wars, and the end of history. It's the Meaning of Life, and the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

It's the Holy Grail and the Fountain of Youth. It's "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" and "Jesus Saves." It's "Don't Worry; Be Happy" and "don't sweat the small stuff." It's self-actualization, self-awareness, self-realization. It's being yourself. It's becoming your best self. It's your higher self. It's your hidden self. It's getting over yourself.

It's the face you had before your parents were born. It's the Buddha-nature and the Godhead and Brahma. It's the revolution, the Singularity, the Omega Point. It's the return to Eden, and the escape from Eden, the Second Coming of Jesus and "the democracy that is to come." It's everlasting peace and the Final Battle. It's the One World Order and the end of empire.

I haven't believed in God in any kind of conventional sense for about 10 years now. I've been trying to deal with that ever since. I had a lot resting on this particular shelf, and when it came crashing down I was left with a considerable mess. But I don't call myself an atheist because it's not my inability to believe in God that's the issue; it's my inability to believe in the One. This is not about God but about the very structure and shape of belief, and the structure and shape of my own subjectivity.

I don't know what lies beyond our perception, nor do I know how accurate our perceptions are. I don't think there's a single vision of the world on which we all should agree -- let alone one on which we're likely to agree -- and I'm sick to death of claims to have found it, regardless of who is making those claims or how explicitly such claims are made.

We are not going to agree because none of us can claim access to non-contingent knowledge. No matter how deeply felt, no matter how soundly theological, the believer's reasons for believing have far too much to do with the believer's life circumstances, experiences, and place in history. Ditto the atheist. And no, for the record, rejecting the One Thing is not my One Thing. Nice try. I need to believe what I'm articulating here for exactly the same kind of contingent reasons as the believer and the atheist. Mine is not a third way; it's just a way. It's how the world looks to me. It has value not in being the One Thing, but in being the one thing that, for right now, I can say I honestly think.

God is a red herring.

Counting Blue Cars

2010-09-28T08:39:00.006-04:00

I knelt in front of the minister, whom I'd sought out for this very purpose: to be anointed with oil and prayed over in order to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. By this I mean that I wanted to speak in tongues. I grew up very anti-charismatic; in the Church of Christ there were three things we definitely weren't: charismatic, Catholic, or Calvinist. But the theology of my childhood faith seemed flat and sterile compared to those who were experiencing more than just heady assent to doctrine, who were getting some kind of taste of God that I had been denied. I don't remember if this was before or after my Catholic phase, but it doesn't matter. In that moment, I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I opened my mouth I could let fly with the language of angels. It was, if I can be forgiven the pun, right on the tip of my tongue. If I just gave things the slightest push, if I tried, maybe I could manifest the sign I was looking for.

In the end, it was that push that did me in. I knew that, on some level, I would be making it happen, that I would be having this experience predicated on the fact that I wanted to have this experience. I really think it was possible, but somehow I also knew it wasn't going to be the thing that I was looking for, the thing that I now suspect doesn't exist -- not for people like me.

I wanted something that I couldn't disbelieve, something so overwhelmingly real that it would reorient the rest of my life. Some so real it would make me real. I was, by this time, already starting to doubt my legitimacy as a Christian. I didn't feel the gushy Jesus stuff other people felt. People would tell me things like "I can just see the power of God on you when you lead worship" but I knew in my heart it was a kind of performance, and one that would obtain whether I was leading worship or playing in a bar. I pour myself into the music that I play, even when I don't like the music in question, because that's what we do as musicians. I can couch that in Christianese -- I used to joke that "it's not worship unless you sweat" but I knew it was the music, and this made me feel fake.

The minister reassured me that sometimes it doesn't happen right away, that later down the road, at some random moment, I might be ravished by the Holy Spirit -- that the prayer and the anointing had done their work, and not to worry. I wasn't worried, but I was pretty sure nothing was going to happen. Emily Dickinson famously refused to go forward during a revival at Holyoke, even though most of her peers were caught up in ecstatic frenzy. Simone Weil, for all practical purposes an atheist, was enamored of the Church but never joined because she felt she belonged outside, if only just. William James, in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience, seems smitten by mystics, recognizing some kind of validity to their experience, which he felt was denied him. Kathleen Norris quotes someone -- Levertov, maybe, or Sexton? -- who said "I love faith, but I have been denied the gift of faith."

I recently had a brief exchange with Cheryl Ensom Dack over at Peter Walker's blog. She too, has been looking for an encounter with God, though she narrates things differently than I do. And with no such encounter forthcoming, she's moved on. She's open to God if he decides to show up, but she's not holding her breath. I've always wondered if Simone Weil's title Waiting for God was an allusion to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which the title character never arrives, but I don't know. Either way, I relate to these people, those of us begging for scraps at the existential banqueting table.

But that's not quite right, either. It's more like we're watching other people eat sand, and rave about the gourmet dining, knowing that it's not sand to them, and yet unable to undertake the act of surrender necessary to taste the prime rib ourselves. The wine and bread refuse to transubstantiate, and whether a priest says hoc est corpus meum or a parlor magician says "hocus pocus" it's not going to change anything.

We've got it wrong, our friends say; we want to know so that we might believe but we must, as Augustine said, believe that we might know. We can't have this experience because we won't have this experience. We nod and we smile. We say "I know, I know," and wave our hand dismissively. We might even agree. But we also know that we won't because we can't. We can't will ourselves to believe just so that we might have a particular kind of experience and still believe the experience the way that others do. We'd always know we made it happen. We'd always know we surrendered to the particular conditions necessary to have a certain kind of experience and that's all it would mean, all it would ever mean.

This is the deal we made, though we didn't know we were making it. This is our Faustian bargain, but at the end there's no devil anymore with whom we might negotiate: no backsies, no do-over, no mulligan.

We wanted to know something. Wanted to see something. We had some kind of insatiable curiosity about systems, about meaning, about language, about human thinking. Something to do with the "linguistic turn" and poststructuralism and Heisenberg and semantic structures and science fiction and religion and God knows what else and we don't even remember when the turning point was, just this never-ending ratchet click, click, click, no turning back we already took the red pill the toothpaste is out of the tube the water is not turning into wine into blood and no, Goddammit you're not going to speak in tongues because you'd just be making it up and you know it.

It feels, at times, a little like madness.

We'll sometimes poke fun at the true believers because of their blindness but at the same time we covet what their blindness gives them. We see people raising their hands in worship, and not just for show but out of some depth of spirit, and we wonder what that's like. We hear people choke up in the middle of a puerile but heartfelt prayer and we wonder what it would take to move us so completely. We hear people talk about their deep, personal relationship with God or Jesus and we think: really? What on earth would that be like? Not just to experience that -- it's not that simple -- but to be the kind of person who can?

But we traded off. We chose something different. We can't go back, and we wouldn't anyway. We didn't get cheated, not really. We got exactly what we were looking for. We all do.

Tell me all your thoughts on God.

Blest Be the Tie That Binds

2010-09-23T10:02:00.005-04:00

[I'm performing a wedding this weekend, and this is the homily I've written for it. I've, er, changed the names...]

Jim and Pam have chosen 1 John 4:19 as the text for their ceremony, which says “We love because he first loved us.” Let’s look at that verse in its larger context:

⁷Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.⁸Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.⁹This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

¹³We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. ¹⁶And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.¹⁷In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. ¹⁸There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

¹⁹We love because he first loved us. ²⁰If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. ²¹And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

John here seems a bit harsh in places, and I hope he’ll forgive me for suggesting that he also seems to repeat himself like a doddering old fool. This is, perhaps, not far off the mark, since we suspect this was written late in John’s life. He’s getting on in years, he’s writing to the churches over which he was an elder—this may even have been a sermon—and he wants them to get something. He’s very keen that they grasp the connection between the love God has for them and the love they show one another. We’ll come back to that.

But Jim and Pam have also identified a larger theme that frames our celebration today: that of second chances. God is all about second chances—and sometimes third and fourth chances. In fact, when asked how many times we needed to forgive the same person, how many chances we should give in order to reflect the love that God has for us, Jesus tells Peter “70 times 7,” which to a first-century Galilean fisherman was about the biggest number he could think of.

The broad arc of the Christian story is one of a global second chance, of God offering humanity not merely a do-over or a mulligan, but a shot at genuine restoration. Humanity has blundered, and continues to blunder, but God has stepped into this mess we call life in order to bring us back around. This is not some means by which the past is merely erased, but a way for it to be redeemed, bought back, carried with us into the present—not as a punishment or a reminder but as the very ground against which God’s love stands out in stark contrast.

At the end of the Christian story we have a knowledge of the depth of God’s love that we would not have had without having blundered in the first place. I’m tempted to say that of course this doesn’t justify our sin, but actually it does—not by making it right, or making it okay, or letting it go as if it were nothing, but by putting it into right relation. God’s love for us puts our own depravity into its proper context. There is a second chance for humanity.

Nested within this larger story—and in some ways the Bible is far more about this story than the larger one we extrapolate from it—is the story of a people. God calls Abraham out of Ur, which was probably Sumeria, to start a people who would play a special role in God’s plans. Later he calls that people, now known as Israel, out of Egypt to continue their journey as part of that plan. He forms a covenant with them, a covenant not unlike marriage, and in fact many passages in the Bible speak of that relationship in marital terms.

But Israel breaks the covenant. She is unfaithful, and God punishes his people by allowing them to be taken into exile by enemy forces. Their city is destroyed, along with the temple. They must learn to live in a strange land, among strange people with strange ways. They learn to make do and to serve God in adverse circumstances. God promises them that it won’t last forever, that he will one day send someone to rescue them. So they wait. And they wait. And they wait.

This is the context into which Jesus comes, as the very person who would rescue them. Jesus comes not just to rid us of our existential angst but to proclaim to his own people that God wasn’t angry with them any more, that their second chance had come at last, that their collective dark night of the soul was about to see the dawn break in at the start of a new day. There is a second chance for God’s people.

(I should also note that when Jesus’ followers take this message to the streets, God reveals to them that even the Gentiles—people who were not Israelites—could get in on the action, and this is where the smaller story connects to the larger one.)

God is also, of course, a God of second chances for individuals. Peter is a good example of this. Peter was a companion of Jesus and one of the twelve apostles entrusted with Jesus’ message. He traveled with Jesus, ate with him, watched him work wonders and heard his teachings. And yet when things got ugly, when Jesus was arrested by Roman officials and betrayed by his own people and even one of his own band of brothers, Peter, despite his protestations to the contrary, joins that betrayal by denying he knows Jesus. He throws Jesus under a bus.

Later, after Jesus has risen from the grave, he finds Peter, who has gone back to fishing. Peter has betrayed Jesus not just by denying him, but by giving up on his whole program and trying to fade back into obscurity. And here comes Jesus, back from the dead, to face Peter.

Awkward!

But Jesus doesn’t come for revenge or to say “I told you so” or even to demand Peter’s apology. He comes to forgive—and not only that but to reinstate Peter, to re-commission him with his original task of spreading the message. To allow Peter, if I might crib from Shakespeare a little, to wash out the damn spot of his own betrayal and once again be about the business of taking Jesus' message to the world. There is a second chance for Peter -- and for us as well.

Jim, Pam, the selection of this text and this theme in light of your circumstances is not lost on us. This is not, for either of you, your first rodeo. The children from your previous marriages are here, even in the wedding party itself. You’re not trying to hide this and we can’t pretend it’s not true. There is a very real extent, then—without assigning particular blame here—that our celebration is taking place in the context of prior failures. That stings a bit. We’re not judging; no one in this room wants to start dragging out catalogs of our foibles and follies. For any of us to claim the moral high ground would be merely to add hypocrisy to our own list of sins and shortcomings.

But we must be honest. The second chance is not starting over from some imaginary zero point, but starting again from where we are right now. If it is true, as the Bible tells us, that God does not remember our sins, it is just as Biblical to recognize that he is fully cognizant of them and loves us anyway. God is not some old fart who can’t remember all that we’ve done but a gracious father who loves us in spite of all that we’ve done.

This all sounds nice and good and lovely but if the 1 John passage I read earlier means anything, it is that this love must be realized. John is refreshingly honest; to say that we love because God first loved us is to recognize that we are not noble, or generous, or even particularly good. We do not love out of the kindness of our hearts or the depth of our virtue but in response to a divine overture. But John is also realistic in the sense that he knows that the love of God is not something we are going to experience outside of a concrete expression of that love in community. This is what the incarnation is about—not just God putting on human flesh in the form of Jesus, but also God’s spirit being poured out on all flesh that we might be Jesus, might become the body of Christ.

Yes, God is offering you a second chance, Jim and Pam, but look around this room to see the way in which that is being made concrete. We, your friends and family, are daring to step in for God, to be the body of Christ and extend that second chance to you, just as you extend it to one another. It’s not the papers we sign or the words I say that ratify or sanctify your marriage but our willingness, as a community, to recognize it, to call it out, to hold you accountable to it. We are here, today, to say God’s “I do” to you, God’s “yes” to your need for a second chance.

Likewise, if the incarnation makes any sense at all, then you are also to be this for and to one another. Jim, Pam is beloved of God, and chosen, but she’s going to feel that most deeply through your embrace and your encouragement. Pam, Jim is a broken man made whole by the grace of God but he’s going to know that in a special way through your compassion and your care. Marriage is the crucible through which God is going to continue to refine you into the people he’s called you to be. Peter’s second chance was to get back to the preaching of Jesus’ message. The Hebrew people’s second chance was to get on with the project of being a blessing to the Gentiles. Humanity’s second chance is the opportunity to participate in the ongoing restoration of creation. Your second chance is to take your place alongside us, now together as husband and wife, to learn grace.

Let us pray.

Farther Along

2010-09-17T06:43:00.003-04:00

So, I'm neck-deep in dissertation stuff. This is my life right now, besides grading papers. I'm taking notes for chapter 3, trying to sort the work of John Howard Yoder into the "five principle topoi" around which I'm organizing the dissertation: ethics, ecclesiology, eschatology, etiology, and economics. Yes, they all begin with 'e'; that's part accident, part serendipity, and part homage to Catherine Albinese's four C's of religious studies -- creed, code, cultus, and community -- only mine are designed to get at the overlap of religion and politics in specific ways. When I landed on that rubric I began to feel like I might actually have something to say.

Yoder is great for this because he basically connects all those dots for me in his own work (in fact, I'm seeing ways in which my approach to this study -- I'm examining the relationship between religion and politics in the postsecular turn through the lens of Christian radicalism, particularly the anarchist implications of a pacifist ethics -- has been shaped by my appreciation of Yoder). His pacifist ethics is made intelligible by his eschatology, and he knows this. His ecclesiology is the sociopolitical expression of this ethics as a sign, a foretaste, and a herald of what is to come. The church is to live out a kingdom ethics in the here and now that will be for the whole world in the time to come. This ethics has a strongly economic component inasmuch as it is also a Jubilee ethics, where debts are forgiven and slaves set free, and Yoder's clearest expression of this is in his 1972 The Politics of Jesus, which is an etiological project in the exact sense that I am using the word.

The church can afford to be pacifist, in Yoder's theology, because the church is not charged with the task of setting things right. This will happen by the hand of God at some later date. Yoder is correct to point out (decades ahead of people like N.T. Wright) that the horizon of expectation, for Jesus and his followers, was not some other-worldly realm but God's action in this one, a time when God would break into history and settle the score. Justice is deferred eschatologically such that those times that turning the other cheek just gets you slapped again and the path of self-giving love leads to crucifixion are redeemed at some future date when all is revealed.

For Jesus and his followers, this meant judgment upon Israel's enemies (Rome in particular) and the vindication of the martyrs. The book of Revelation makes little sense without this assumption. They thought it was coming soon, within a generation, and while Yoder explicitly rejects a hermeneutic in which Jesus' ethical call is intelligible precisely because this was seen as so close (and because the imperial power of Rome disallowed violent resistance as a live option) he does so simply by extending the deferral period indefinitely. God, apparently, is a perpetual grad student who keeps taking classes to avoid paying back his loans.

For a time, I was able to crib a page from the eschatological playbook of my Transmillennial friends, one that says everything's already fulfilled, and read Yoder through that lens. It takes the apocalyptic bookend off one end of the shelf. In such a mashup, then, this is it; the church's nomadic journey in resistance to the powers has been concretized as the very way of Jesus. God has effectively pronounced that there is no reckoning, no guarantee, no promise that everything's going to be okay. This, take it or leave it, is the world created and called "good," and while we're welcome -- perhaps even called -- to contribute to the common good, there is no grand design or plan to make everything correspond to our idea of perfect.

In this theology, one embraces the kenotic, pacifistic way of Jesus not because everything's going to Come Out Okay in the End, but simply because it's The Right Thing to Do. This is what it means to follow Jesus. This is the way of the Cross. I lay down my claims to power, or defense, or vengeance, not secure in the belief that God is going to justify my stance in some tangible way but simply because that is my calling, regardless of what God does or doesn't do.

It's a kind of poststructuralist version of the Calvinist who insists they would praise God even if they were one of the damned. Embracing such a call is what it means to believe in the Resurrection, which becomes, in my way of thinking, less a metaphysical claim about what once happened to some dead guy and more a way of narrating the rightness of the path of the Cross. There's a lot I like about that.

But that center did not hold. Pacifism became the hammer that let me see the whole world as a nail. It quickly became an absolute, an ethical position that takes on all comers. It became a way to win, a way to embrace my skepticism while still being more right than all those other bastards who piss me off by being so right. It was my own secret gnosis, the key to everything, the one ring to rule them all. In the end, it had to be crucified. If following Jesus means anything, it means I don't get to decide what following Jesus is supposed to look like.

I haven't started packing heat or anything. I'm probably 99% pacifist; I just don't want to foreclose on that 1%. It's not because I'd cave under the carefully constructed hypothetical scenarios that opponents of pacifism like to toss at pacifists. Sure, under the right conditions, I'd probably put a cap in somebody's ass (but I'm not buying a Glock on the off chance that such a condition will arise). That's not a good reason to not be a pacifist any more than the fact that I can think of situations I might lie is a good reason to give up on honesty.

No, it's more that pacifism as an absolute isn't really pacifism. An absolute ethical stance is inevitably an ethical shortcut that presumes to know in advance the answer to a call that hasn't come yet. I'm all about preaching pacifism to the privileged; I'm a lot less comfortable preaching it to the oppressed. Not that I'm trafficking with the oppressed a whole lot, mind you. I'm not. And not that violence is very often a clear and present option for anyone, let alone the oppressed. I just can't, as easily as Yoder, dismiss the idea of the strong having responsibility for the weak, up to and including using force in defense of the weak, mostly because I don't share Yoder's metaphysical commitments.

In not believing that God is coming over the next hill to save our sorry asses, I disabuse myself of the luxury of a pacifist ethics. The grand reckoning that Jesus and Paul associated with the apocalypse never happened, and I don't have the metaphysical apparatus to either believe everything was really fulfilled in some way that we can't fully understand or that it is going to be fulfilled at some point in the indeterminate future. But I can still read this as revelatory, as apocalyptic in the sense of an unveiling; it reveals our freedom, our stark, naked, terrifying freedom. The freedom to which Sartre said we were condemned. We are free from any and all apocalyptic scripts. Free from ethical absolutes -- which does not so much free us from the ethical call as it throws us ever more deeply into that call.

This is our salvation.

I Come to the Garden Alone

2010-09-07T12:41:00.004-04:00

Labor Day happened to fall on our youngest's birthday. He turned nine. So when he asked for pancakes for breakfast (actually, his stuffed pig -- from Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Pig a Pancake, no less -- did the asking) there was no way I could refuse the request, nor did I want to. One birthday breakfast of piggy pancakes was enjoyed by everyone. Well, not exactly everyone, but I was on an alliterative streak in that last sentence.

Anyway, a bit later, when I headed upstairs to the bedroom to change out of my pajamas after a leisurely morning of web-surfing and pancake-making, the smell of the cooked pancakes had morphed on its way upstairs until it somehow smelled remarkably like my first-grade cafeteria, and this, given the evocative power of smell, instantly gave me a minor anxiety attack. This has happened before -- not just the general experience of having a smell trigger a memory or even some sort of displaced anxiety, but this specific smell of my grade-school cafeteria, and this specific sense of anxiety. Sometimes green beans do it. Do not even begin to look for some connection between green beans and pancakes. I don't have an answer for that.

It is difficult to describe everything going through my head at that moment. My initial thought was to identify the smell, quickly followed by the vague sense of anxiety that I knew was triggered by the smell simply because I hated first grade so much. Then I began to wonder if the smell was really all that similar or my brain was fixated on the memory of grade school for some other reason and the smell was just handy for that purpose, and then I wondered how I might get a blog post out of it because it would be a shame to waste such an interesting moment.

This all happened in the time it took me to find a shirt and put it on along with a pair of jeans, though if I'm honest I'll tell you that I was similarly hyper-aware of the process of finding the shirt and putting it on along with the jeans while at the same time both experiencing and seeking to stave off a minor anxiety attack that I hoped I might be able to milk for a blog post and wondering what that might really say about me, aside from the obvious conclusion that I'm slightly fucked-up but at least, most days, high functioning. Some of you get that. The rest of you probably never will, and that's okay.

I don't remember, of my own accord, why first grade was so traumatic, but the story is familiar to me, told often by my mother. The story is that I taught myself to read at age four, but the school I transferred to in first grade refused to recognize this, apparently assuming my mother's claims to that effect to be just so much maternal hyperbole. Thus I was bored, quite literally to tears, and often tried to convince my mother to let me stay home sick, which sometimes worked. This I remember vaguely. Then one day, as the story goes, I was in the cafeteria line with one of my classmates when he posed some question about the day's lunch offerings, which I answered by reading the menu board to him. This was noticed by a teacher, and thus the school "discovered" I could read. They quickly telephoned my mother, whose response was some rather more polite iteration of "No shit, Sherlock."

So there's the neat package: I hated first grade for the above reasons, and the smell of the pancakes, modulated by its trip to the bedroom, triggered the smell of my first grade cafeteria and prompted a (very minor) anxiety attack which was ameliorated by a couple of deep breaths and relocation to somewhere the smell wasn't. Neat.

Except I don't buy it.

I don't buy it because among everything else running through my head in that moment was the recognition that while I was thinking first grade, I was, inexplicably, seeing fifth grade. Moreover, according to the story, the first grade cafeteria was the scene of my triumph. Why the panic?

By fifth grade I was in my fifth elementary school: one for kindergarten, another for first grade, another for second through the first part of fourth grade, another for the latter part of fourth grade, and then fifth and sixth grades at a Catholic elementary school. We were not Catholic. Nor were we the kind of people who could afford a Catholic school. My grandparents bankrolled it, for reasons I'm still fuzzy on. Something about the school's "great reading program," which was supposed to be helpful to my siblings, particularly my sister, who was behind in almost everything but especially reading skills. I didn't need the help but got to go along for the ride.

Really, the whole elementary school kit and kaboodle was a study in social discomfort for me. I was a supremely nerdy kid, with greasy hair and dark-rimmed glasses, the kind that have become strangely fashionable only 30 years too late. In second grade, I had Mrs. Beverage -- that was really her name, though I insisted on abbreviating it "Mrs. Bev." (I had recently discovered abbreviations). I also insisted on numbering my assignments in Roman numerals (I had recently discovered those, too). I won the spelling contest and went to regionals only to make a rookie mistake on "gangrene" (I knew it instantly but there are no backsies) and get disqualified. I cried and my mom gave me peanut M&M's, which remain a comfort food to this day.

In third grade I had Mrs. Lamb, probably the sweetest little old lady ever to walk the planet. I also had an obsession with dinosaurs, and a crush of sorts on one of the fourth grade teachers, whose name, interestingly, I don't remember. On what I'm guessing was my 9th birthday, one of the other third grade teachers, Mr. Nelson, paddled me in what I'm sure was a good-natured way, but I cried and this made him feel really, really bad, which I think was the whole reason I cried. I can't be sure. I wouldn't put it past me. Mr. Nelson seemed to be intrigued by my intelligence, and sometimes brought in a Simon game (you know, the one with the pattern of lights you're supposed to match) because, apparently, all smart nerdy kids like Simon.

Fourth grade is a blur. We moved halfway through, and I only remember one incident from the new school. My mom was a college student, and a single parent with three kids, so we had no money. She made us flannel pajamas, which were invariably colors like yellow and pink with bunnies or something on them. The homemade elastic waistbands ended up looking kind of frilly. And I wore them under my corduroys like long johns in the cold winter months. You can imagine the hilarity that ensued when I slipped on the ice in the playground one day and my shirt came up and the whole world saw my pink, frilly, bunny-populated pajama bottoms peaking out of the top of my pants.

Which brings me to fifth grade -- why, after all that, is fifth grade so particularly traumatic that it is that cafeteria my mind conjures? I can't say. Is it another trick of the mind, perhaps? I know that in the fifth grade (and sixth, for that matter), we were still rather poor and I wore hand-me down clothes, as a lot of people do. But for some reason, I refused to wear jeans, and for some other reason, the only available alternative involved plaid pants, and for some reason I was totally okay with this. It was 1980 or 81. I think my favorite shirt might have been velour.

All I know is that in fifth grade I felt very alone -- not an outcast, because that implies having been part of something to be cast out of -- but an outsider. I was at a Catholic school and we were not Catholic and while I don't remember anyone making a big deal out of this, it was there. And I think this is right around the age where your sense of self really starts to come on board, and I was thereby coming more and more to terms with being an oddball. I was weird. There's no way around that. I was brainy and skinny and short and wore plaid pants. I would later learn to wear jeans, and to be funny, and to use my intelligence as both tool and weapon. I would learn to craft words, and I would discover a musical talent that opened whole worlds to me.

There are still plenty of embarrassing stories from those later years, but I gradually learned to navigate the social environments I found myself in. I learned a skill that white heterosexual males don't usually have to learn: I learned to pass. What did I learn to pass as? It's a fair question, and the only answer I have is: whatever I needed to be. (Within reason, of course; I could not convincingly pass as a jock, for instance, but that still left a wide range of options.)

While I most certainly don't want to hang everything on this, it appears at least some of it might have to do with being an introvert. "Introverts would rather be entertained by what's going on in their heads than in seeking happiness," writes Laurie Helgo in a Psychology Today article [H/T Bad Alice]. "Their big challenge is not to feel like outsiders in their own culture." She continues:

As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal—they'd rather find meaning than bliss—making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge—not to feel like misfits in their own culture.

That I'm an introvert is hardly news to me -- for awhile I was a Meyers-Briggs junkie -- but this article goes some places that I find interesting and strangely comforting. And in light of my description of the scent-induced anxiety incident above, I thought this was particularly telling: "Scientists now know that, while introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation."

No shit, Sherlock.

That doesn't tell the whole story, nor does it get me out of the recognition that I was, and am, an odd duck. At a certain level, I felt like an outsider as a kid because I was just weird, and kids are brutal, and there's no need to (irritably?) reach for a more trenchant explanation.

But I admit it kind of has me eagerly anticipating the first chance I get to blurt out: "Why don't you people just leave me the hell alone?"

Love (Divine, All Loves Excelling) on the Rocks

2010-09-04T07:57:00.008-04:00

I am not, as it turns out, going to be a Buddha-killer. Killing the Buddha thanked me for my submissions and respectfully took a pass. I think I can see why, and I'm secret pleased to have already begun collecting the string of rejections that any writer carries around as a rosary. I have every intention of, someday, collecting the best of this blog (plus some other stuff), scrubbing it behind the ears and putting one of my old party dresses on it to see if I can sell it into prostitution. Here's your one chance, Fancy -- don't let me down.

It's not time for that yet. I am, appropriately, in dissertation mode, adding a few thousand words to my draft week by week and hoping against hope that I'm saying something worthwhile -- or at least worth a nod of approval from my committee. And I keep thinking about what I might write later. I still want to write a book about evangelical praise and worship music -- I think -- and I'm kicking around an idea about apocalyptic and science fiction.

In the meantime, my church gig has finally coming to an official close. The new guy is on the scene and this is my last week. I haven't done much. I had one meeting and one rehearsal, but I didn't have to plan anything or follow up on anything or field any questions except those of the new guy trying to get his bearings. Last Sunday was my last as a worship leader (maybe ever?) and we kicked ass and took names, musically speaking. The band was on, the vocals were tight, and everyone knew what to do. I just strummed my guitar and smiled and connected with the congregation. It wasn't even bittersweet. It was just fun.

Which is not to say it wasn't ironic. These are songs I would not and do not like as listening music. Part of me likes them, and I poured myself into them in a way that would seem to defy all my protestations of unbelief, but it was also like watching Three's Company reruns: it's enjoyable, but you'd be embarrassed if the wrong people walked in.

These are also songs the content of which I often cannot affirm. And it's not even that they invoke God so much as they evince a piety I'm pretty sure is disingenuous coming from me. All the stuff I wrote in "Why Remain?" is true, don't get me wrong, but these songs gush in a way that I don't. Ever. At least not about Jesus. I have no trouble waxing theological, at least partially because I don't think we ever escape the theological, but the language of piety is one that I sing but never speak, like a tenor who can't speak a lick of Italian but can bang out a rousing rendition of "La donna è mobile."

We've thought about where to go from here, church-wise. We could go back to our old church, a much smaller congregation where we still have friends and which, by virtue of some personnel changes, might be a place worth returning to. They dismissed a senior minister who was neither a good pastor nor a good preacher. One of these can usually be overlooked in lieu of the other, but if you don't have either one you probably need a new line of work. And as strange as this may sound, I'm something of a mentor to their youth minister, who is serving as the interim preacher and might end up in the spot for good. I have, at least, been in a position to offer him counsel and advice from time to time and this seems to work better if I'm not, at the same time, a parishioner.

Ditto another minister friend for whom I'm less a counselor than comic relief and a safe place to vent. He's the one whose church thinks he's too "emergent" -- a fear that is as silly as it is unfounded to begin with -- and while I don't think being a parishioner would be an issue, my friend and his family would be the only people we know, and they're Methodists, by which I only mean that they could get shipped off to parts unknown at a moment's notice, or so it seems to me.

Though I joke that I'm a "Freelance Episcopal," and am geekily in love with the Rite I liturgy, being Episcopal is probably the sort of thing I like the idea of more than anything else. My family would hate it, and I'm not sure I'd feel deeply at home anywhere. Besides, the local parish is Rite II anyway. The infidels.

There's always just staying home, giving up the churchgoing enterprise altogether. But our kids are rather deeply invested; all but the youngest are volunteers in some capacity. Simply not showing up while our kids remain involved would invite questions I don't want to field, and a sense of betrayal I don't want to be responsible for evoking in people that I've gotten along with so well. So we'll probably just stay put.

Me and Jesus, we're on the rocks, but we're sticking it out for the kids.

Why Remain?

2010-08-23T15:42:00.006-04:00

Another guest post, this time on my friend Matthew's new blog, Slaying the Jabberwock. From "about the blog":

This blog contains stories and statements from people who, despite serious misgivings and/or significant theological departures, refuse to surrender the name "Christian" for one reason or another, or even from those who don't have serious doubts or theological disagreements, but are tired of certain groups of people holding the monopoly on Christianity. These are the stories of relationships with god. And they are all true.

I'm not yet a Buddha-killer, but I am a Jabberwock-slayer.

We Now Pause for Station Identification

2010-08-21T10:51:00.002-04:00

I've trying to think of the next essay to post, something high-minded and philosophical. Something eloquent and articulate. But nothing's coming to mind so I'm just going to get all auto-therapeutic and bitch about my life.

Actually, I like my life. A lot. My life is one of the most interesting things going. Just ask me. So I'm not really bitching. Well, maybe a little:

In response to my dream of being a Buddha-killer, Thom answered privately to suggest a piece that's not even on the blog, and Matthew made some suggestions, probably because he wants me to contribute to a collaborative blog he's set up. The rest of you suck, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. :)

No, seriously, I've taken Thom and Matthew's suggestions under advisement and submitted something -- actually a couple of somethings -- to KtB to see if they bite. I'll keep you posted, of course.

In other news, I'm about to lose my church gig, inasmuch as we've just hired someone full-time to do what I've been doing part-time. This is a bit of an anxiety-inducer at my house -- the money part, that is. The being-out part we're pretty happy about. This has been pretty good, as far as church gigs go, but it's still a church gig. There's some stuff that comes with that, especially for a guy like me. But it's not like I've been treated unfairly. I've always known that my post was interim, and while I briefly entertained the idea of being that full-time person, I knew when we decided against such a move that my days were definitively numbered. I have not been misled or mistreated, and I never intended to stay forever.

There are transition details to work out but basically it's time to close this chapter of my life and ponder what's next. And except for the loss of income, what's next seems kind of exciting. Where might I go? What might I do? I don't mean the former in the geographical sense or the latter in the vocational sense; what I mean is: what does my life look like if no part of my income is contingent upon my serving a function in the evangelical soul-winning enterprise? This feels remarkably freeing.

We'll still be going to church, and I'm sure I'll still be tapped for musical roles, though I'm going to try to keep that to a minimum, especially for now. The new guy needs to be able to cook in his own kitchen without me looking over his shoulder, and I think I need the space from evangelical religion. I want to continue to write about it, though, so I can't stray too far. There's too much good material to be had.

I think, eventually and gradually, I'd like to re-incorporate my blogger alter ego into who I am IRL, such that "Irritable Reaching" is no longer a separate persona, but just the blog of the guy I am all the time. It won't change my writing any, but it will let me lay claim to it in a way that seems more whole. On the other hand, even without being employed at a church, full disclosure -- especially in some sort of dramatic fashion that I'd hate anyway -- would be socially devastating.

So: eventually and gradually.

License to Kill

2010-08-15T18:25:00.002-04:00

I want to submit something to Killing the Buddha. In short, I want to be a Buddha-killer. So I'm looking for suggestions from my readers as to what particularly kick-ass essay I should send them. Feel free to select something recent, or something from the archives.

It's shameless. It's self-promoting. It's part and parcel of my own inescapable narcissistic script. You expect nothing less.

I'll take all suggestions under advisement, but if something emerges as the clear winner, I'll do the democratically right thing.

Apocalypse Now

2010-08-14T10:34:00.006-04:00

Thomas Merton remains one of my favorite writers ever. I'd even go so far as to say that while the seminal work of spiritual autobiography has to be Augustine's Confessions, Merton's work put it on the map for the modern world. Everything since then pays homage to the North African bishop, but is effectively a footnote to Merton.

Merton comes to mind a lot these days as Christian mysticism seems to be enjoying a kind of renaissance. Carl McColman just published The Big Book of Christian Mysticism. People are gushing over Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr -- and Lord, do they gush. He's like a tonsured rock star. Okay, he's not really tonsured; I think he's just balding. But you get the idea.

I like mystics, and I'd like to think I have a deep respect for the contemplative tradition. I'm familiar with St. John of the Cross (as in, I've actually read St. John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila to boot) and The Cloud of Unknowing. I'm no stranger to meditation or centering prayer, even if I haven't stopped to visit all that much lately. I learned to chant Psalms from an audiobook by Cynthia Borgeault. I know how to do lectio divina, and the difference between the moral, allegory, and unitive modes of reading scripture.

But -- and I say this at risk of hurting people of goodwill -- I don't buy all the hype. I don't like the implication, which is easy to get when reading contemplatives and the people who love them, that contemplation is the sine qua non of all religious life, that it is the thread that connects all religions, that it effects an unassailable unity with the Divine that constitutes the teleological end humanity itself.

Meh.

I think meditation can be good for us, and to the extent that it can help us to not be such assholes, I'm very much in favor of it. But I think it's good for us the way that practicing the piano might be good for us, or physical conditioning might be good for us. I have no doubt that it opens up new insights and makes available new experiences, but it does this somewhat in the same way that learning to appreciate wine might, or learning to like opera. Coffee drinkers know the Joy of the First Cup. Others, who have not gone through the proper initiation, do not know this joy. They are cut off from this particular gnosis. I don't want to gloss over the ways in which meditation offers access to altered brain states that differ significantly from these other practices (unless one really overdoes the wine), but the gist of things, for me, is this:

The mystical or contemplative experience is the perfectly normal outcome of a particular kind of human practice.

I know this sounds reductive, but I'm not saying that this experience is reducible simply to its corresponding brain-states. Nor am I denying -- in fact I would insist -- that this experience is and must be given meaning within the framework of some tradition or another. But at the end of the day I see no clear evidence that this necessarily involves, implies, or requires transcendence, if by this one means some kind of definitive connection to things beyond the empirical world.

I also see no reason to think that contemplation isn't something that some might specialize in just as others might specialize in music or sports. Being a good musician -- and there are some profound experiences that go along with that -- is also the perfectly normal outcome of a particular kind of human practice, and some seem to be more suited to this than others. Ditto sports and other forms of practice. Each of these, incidentally, holistically engages the body/mind complex, so no special pleading from the contemplative camp on that one.

I am not, however, anywhere near Ken Silva on this issue:

...it’s my contention that the practice of meditation in altered states of consciousness—transcendental i.e. transforming—is actually laying the foundation for a Global Religion, which will one day be headed by the Anti-Christ. That’s why I’ve been warning Christians to stay away from the growing fad of Contemplative/Centering Prayer, which is itself transcendental meditation-lite.

Um, yeah. Okay. Here's me, backing away slowly...

Actually, while Silva's paranoid fears of a "Global Religion" are part and parcel of his irrational and superstitious mythology, and I'm not sure his characterization of centering prayer as "transcendental meditation-lite" would be sensible to practitioners of either TM or centering prayer, he's not that far afield of the claims (implicit and explicit) of some contemplatives and mystics that contemplation constitutes a kind of meta-religion that can unite us all, that union with the godhead is the hidden goal of all religion. Silva agrees, after a fashion, but thinks it's of the devil. I disagree with both camps.

I'd like to suggest that knowing God, and being "partakers of the divine nature," are actually much more straightforward than herculean pursuits of the beatific vision. For, if the nature of God is the self-emptying act of creation (tzimtzum) and revealed in the self-emptying nature of Christ crucified, then we are partakers of that nature to the extent that live into that self-emptying love. I have no doubt that the contemplative arts can help us, or help those of us inclined toward them, in this process, but I am resistant to the idea that contemplation accomplishes this.

If I might be permitted a bit of indulgent prooftexting, John has Jesus telling us that eternal life is to know God (John 17:3), and Jeremiah has God saying, of one of the good kings, "He defended the cause of the poor and needy...is that not what it means to know me?" (Jer 22:16). Prooftexting notwithstanding, here's the general principle I'd like to offer: knowing God means being about the things that God is about, and if we take the teaching of Jesus seriously, as well as the prophetic tradition in which he seems to have situated himself (or in which his biographers situated him), this would seem to mean championing the poor, the widow, the alien, and the fatherless -- the "looking after widows and orphans in their distress" that James calls true religion.

Now, if that's the "Global Religion" Silva is afraid of, then I say bring on the Antichrist.

The Church's One Foundation

2010-08-13T06:33:00.005-04:00

Randall Balmer once quipped that he'd leave evangelicalism but he didn't know where to send the letter. Balmer, who has since been ordained an Episcopal priest, seems to have figured it out, but recently someone came up with a better idea: quit the whole thing (Christianity), and do it on Facebook.

Of course I'm talking about Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned (among many others), who turned from atheism to Catholicism about ten years ago and started writing books about Jesus. Judging from interviews and articles, she retains a fairly orthodox view of the Son of God but thinks the church sucks (vampire pun unintended) and wants nothing to do with it. Any part of it. Her announcement has launched a media -- and social media -- firestorm that has been interesting to watch.

I can't say that I blame her, either for her announcement or for making it on Facebook. As to the former, she has good reasons for wanting to distance herself, and although quitting Christianity, even while clinging to Jesus, is not particularly unique or novel, it's certainly her prerogative. As to the latter, it seems to have been a savvy move; her Facebook site, 70k strong to begin with, jumped to 90k, and while I'm not one to doubt her sincerity, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and she does have to sell books. She also notes that making the announcement in a public forum has provided both the incentive and the means to quote her accurately. That -- how does one say? -- doesn't suck.

What surprises me (sort of) is the galvanizing effect she seems to have had. Reactions tend to be polar, with some anathematizing Rice, or ridiculing her, and others lionizing her and praising her bravery. Facebook posts and blogs about the development attract dozens, even hundreds, of emotionally charged comments. It seems pretty easy to connect the dots to a zeitgeist in which people are calling themselves "Jesus followers" and/or saying they're "spiritual but not religious."

I find such claims both fascinating and a little perplexing. Some of this has to do with my being engaged in the academic study of religion, an occupational hazard of which is the tendency to see religion in everything. It's also connected to my postsecularist bent, which insists that the human subject is ipso facto, a religious subject. It's also related to my more cynical observation that if one wants to find a truly irreligious person, one is more likely to find such a person not in the atheism section of the local bookstore but casually gracing the pew of the nearest church.

But even aside from all those things that mark my personal bias, these claims are a bit like those of someone running for office saying they're not a politician. The underlying meaning is something along the lines of "I'm not like those other people," but taken at face value the claims are a bit ridiculous. A person running for office is, unavoidably (and pretty much by definition) a politician. The idea that the spiritual and the religious are distinct categories and that one can choose to be one or the other is a uniquely modern luxury. Someone who follows Jesus is -- again, by definition -- a Christian, regardless of what he or she might think of particular expressions of Christianity. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you feel compelled to do something with Jesus, regardless of what that might be, you have not in any meaningful way escaped the orbit of Christianity. David Henson and Thom Stark both express this well.

This, then, is my version of Big Tent Christianity: the idea that we remain part of the larger theological conversation for at least as long as we have something to say about Jesus. Anne Rice is more than welcome to say she quits, to grab some communion wine and jump on the ecclesiastical version of an inflatable slide. That gesture means something, and it definitely seems to be doing some kind of work. But it's doing that work inside that big tent. Likewise, the claim to be spiritual and not religious means something, but the force of that meaning comes precisely from its being a religious claim.

So, if you need to distance yourself, do it. If you need people to know you're not like those other people, there are ways to accomplish that, and I can't tell you which of them is right for you. Join a house church. Be "emergent." Say you're quitting Christianity. Be a Jesus-follower, or a "follower of God in the way of Jesus." Call yourself "postchristian." Say you're "spiritual but not religious." Put "Jesus" down as your religious affiliation. Call yourself a heretic. Embrace theological non-realism. De-bunk everything orthodox Christianity believes about Jesus. Go on a life-long quest to systematically disbelieve each of the 5 fundamentals. Do what you have to do.

But you might as well close that tent flap. You're not going anywhere.

Guest blog on Unorthodoxology

2010-08-05T17:14:00.001-04:00

David Henson has invited a series of guest bloggers to write on fatherhood and spirituality over on his blog, and believe it or not, I had something to say. Check out the rest of the series too. I'm honored to be a part of it.

Top Ten Reasons I'm Not Emergent

2010-07-26T05:29:00.005-04:00

10. I can't grow facial hair.

9. I don't actually like Guinness.

8. I don't see the point in pretending I'm not liberal.

7. I've never posted a video to YouTube.

6. I've never liked Johnny Cash

5. I'm sure as hell not going to drink PBR just so I can be "ironic."

4. I don't have a fixed-gear bicycle and don't know why I'd want one.

3. I have no idea what Sufjan Stevens even sounds like.

2. I last updated my Twitter feed two months ago.

1. I actually know what deconstruction is.

[Disclaimer: I don't have any significant beef with the emerging church, which seems to be a combination of self-absorbed hipsters and people asking important questions. Sometimes these are the same people.]

Be Not Afraid

2010-07-24T07:00:00.006-04:00

I hear the word "scary" a lot in political conversations; Obama is not simply someone with whom my conservative friends have significant political disagreements; he's "scary." Sarah Palin is not just laughably naive and delusional; she's "scary." The Obama administration's agenda is not some half-assed attempt to move us closer to European democracy hopelessly hamstrung by partisan politics; it's "scary." The Tea Party is not just a bunch of right-wing wackos getting way too much media attention; they're "scary." Oh wait -- I'll concede this one. People making a big show about how they have guns and threatening to use them against their political opponents are, in fact, scary.

This taps into some kind of apocalyptic zeitgeist in which we are headed inexorably toward oblivion. I remember seeing a book that predicted that Bush would find a way to get elected for a third term and set up a fascist dictatorship. Obama is marching us toward socialist totalitarianism. Muslims are going to take over the world and make us all wear burqas. Fundamentalist Christians are going to take over the world (or just the Texas school board) and take science back to the Dark Ages. Mexicans are going to come streaming across the border and, um, get jobs or something. Al Gore is going to take over the world and make us all drive hybrids.

The litany is as varied as it is hysterical: Our way of life is at stake. Our cultural values are at stake. Someone, somewhere, is making a mockery of everything that made this country great. America is no longer the Christian nation it used to be. America is no longer the secular nation it used be. [Both of those are, to some extent, true, but I digress.] The arm of American imperialism is reaching farther and farther. The American empire is in decline. Technology is getting out of control. The environment is getting out of control. We're too smart for our own good. We're getting dumber. Kids aren't keeping up with technology, and won't be competitive in the global market. Kids are too reliant on technology and can't read any more. And so on.

All of these things -- some of them more connected to reality than others -- are "scary."

Maybe it's always been this way. Maybe we've always demonized the opposition in the strongest possible terms. Maybe we just have this tendency to throw everything onto an apocalyptic screen. I call this "archetypal projection": some things are so important to us that we have to talk about them in terms of life and death, of heaven and hell, of impending judgment and The End of the World As We Know It. I don't mean to be glib. Bad things -- scary things -- can and do happen. A post-capitalist society might also be a post-collapse society. A terrorist cell might just get a nuke and use it. Somebody might actually put Sarah Palin in charge of something important. But as I hope my (very ad hoc) list indicates, not all of these "scary" scenarios can be true at the same time.

One of my Facebook friends is looking for a flagpole, or materials to make one. This is a man whose "about me" section used to read "Only two people have ever offered to die for you -- Jesus Christ and the American soldier," so there's no doubt he needs the flagpole to show his patriotic colors. I'm a little surprised he doesn't already have one. And I think he's doing it because he's scared, because he feels there's a great spiritual battle going on for the soul of the nation. Old Glory becomes an ebenezer.

I can relate to my friend on a certain level, I think (or would like to think) but really nationalism makes me uncomfortable. Were I of a more fideistic bent, I might call it a form of idolatry, and at one point I did. I suppose even now I might find that language useful, even if I don't connect the dots the same way I used to. I still can't bring myself to say the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the National Anthem. To direct one's attention to an object, make a special gesture, and say special words or sing a special song seems an awful lot like worship. I like to keep the list of things I consciously worship very small, and I'm working on the list of things I unconsciously worship. A piece of colored cloth doesn't make the cut.

Neither, I'm afraid, does "the republic for which it stands." I don't hate America. I am neither proud to be American nor ashamed, simply because I had nothing to do with being an American. I am American by the accident of birth. I happen to have been born in a particular time and a particular place and I don't see why I should have rights that others don't simply by virtue of that fact. Am I supposed to be proud to be lucky?

Add to that fact the circumstance of having been born white, and male, and now we can add to that constellation of rights a set of privileges I'm only vaguely aware of. Should I be proud of that as well? I'm not sure Jewish men ever really prayed "Lord, thank you that you did not make me a Gentile, a dog, or a woman," but that's what this is starting to sound like. I'll pass.

At any rate, it recently struck me: isn't there some point at which the philosophical musings of a handful of disaffected white middle class British colonials who happened to win a war in the late 18th century cease to be relevant to our present condition? Isn't there a point at which the vagaries and vicissitudes of our collective social life so far exceed the Founding Fathers' capacity for foresight that the system itself is hopelessly stretched at the seams?

What would that look like? Would it look like a two-party system so ideologically bifurcated that that both sides see the other as a harbinger of the apocalypse (and at least one side seems hell-bent on inaugurating it)? Would it look like our being so far removed from our history as marauders, conquistadors, and squatters that we become hypersensitive to immigration and religious alterity? Would it look like a world in which everything is "scary?"

I don't know. My biggest beef, I guess, with this kind of hyperbolic language -- besides my personal aversion to drama -- is that it leaves us of bereft of a language to describe things that are genuinely devastating, like the BP oil spill. On one hand, this is simply an incredible travesty for which have a hard finding the appropriate words. There's a whole world -- a world once teeming with life and livelihood -- now gone. Fixing it is not available to us. All we can muster is some kind of meager damage control. It's not the End of the World As We Know It, but it is the end of a world.

We lack the language to describe it because we've cheapened our stronger language by using it to describe people whose politics we don't like. But we also lack the language to describe it partially because we know, somehow, that life will go on. This won't significantly change policy. It won't cause us to re-think our relationship to oil so much as it will encourage us to be more careful, like the lung cancer patient who decides to cut down to a pack a day.

In a world where everything's "scary," nothing scares us.

The Invisible Hand is Giving Us the Finger, part 2

2010-07-03T06:33:00.006-04:00

[See part 1.]

There's more to the story than just capitalism, but I don't want to venture too far afield. There are any number of anti-capitalist movements one might be a part of, and I think these are necessary, but I'm not much of a joiner. Most of these end up being some kind of anarchism or socialism. I am not using those designations dismissively; I mean them merely as descriptors -- these are the sites of anti-capitalist critique. I don't mean, by "anarchism," people who have an affinity for spray paint and Malatov cocktails (or the teenager who buys an anarchist T-shirt at Hot Topic), nor by "socialism" do I mean the failed attempts to bypass capitalism by people who can't read German.

For the socialist -- and I'm painting with a terribly broad brush -- the issue is primarily economic -- but addressing the economic issue will take a major overhaul of the structures of society, especially given the rise of neoliberalism (note that this designation covers all US fiscal policy from c. 1980 onward, regardless of which party is in power, and that "neoliberal" is not the opposite of "neoconservative"; neocons are just neolibs who like to bomb people).

The anarchist critique is more ambitious, calling into the question at least the state (in classical anarchism -- Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin), but often extending to all structures of domination up to and including civilization itself (anarcho-primitivism -- Zerzan, Perlman, Watson). In most cases they are not anti-society or anti-organization; they see significant problems with the kinds of society and organization we've attempted thus far, and seek forms of social organization that are not oppressive, coercive, or hierarchical. (Having said that: yes, there are anarchists who just want to burn everything down. They're honestly not that interesting, though I suppose they could be fun at parties.)

Anarchism and socialism, then, are both radical, not in the colloquial sense of "extreme" or "crazy" but in the etymological sense of the word which means get to the root of something. Neither is content to simply prune capitalism and trim its branches; they want to uproot it and replace it with something else. Anarchists typically want to replace it with considerably less at least in terms of governing apparatus (or they want to uproot more than just capitalism), but it's difficult to find an articulation of what comes next (from any camp) that doesn't sound a little crazy. I think this is okay. In fact, I'd say the smart money is on not claiming to know exactly what comes next. This isn't to say we don't need some ideas, but simply to admit that our attempts to predict are going to fall short. We need people experimenting, exploring the possibilities.

I believe our best future is a post-capitalist future, and I'm looking for ways to contribute to that future that don't feel forced, contrived, or naive. Cribbing a bit from Steve McIntosh, let me point out that the broad arc of human social history is toward larger, and farther-reaching, structures, from tribes to warrior fiefdoms to kingdoms to nations to nation-states to a kind of postnational global capitalism and increasing tendencies toward collaborative governance (the EU, etc.). I'm not saying these stages are inevitable or predetermined but they have happened, and there seems to be a kind of ratchet dynamic; it's hard to go back.

Moreover, each stage breeds its own resistance as it creates new kinds of oppression regardless of the extent to which it answered some of the problems of the earlier stages. In other words, each click of the ratchet is neither wholly good (as progressivists would have it) nor wholly bad (as primitivists and other reactionaries might have it). For each step of the way, there is a price to be paid, and we're never going to reach a point where there is no price (as utopian visions would have it).

This is a dialectical process, and let me suggest that it is also fractal, happening all the time at every level of human organization. These larger shifts are different in degree but not in kind. What I'm suggesting, however, is not a predetermined entelechy or teleology, but an undetermined -- and thus risky -- unfolding. Something, we know not what, is calling us, and the call is never answered or completed or fulfilled.

At least, you know, until the sun goes supernova or whatever.

McIntosh's work suggests that the next logical step is global governance, the bugaboo of many a Christian/conservative conspiracy theory (I specify Christian only because the "one world order" is so commonly a part of paranoid end-times scenarios), and the scope of capitalist ideology in our day suggests that the only salient response is going to have to be global in kind. I think this will include, and have a place for, dumpster divers and off-the-grid communes, but it won't be carried by them -- certainly not exclusively.

What I'm saying, as kindly as I can, is that it won't be the anarchists. I like them. I think we need them. That sounds condescending; it says "We need you, but not for the reason you think, and toward a purpose with which you don't completely agree." Anarchists are good at local direct action and the construction of alternative communities. Our post-capitalist future will need to learn from that. Socialists are good at imagining the economic and political infrastructure necessary to realize a post-capitalist society on a global scale. We need that, too.

We also need the technological infrastructure bequeathed to us by global capitalism. The kind of large-scale-but-grassroots- organization necessary to pull off this next step won't happen without that technology, which itself probably wouldn't have existed without capitalist excess.

Capitalism, like anything else, contains within it the seeds of its own deconstruction. This is something my friend Thom Stark pointed out to me, though he shouldn't be blamed for anything else I'm saying here. Part of what this means is that the post-capitalist future, whatever it might actually look like, won't come to us until we're ready. But, lest we capitulate to an unhelpful eschatological helplessness, it won't come to us until we're prepared -- and I mean this in the sense of a prepared salad, or a prepared piano. Something needs to be done before we're ready. There's work to do, and it takes various and varied forms.

As each new horizon comes to us, what emerges (I am loathe to use this word, but it is the best one) is neither a recapitulation of the status quo that the establishment seeks to protect nor precisely what any of the forms of resistance are fighting for, but something new that is contingent upon the old, answering some of the old problems while creating new problems that will be addressed by future yet to come (and which, in a very Derridean sense, never fully arrives).

If I had to guess, I'd say that a post-capitalist future will look more like democratic socialism than anything else we might think of, but it won't be, exactly, any particular democratic socialism being articulated now. The future comes to us as a gift, and is not going to rubber-stamp anybody's pet project. Nor does it come with a guarantee. It will not be utopia. It will not be the "end of history." It will be a next step, and a necessary next step.

It will be risky -- but it is worth our imagination.

The Invisible Hand is Giving Us the Finger

2010-06-29T05:55:00.007-04:00

I'm not a big fan of capitalism -- not because it doesn't work, but because it works marvelously for a small group of people, works passably for a larger group of people, and completely screws everybody else. The legacy of colonialism and exploitation in the West means that we've been able to gank the system so that the first two groups are overrepresented in our sample. Capitalist nations are prosperous not because capitalism works universally but because we've been able to make capitalism work in our favor at the expense of others.

Poverty is a very real problem, even in America, but it's easy to point to places in the world that are much worse and say "See? Our way is better!" -- only because we've been able to essentially offshore the lower strata. The capitalist system demands a continuum of relative wealth, and our ability over the past couple of centuries to make sure that the bottom of the heap exists somewhere else is hardly a credit to the system itself which -- in case this isn't obvious -- is structurally unjust. The figure of wealth is only meaningful to us against a ground of poverty.

Defenders of capitalism will point out that wealth is not a zero-sum game, and they're right; however, this defense conveniently ignores the nature of market economies, especially with floating point currency. Wealth is relative, and this requires winners and losers. For some to be rich, others must be poor as a point of comparison. "A rising tide lifts all boats," but this ignores the people slaving away at the bottom of the boats, languishing below the water line regardless of how high the tide might be. The implicit promise -- that allowing some to be ridiculously wealthy is good for all of us -- has failed to materialize. Trickle down, my ass.

Capitalism purports to be a meritocracy. It is supposed to favor the industrious, the virtuous, the strong. It is the grotesque love-child of Nietzsche and (Weber's) Calvin in which the Übermenschen are characterized by the Protestant work ethic. But that's not what happens. Capitalism favors those who already have capital, or who are either lucky or smart enough to work the system to get it. By way of a very simple example, I can inherit a million dollars, invest it at 10 percent, and make six figures by doing nothing. My money "works" for me. I do not have to be virtuous, industrious, or even very smart. And the issue here is not inheritance, it's that I can make money just by having money.

Or I can be hard-working and intelligent, but born into poverty and not manage to be one of the fortunate Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. How many kids have to not make it out of the projects for us to celebrate the one kid who does? It is precisely because such a one is an exception that the story is compelling to us. More to the point, perhaps: someone can work in finance, creating new ways for people with money to get more money simply by having money and make ten or even a hundred times what someone with comparable intelligence and self-motivation might make teaching first graders how to read. Capitalism makes these scenarios possible. It guarantees that such scenarios are possible. Attempts to cover this up or explain this away are just so much capitalist theodicy.

Inasmuch as capitalism is the economic sea we're swimming in, I don't fault people, nor do I feel guilty myself, for treading water or even paddling a little bit. We're all complicit -- all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so to speak -- and one of the salient features of global capitalism is that there is effectively no outside. Everything's for sale, and even resistance is commodified. Some people's response is to duck below the radar as much as possible, to live in the negative space of empire. Some of them have books you can buy on Amazon. I'm not saying they're hypocrites; I'm just pointing out that there is no outside. No matter how much you might be able to go off the grid personally, there's something about the movement you're a part of, or what you stand for, that's eventually going to make someone some money.

[See part 2.]

Jesus Loves the Little Children (and I'm trying)

2010-06-27T13:35:00.014-04:00

It's VBS week at the church, and VBS is a major production here.

Major. Production.

And I hate it. I hate the cheesy music, and the cheesy dramas, and the costumes. I hate the way everything else gets put on hold so we can have cheesy music and dramas for (mostly) middle-class white kids, many of whom already belong to another church. I hate the disruption of my writing schedule and the expectation that I'm just as excited as everyone else.

Needless to say, I'm nursing a bit of a bad attitude about the whole thing and I'm trying (mostly successfully) not to let that show. It's just one of those major ruptures in my attempt to pass as an evangelical, and I think I hate it, at least partially, because it makes me mindful of that gap. If I'm honest, it exposes my hypocrisy. I think VBS is a waste of time and resources. I think it's hopelessly hokey and I'm kind of embarrassed to be a part of it, yet somehow I justify my involvement with adult version we call church.

I sometimes dream of an exit strategy from evangelicalism, but that might not happen, inasmuch as we're embedded in this milieu. My kids love church -- hell, they even love VBS. My assumption is that it is annoying but harmless. Where I struggle is with the possibility that we're trapped in a cycle of enabling, perpetuating a kind of complacency. Kids are coming to Jesus! And we're even helping out some poor people! And this, of course, is the best we can do until Jesus comes back.

I don't believe that at all. I don't believe it's the best we can do, though I'm not doing any more than that myself, and I don't think Jesus is coming back to fix things. We fail to fully address the tragedy of the human condition because we have an out. This is bogus. I know this to be bogus. And I prop it up with my involvement.

I'm torn between the cynicism of thinking the whole schtick is just a waste of time because in the end we just die and the cynicism of thinking people might as well cling to their illusions -- I just provide the soundtrack. I feel like I'm part of the Titanic band, playing "Nearer My God to Thee" as the ship sank. Throw in a depressive episode that I refused to really recognize until it was over and it's been a pretty bad week. Fortunately, I'm feeling better but that doesn't make the other stuff go away.

I can survive by pretending that theology doesn't matter. That our complicity in a socioeconomic system that seems to be perfectly designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while guaranteeing poverty for many (with a nice, soft, squishy, complacent middle holding things together) doesn't matter. If I spin things to myself the right way (and of course I always know I'm spinning; life was easier, if more dangerous, when all of my projects of self-delusion were subconscious), I'm just participating in other peoples' meaning-making. I can be okay with that. Except I have limits. And I'm at least smart enough to recognize that if all I ever do is help people (including myself) feel okay about where they're already at, I'm perpetuating a status quo I claim to hate.

I confess I'm a bit smitten with the theological musings of Slavoj Žižek. Žižek says some stuff that is batshit crazy, and I think he says it for precisely that reason. He's not really a theologian in any kind of confessional sense (actually he's an atheist) but a philosopher -- and he's very, very odd. Hard to watch on video odd. Not sure I ever want to meet him in person odd. But the overall shape of his theology I find fascinating. John D. Caputo sums it up this way:

Following Hegel, Žižek denies the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity, between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world. For him, the absolute in itself (Father) negates itself in order to empty itself without remainder into the world (Son), of which the Christ is a singular sign, constituting a kind of first death or kenotic emptying of the Father/God. That negation is in turn negated in the Crucifixion, in which nothing less than the God(-man) himself dies, which allows the emergence of the collective "spirit". The supreme moment of dark lucidity is Jesus's lament "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point, the horizon is wiped out, and the cold black truth is exposed that no one (save ourselves) is coming over the horizon to save us, that we are sustained by no overarching cosmic support. We are on our own. Just as in psychoanalysis, Žižek says elsewhere, the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no "Big Other" (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan's symbolic order or what Derrida called the "transcendental signifier"). [From Caputo's review of The Monstrosity of Christ.]

I was working toward something like this a couple of years ago here. I might temper Žižek with Caputo's own "weakness theology," and maybe scoop up some Philip Clayton along the way. I'd also toss in the Jewish mystical concept of Tzimtzum -- the idea that creation took place through God's contraction of Godself, a primordial divine kenosis at the very heart of creation.

Thus, the trajectory of self-emptying, from Incarnation to the Cross, is revelatory, not of a divine plan in which everything comes out okay, but of the Void itself. The Christ-event reveals to us the true nature of God as Emptiness, all the way down. [The thud you just heard was Mike Morrell falling over as he reads this. Pay it no mind.] Caputo argues that God is not a being who does things, but the name that we give to "a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet."

Where does that leave us? Same place we've always been: experimenting with ways to organize ourselves, trying to find something that works for all of us. It's a problem that is not so much awaiting a final solution as it is generative of possibilities, all of them provisional, some better in a given time and place than others. What we're doing now is not working, and it doesn't matter who's in charge. I no longer have the luxury of believing it's magically going to get better someday, and I certainly don't think it's going to get better by singing love songs to Jesus.

But I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do that would be genuine. More to the point, I don't know what to do that doesn't feel like a futile Quixotic attempt to find the Answer. I don't know what to do that isn't in danger of becoming an idol to itself, or just another thing that I used to believe in.

So This Is Blogging...

2010-06-10T16:36:00.008-04:00

I got my bachelor's at a pretty conservative Bible college, which probably explains a lot, including why there's a kind of secret bond among those of us who attended and are now (let's just say) in a different place. Several of these people read this blog -- or they used to, before I fell off the face of the earth.

I can't remember if chapel was mandatory or just regulated by peer pressure. It seems to me it was mandatory, at least in theory. Each semester we got half a credit of "Christian service," part of which was being involved in some sort of ministry, or at least helping little old ladies cross the street, and part of which was chapel attendance. Lord knows what kind of mischief we might have gotten into if we didn't get our assess to chapel twice a week.

Still, there are always people who played the system. For every rule in the student handbook, there were at least three people willing to help you break it. Depending on the rule, there might even be people willing to sell you the means -- or be the means. For other rules, there were loopholes to exploit.

At any rate, some people got reputations as chapel-skippersl. I was always too chicken, but there was a guy on my floor, an upperclassman, who never went to chapel. He was a fun guy, actually, who liked Rush (the band, not Limbaugh), was a decent guitarist, and seemed like he'd be a frat guy if he went to a state college. He was constantly joking with the younger guys on the dorm floor in a big-brother kind of way, or maybe in the your-best-friend's-big-brother-whom-your-mom-thought-was-a-bad-influence kind of way, or somewhere in between. I'm pretty sure he drank, and I'm pretty sure there were goings-on with some of the coeds. He preached on the weekends.

I don't know that his lack of attendance ever caught up with him in a meaningful way. It was widely known on campus that he never went, but we never got wind of any kind of repercussions for that. And then it came time for his senior sermon. Graduating preaching majors either had to give a senior sermon or they had the opportunity to do so, I'm not sure which. Either way, most of them did, and our chapel-skipping friend was no exception. He showed up dressed nicely in a suit most of us had never seen. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything but shorts and an AC/DC t-shirt.

He stepped up to the pulpit, looked around the room with a grin that would have put Zaphod Beeblebrox to shame, and said:

"So this is chapel..."

Love That Will Not Let Me Go

2010-03-31T06:32:00.006-04:00

I'm sure nobody's noticed, but I gave up arguing with people on the internet for Lent. I didn't do it so much for the season itself (which has nevertheless brought forth its own lessons) but because I didn't like what I was becoming: angry, bitter, cynical. I once heard Brian McLaren suggest that the burning question is no longer "If you die tonight, do you know where you'll spend eternity?" so much as "If you live another 30 years, what kind of person will you be?" I sometimes joke that I want to be a curmudgeon when I grow up, and while there really is part of me that looks forward to reaching an age where I can turn down my filter settings and get away with it, there's also a part of me that would like to be known and remembered in my later years for, well, wisdom. Depth of character. Integrity.

This is difficult at least in part because I'm so fickle. I waffle. I've gone back and forth on so many things that to take a stand in any direction can be dismissed as me crying "wolf." I'm either refreshingly transparent or I've shot all my credibility to hell. You pick. If I've come to know a certain freedom by no longer trying to be a particular kind of religious person, it's becoming clear that fashioning myself into a particular kind of skeptic isn't doing the trick either.

It's probably obvious to everyone but me that I am probably never going to escape evangelicalism, and I'm certainly never going to escape Christianity. I used to joke that I was a Christian because God won't let me be a Buddhist. These days I'm likely to to joke that I'm a Christian because God won't let me be an atheist. God's not going to let me be Episcopalian, either, and it might be worth keeping God around just so I can be pissed about that.

Really, though, I need resources to help me get over myself. I need a way to bridge or contexualize or make sense of the tension between my interior life, which is deeply skeptical and characterized by seeking to stare unflinchingly into the Abyss, and my outer life, which bears the indelible marks of being forged in Christian community. It would seem that I have the mind of an atheist but the heart of an evangelical. Would this make more sense -- at least to me, if not to others -- if I admitted that I also have the soul of a mystic?

In some ways this is where my troubles started. Not quite twenty years ago, bored with what I knew as faith, I stumbled across Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. It served as the shot in the arm I was looking for, in spite of the fact that I was probably getting into for a lot of the wrong reasons. I wanted to be righteous. I wanted to be right. I wanted some way of feeling "in the know." The spiritual disciplines were my little gnostic secret. But I was also motivated out of an earnest searching. I felt like I was missing something, and Foster's famous tome spoke to that something.

From there I discovered Thomas Merton, and someone who noticed my interest in monasticism turned me on to Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk. This may have been the beginning of the end. It began a long-standing fascination with monks (which I still have), but it also inspired a prayerful longing: I wanted a faith more like Norris's, a faith that seemed so much larger than mine at the time. I wanted the depth of Merton. I wanted to write like both of them combined. I loved the first-person perspectives on a dark and murky faith, framed by the rhythms of liturgy and populated with saints.

I started dabbling in centering prayer, in lectio divina. I listened to Cynthia Bourgeault teaching about chanting the Psalms. I read monastic literature and every kind of spiritual memoir I could get my hands on. I cultivated silence and solitude. I was probably an unbearable asshole about it, but we're all works in progress, right? My point, I think, is that we're always a kind of mixed bag of earnestness and self-aggrandizement. The line between the things we legitimately do to be better people and those we do simply in order to convince ourselves -- or others -- that we are those better people is hopelessly fuzzy, and sometimes doesn't exist at all.

Regardless, however, the practices we cultivate us and the habits we form have an effect on us, whether this happens out of the right kind of intentionality or any intentionality at all. These things had an effect on me, partially (I like to think) in developing greater patience and a sensitivity to spiritual rhythms, but they also plunged me headlong into my own existential doubts. They pointed to a deep undercurrent that helped to clear away some of the bric-a-brac and deconstruct some of the binaries on which my thinking was based. And this was helpful, until this undercurrent folded back on itself and left me suspended over the Void. I don't know how else to explain that.

I didn't handle that well. I haven't handled it well. Probably I'm not handling it well. Mostly I just set up camp in the Abyss, so I can bitch about how lonely it is. I've tried, a couple of times, to out myself as an atheist, but it's never really taken, at partially because my life keeps taking me places where that doesn't play. A real, honest-to-God atheist (sorry) doesn't have the option to say they feel called to anything, let alone playing music in church. That just doesn't work. It comes down to me not wanting to identify as an atheist because I'm such an embarrassment to atheists. It's that inner/outer thing; I can reach a place of unbelief in my head but the rest of my life, having not gotten the memo, trundles along in the habits of faith.

I also stepped away from the contemplative life, because while I'm into things like silence and liturgical rhythms and surrendering to life's lessons (which often means submitting to others) and so forth, I completely suck at the core practices like meditation and prayer.

Completely. Suck.

I'm awful. The concept of spiritual practice can be legitimately expanded to cover things like writing and music, but still, there's the suckage. I got tired of trying to pray more, and tired of feeling guilty for failing at it, and tired of trying to be something that did not, and does not, feel right. I'm not a meditator. I might be meditative from time to time, but anyone can tell you that's not the same. It's like the difference between being a sprinter and occasionally seeing the need to run fast.

At the same time, I am forced to recognize a great cloud of witnesses, from within the Christian tradition and outside of it, who have stared into the Abyss and come through the experience without going mad (Nietzsche seems to have not handled it well, if you get my drift). Even Mother Theresa confessed deep, lingering doubts and a profound sense of God's absence and yet continued her work. For me, it's like I've made this deal with God where I don't actually have to believe in God as long as I keep doing the work God has for me to do. That may not make sense to you, but I'll bet a buck-fifty I'm not the only one.

So -- yeah. I'm not sure where that leaves me. I'm not really a mystic, and I have no intention of being one. I'm not seeking enlightenment or union with the Godhead or the beatific vision. And yet if I invoke Fowler's stages of faith, or Spiral Dynamics (based on the work of Clare Graves and later appropriated by Ken Wilber) I can locate myself somewhere farther along the continuum and yet called to remain with my evangelical brothers and sisters to help them along their paths.

This sounds haughty, perhaps -- arrogant and self-congratulatory -- and I have consistently rejected such a narration for exactly that reason, but it's also deeply humbling inasmuch as I don't get to say what anyone else's path actually is. It means listening, and being accountable to others. It means mutual submission. It means surrendering to a process that I don't fully understand. It means cultivating a kind of trust that necessitates self-emptying.

It means a constellation of things, and if you look just right, maybe squint a little bit, you can make out a shape in that constellation: faith.

Break Thou the Bread of Life

2010-03-14T05:27:00.009-04:00

I forgot the post-it note with the lot number on it. 145, I thought, but I wasn't seeing any lot 145. What I saw was almost another world, a different universe tucked away off the side street I took to get here. The trailers were in various states of disrepair. So were the cars. So were the people, to be perfectly honest. Before anyone goes on a long diatribe about stereotyping: yes, there are some nice trailer parks. This wasn't one of them.

Earlier in the week my wife had been to a tense meeting of our homeschool group. This was a regular business meeting, but on the docket was a discussion of the group's Statement of Faith. The Statement is pretty standard fare -- an explicit declaration of Trinitarian theology, penal substitutionary atonement, and an immanent, literal return of Christ. I forget if it also explicitly mentions scriptural inerrancy, but it might. Over the past couple of years one of the board members has been faced with people who either wanted to join the group but couldn't sign the statement of faith, or who (like my wife) signed the statement but had reservations about its theology, and/or whose husbands (like me) wouldn't sign it at all. Some were wondering if it could be made more inclusive, more ecumenical.

One of the families we've met through the homeschool group is that of a local Free Methodist minister. He's an interesting guy. He's a little younger than I am, with a fondness for tractors and the Cappadocian Fathers. He's bright, but he's at that level of bright where he doesn't always know what it is that his brightness is latching onto. It's like he sees certain threads but there's a layer that's unavailable to him that might freak him out if he saw it for what it is. Maybe he will someday, maybe he won't. I don't know.

He's been getting some flak from an element in his church concerned that he's going "Emergent." He's not, particularly -- he's more paleo-orthodox than anything -- but he's young and bright and has a goatee and wants to draw from a deeper well than the 19th-century evangelicalism that frames his tradition, and this is enough to engender suspicion among a group of people who have been reading too much John MacArthur.

He had his own tense meeting earlier in the week in which some of these issues were aired. I don't know exactly how his meeting went, but my wife told me about the homeschool meeting: several of the homeschool moms on the preserve-the-Statement side of the fence brought their husbands -- or their husbands insisted on coming along -- and the men came out swinging. If you don't like the group's Statement of Faith, they said, get your own group. They managed to connect their particular take on the Christian faith (as exemplified by the Statement) with everything from the Bible itself (natch) to Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Everyone else, by contrast, was made to feel like second-class citizens of God's Kingdom, and while the defenders of orthodoxy would almost certainly say that's not what they meant, a number of people -- including several with no particular qualms about the statement itself -- left the meeting feeling brutally judged, even ostracized. "Narrow is the way and few are those who find it" was a frequent refrain, as if Jesus had in mind an intellectual commitment to 19th-century revivalist evangelicalism when he said that. But they got their way; the vote that night confirmed the Statement of Faith as written.

I still wasn't seeing 145 so I called for directions. As it turns out, I had both misremembered the lot number (it was really 135) and gone in the wrong entrance to the park. A few turns brought me around to the right place and I found the trailer, a nondescript brown one about halfway down the street. I felt out of place. And by "out of place" I don't mean snobbery but a variant of guilt. My car, a cheap import, was nevertheless nicer than anything around it. I felt certain that my clothes marked me as just another white liberal.

Probably I was overthinking things. I do that. Our church has a bit of history with this trailer park, or at least we're cultivating it. We run the largest mobile food pantry in the state, and someone noticed that a lot of the families that come to the food pantry had addresses in this particular trailer park, so they checked it out and saw that the people there needed a lot of help. They couldn't afford basic repairs and upkeep on the homes, and it showed. We began scheduling workdays to assess homes and effect repairs. We dealt patiently with some of our volunteers and some general naysayers who wondered why we were bothering to help people who probably (in the mind of the naysayers) wouldn't appreciate it. We pitched the need to put some money and sweat equity where our social-justice-leaning mouths were.

On one hand, this seems paternalistic, a bunch of middle-class white people salving their consciences and assuaging their latent guilt over the inequities of capitalist society. On the other hand, people who really need food get real food. A family that really needed new steps for their trailer really got them. Dozens of trailers that really needed to be winterized got real plastic on their windows to keep out the real cold. Another family basically got a new bathroom, down to the floorboards (which were rotting). All of this is done without expectation. We don't do it so they feel obligated to listen to us talk about Jesus. We don't do it so they'll come to church. We do it because it's there to be done, and I can get behind that.

I wasn't there to work, however. I was there to buy tamales. One of the park residents is a Mexican woman who supports her family by selling tamales. I'm no tamale connoisseur, but these are fantastic. She includes a homemade salsa verde that will melt your face off. It's wonderful. I knock and she comes to the door, tamales in hand. I fumble for my money. I had picked up some cash to give our daughter for a weekend youth trip and some cash to pay for tamales and put the cash in different pockets. Then I promptly forgot which was which and ended up fishing through my pockets and awkwardly flashing cash in front of woman a selling tamales to scrape by. For some reason I'm very self-conscious about this.

I get home with the tamales along with some taco fixings and a six-pack of Corona (Thom Stark makes fun of me for drinking Corona, but it's what I like). My wife asks me about the beer: "You bought beer? Don't you have any?"

"No," I say confessionally, "I drank it." (It wasn't Corona anyway.) "I need Corona to wash down the tamales -- and I'm contributing to the delinquency of a pastor." My pastor friend and his family were coming over for dinner and I usually try to get him to drink a beer. I don't imagine he gets offered beers on most of his pastoral calls.

This night, I didn't even ask him. I just popped the tops on a couple of cold ones and squeezed a couple of lime slices. He was hooked. Ditto the tamales, which were a big hit. We got the kids going on their tacos and sat and talked, quenching the intoxicating heat of the salsa verde with the intoxicating coolness of the beer, sharing our reactions to the week's meetings and the trials and tribulations of ministry life. As we talked, the troubles of the week washed away, and our emptiness was filled, at least for the moment. We cracked jokes and I got to hear my pastor friend call John MacArthur a dumbass. We got to be heard around the table, and were allowed to feel like we were understood as well.

Our church serves communion once a month, and I don't usually take it, not because I think myself unworthy but because I'm usually playing the piano. It's what I do. I don't really feel left out -- evangelical communion exists in a kind of mushy middle between a robust sacramental theology in which you might get to really eat Jesus and the table fellowship out of which the tradition sprang in which you might get to really eat food.

That night, though, the Host came wrapped in a corn husk and the Blood of Christ had a little bit of lime in it.

Prone to Wander

2010-03-11T06:12:00.004-05:00

This Sunday is the installation service for our new senior pastor. He was our associate pastor when the last pastor left, and as the story goes, he was not on anyone's radar -- including (or especially) his own -- when it came to hiring a new one. Over the course of the search process, however, he became our best candidate. The story might be spin, but it's believable knowing the folks involved, and I feel good about the outcome. The pastor and I are never going to be close, but we work well together and I like him. He's good at what he does, and possesses an admirable, even enviable character that will serve him well.

The installation service is kind of a big deal. Lots of ceremony, after a fashion, though we get to infuse it with our own sense of style. Our denomination is evangelical with Presbyterian liturgical roots, and while our particular church is kind of the 4077th of the denomination, there is still a sense of decorum invoked. The installation service is the last step in a series of criteria that either had to be met or appealed in order to make the deal final. I don't know what John Knox was like, but it's important to remember that Calvin was a French lawyer.

The service itself seems like a cross between an ordination and a wedding. This man is accepting a particular call and making a commitment to a particular congregation. One of the most moving things I think I've ever seen happened while I was on retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton's old stomping ground. I was there with a bunch of other evangelicals and we had the opportunity to see one of the brothers take his solemn vows, the ones that would bind him to the order and to that monastery for life.

The service was gorgeous, a full Mass with all the bells and whistles and everyone in a fancy robe. I think the abbot wore a funny hat. There were readings and liturgical responses and a homily. The novice -- that's what they're called -- was asked a series of questions. It was formality, of course, since the novitiate (which usually lasts 3 years) was designed to test his readiness for the monastic life. If he'd gotten this far, everyone already knew his answer to the questions. And then, at the end, he was officially welcomed into the community. At this, he rushed (actually it looked like he leaped) into the abbot's arms and was embraced warmly. I don't know about everyone else in the room, but a rowful of Protestants sat blubbering at the beauty of it all. It was as though he'd waited for this his whole life, and maybe he had. I've seen couples saying "I do" that didn't look that happy.

Among the Benedictine vows is that of stabilitas, or stability, which means that a monk is committed to a particular community for life. Dispensations are possible, but rare. A monk might be set on assignment or be part of an offshoot monastery. He might be released from his vow to pursue a different vocation or join a different order, or of course he might just walk away from his vow and monastic life in general. But the ideal is to stay in one place, to pray and work, to cultivate, whether in the monastery garden or the hard stony ground of the heart, a sense of deep connection.

In many liturgical traditions there are baptismal vows of some kind or another. While many of evangelicals eschew such things (especially the hypericonoclastic Church of Christ I hale from), it's a long-attested practice and I think there's some merit to it. Evangelicals, for the most part, seem more interested in securing intellectual assent to theological propositions -- we'll say we believe it with our whole heart but we almost always mean our head -- but the baptismal vows speak to something that I think goes beyond the vagaries of what I happen to be thinking at the moment or the metaphysical commitments I'm willing to sign off on.

The closest I actually come to such a vow is a pact with a friend that neither of us can leave the faith (in the final, for-real sense) without first hashing it out together over a 12-pack. And the person leaving has to buy. I seem to have lost contact with this person, however, which might put a damper on the effectiveness of our pact.

I once tried to embrace a variant of the vow of stabilitas, not by taking an actual vow, but in making an internal commitment to a particular congregation. Our church at the time was really struggling, and there were all manner of tempting reasons to get the hell out of Dodge, but I could also look back on my life and see a history of leaving. "All I know to do," sings Indigo Girls' Emily Saliers, "is go." And I thought maybe it was time to suck it up and stick things out. Right about that time, of course, elements of the universe aligned to deliver us to the church we're at now. There may not be a God, but somebody sure likes to fuck with me.

So much for stabilitas. I also have other ways of lashing myself to the mast, though predictably I have trouble with which mast. I like to hang myself on the horns of false dilemmas, to try to seek clarity by invoking questionable dichotomies. There's the tug of war between my writer self and my musician self. I'm not really a musician, I muse, hoping that this realization will bring clarity to my path, but the evidence betrays me: I can't go five minutes without tapping out some polyrhythm on the nearest flat surface. I can tell you the chord progression of the song playing in the background at Starbucks. I have guitar picks in my wallet. Three nights this week are devoted to rehearsals, not to mention Sunday morning or the installation service, and just last night I sat in with an a cappella group that happened to be short a tenor.

So I'm a musician. Then I'm not really a writer. I'm not published, for instance, and I'm not making any money writing. But I teach writing -- and I'm not getting up at 4 in the morning to play the guitar, now, am I? People send me their work to edit and wordsmith. I'm constantly evaluating the things that happen to me and the stuff that I read to see if it is fodder for a blog post or my dissertation. I chose my advisor on the basis of what I thought he could do for my writing.

Can you see, though, how choosing one or the other would lend a kind of clarity to the process of identity construction? It works in other areas, too. Maybe I'm not really an academic. I'm not sure I'm interested in tenure track. I don't really want to write for scholarly journals so much as I want to write creative non-fiction. I'm bored silly by departmental politics (who isn't?). But I've been known to have conversations with my profs that lose everyone else in the room. In fact, I once lost the prof -- my religious studies teacher said "I see your lips moving, but all I hear is 'blah blah blah'" (I was trying to use Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem as a metaphor for epistemological vulnerability). I am at home in the classroom, and if I'm also more insecure about being a teacher than some of the other hats I wear, that's probably par for the course.

Or I'm not really a worship leader. Here I can muster some evidence, but we'll get to the actual religious stuff later. As much as I resent being a Chris Tomlin cover band, as much as there are days -- including Sundays -- where I'd rather eat shards of glass than hear, let alone play, another evangelical worship song, it's in my blood. The harmonies and arrangements come to me instinctively, almost in my sleep. There's no way to say this without sounding hopelessly self-aggrandizing but there's a kind of magic that happens when I'm involved with the music. I know how to hold things together. I know how to pour myself out as an offering and move a congregation. I know how to get musicians and singers to bring something out of themselves they didn't know was there. It's almost something that happens to me rather than something that I'm doing consciously. There's a reason that I've been asked to lead worship for the installation service, and I'm honored and humbled by that.

This goes for the big-ticket items as well. Maybe I'm not a Christian, but that doesn't explain my tendency to think in Biblical metaphors or the reality that if I'm a musician, I'm undeniably a church musician. I've tried walking away but it never takes. I end up like Jonah, getting swallowed by some great fish or another. It gets old. I need Jesus just as much as anyone esle. On the other hand, I can't deny being a skeptic, either. This, too, is in my blood. I'm not surrendering my critical faculties for the sake of a cheap sense of peace. I'm not giving up my hermeneutic of suspicion to anyone, including Jesus -- and if he can't take it, what good is he?

It's dangerous to be premature about such things but I think I'm at a place in my journey where the task is no longer one of discovery so much as choice when it comes to identity. I am all of those things, and I either have to choose among them or choose not to. It's the classic existentialist good news/bad news: you get to choose who you are, but you have to choose. Right now I get to be all those things, and while there may come a time that's no longer the case, at the moment there aren't any external factors dictating such a choice or demanding one to be made. Which is why I keep trying to make them up. And why they're false.

Maybe I need this kind of diversity, on all those levels. Maybe I'd chafe at being pegged to one thing. Maybe I'm a tent-dweller, waiting for the pillar of fire to move. Maybe being lashed to the mast is itself the problem. Maybe this is part of that thin line between being me and being batshit crazy. I'm willing to go with that.

Besides, I don't have the money for a 12-pack.

Open My Lips

2010-03-07T15:22:00.004-05:00

I wrote this prayer for our run-through this morning:

God, who called Israel out of Egypt and who called Christ out of the grave and who calls us to a life of service:

Take our weary bones and put flesh on them, that we might embrace the weak.

Take our weary souls and breath life into them, that we might preach the good news to the poor.

Take our weary hearts and pour grace into them, that we might love sinners.

Amen.

Grace Greater Than Our Sin

2010-03-05T09:50:00.004-05:00

"How did you get through college?" the student asks me, and I chuckle. He looks a bit puzzled. "Why do all my professors laugh when I ask them that?"

"We laugh because we've been there," I say, but it's clear in that moment that he is deadly, earnestly serious. Behind in all his classes, he had made an appointment with me to see what he could do in my class to get caught up.

"I actually went to a counselor," he tells me. "Aren't they supposed to listen? This one let me get out about two sentences out before he just talked the rest of the time. It wasn't very helpful. So I've just been asking my professors how they got through college." He's a fifth-year senior, and I think he's probably weary of being in school and fighting himself for the wherewithal to just finish. I've definitely been there.

In fact, his question is timely inasmuch as I'm worried about how I'm going to finish a dissertation while teaching a 4/4 load and doing adjunct work as well as being on staff at a church. I love teaching. I love working. I have a hard time turning down gigs in an economy where at least 1 person in 10 doesn't have a job. Anyway.

"I got through college by mapping out my assignments," I tell him. "I went through all the syllabi and listed the assignments in order, and then just hammered away at them. By finals week I had all my assignments done. I was bored, of course, because everyone else was scrambling and didn't have time to hang out, but I got it all done."

The truth is I only did this full-bore for one semester, and I once flunked a poetry class because I didn't complete all the assignments. But he doesn't need to know any of that. He needs hope. He needs to know, like Jim Carrey's character in Dumb and Dumber, that there's a chance. The plan worked for me, and I still use a modified version of that plan to this day: I tackle things in the order that they're due, because otherwise I'll just do whatever seems interesting at the time. Like write a blog post.

"Even now," I continue, "I set up external rewards. Like if I get these seven papers reviewed, I can play some Mario Kart with my boys." He smiled at this. "If I get my quota done for the day, then I can crack open a beer or do some pleasure reading." He's over 21; I'm not going to shatter any illusions for him by admitting that his writing prof rewards himself with video games and a cold one. "It's basically a kind of auto-manipulation," I admit. "You trick yourself into being productive." This seems to connect with him. "I'm going to guess you're fighting yourself to get through this last semester" -- he nods knowingly -- "so fight dirty."

Maybe it sounds corny but I believe this is holy work. There is something sacred here, a channel of grace in the student-teacher relationship. I like teaching writing because I know they need the help and most of them know it, too. I like those moments when I can show a human face to the students, when I can be a person and treat them as persons. The university system (like many aspects of Western culture) has ecclesiastical roots, and there's a priestly element to being a prof. I dispense grace, after a fashion, and in this moment my office has become a confessional, my student a penitent sinner. It's my job to figure out the combination of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, and holy water that will bring absolution.

"Now," I continue. "You're telling me you have assignment 1 finished but you keep forgetting to email it?" He nods sheepishly. He's a little embarrassed by that, but I've been there, too. "Okay, so you're going to email that tonight." He writes this down. This gives me hope for him. "How long will it take you to write assignment 2?" About two hours, he tells me. That's about right. "When will you have a two-hour block of time to write it?" He tells me he has Friday open. "Okay, so Friday night you're going to turn that in. Assignment 3 builds on assignment 2. Are you going anywhere over break?" He's not. "Perfect. Then by Tuesday of break you'll turn in assignment 3 and be caught up in this class. I don't know what you're working out in your other classes, but that will take care of this one. Do we have a deal?" He agrees to this and we shake on it.

"One more thing," I say. "Don't tell anyone, but I secretly believe that being behind is its own punishment. If you can get this done and get caught up by Tuesday, I'll waive the late penalties -- but you have to get it done."

This, I can see by the way his face changes, is Good News.

Beneath the Cleansing Flood

2010-02-27T14:26:00.004-05:00

Our 15-year-old is taking biology through the homeschool co-op. It's a Christian group, so the class is taught by a creationist using ~~creationist propaganda~~ a creationist textbook. This is a bit troubling, to me and to her. "I just give the answers the teacher wants," she tells me at dinner, "and I don't worry about what I think." It seems a strange dance to be doing so young, but it's not uncommon. Whether the issue is one of religion or ideology or just peculiarities within a discipline, students must, at one level or another, capitulate to at least some of the whims of any given teacher.

This led to a dinner discussion of creation and the flood and other issues of historicity in the Old Testament. I pointed out, as I have numerous times, that many cultures have a flood story -- and this, coupled with evidence of flooding at different periods of earth's history (geologists are candid about this, calling them "superfloods"), suggests some kernel of truth in the basic contours of those stories. But this doesn't make any particular culture's flood story true in and of itself. Such stories could also be rooted in our habit of settling down in floodplains, which were tantalizingly fertile but subject, of course, to flooding. It would not be hard to see a particularly nasty deluge as divine retribution for something or another.

The conversation moved on to other problems of historicity. The table was a bit distraught when I pointed that there is no extrabiblical evidence that Abraham ever actually lived, especially when I pointed out the conspicuousness of having twelve tribes named after twelve brothers --though I did admit to a literary shift from the overtly mythological in Genesis 12 when Abraham is introduced (I did not point out that the shift in question seems to be one from myth to legend or folklore, or from ancient Semitic mythology to a more specifically Hebrew one). I pointed out that David was probably not the one who slew Goliath, but I didn't mention that this may not have any bearing on the story's historicity to begin with. And so on.

Eventually, everyone left the table but me and our oldest son (he's thirteen), and he stuck around to ask me about the New Testament. What did I think about that? Was it a bunch of of made-up stuff, too? "No," I said facetiously, "It's true. Every last word of it." But he was on to me, and wanted to know where I drew the line. What's true and what's not? I was evasive. "I don't know," I said. "All we have are stories." This wasn't good enough.

"But what do you think? Don't you have an opinion? Don't you care?"

"Sure," I said. "These stories are important."

"Yeah, they're important," he said with teenage petulance. "But do you think they really happened?"

"What do you think?" I deferred.

"Well, I think the Old Testament has a bunch of goofy stuff in it but the New Testament seems okay."

"Okay," I said, "but some people think the Old Testament must be 100% accurate, because their faith relies on it being that way. And there are ways to believe that if you need to. On the other hand, some people think the New Testament is full of goofy stuff, too."

"Yeah, sure. But what do you think?"

I tried different evasions but it eventually came down to me admitting that I wasn't going to tell him. Maybe, I suggested, when he's thirty. He left frustrated, and I apologized later for being evasive. He said it was okay, but I still felt like I'd failed him somehow. Wouldn't a real dad impart his hard-wrought wisdom to his progeny? Part of me knows, however, that whatever I take a hard stand on now is going to be what my son rebels against later. I like to keep that list small.

He can't, as the old movie line goes, handle the truth, but the truth that he can't handle is not that the Christian faith is predicated on a bunch of historically questionable claims, but that his father feels that way. Part of me is concerned about one of our children blurting out their father's theological idiosyncrasies at an inopportune moment, but the bigger part of me is simply concerned about the cognitive dissonance of him trying to deal with his music-minister father being an agnostic or maybe even an atheist. I think he'd feel betrayed. Being my son, he's a bit more skeptical than the average evangelical kid (hence his suspicions about the OT), but he's still a believer, and even as his dad I don't know that I have the right to trump that. I know he just wanted to hear what I thought, but I don't think I'm flattering myself to suspect that what I think might carry some weight, and I want to be careful with that.

I regularly download podcasts from The Moth. It features "true stories, told live without notes." A recent podcast featured a woman with cerebral palsy who told her story with the help of a translator. Even though she spoke English, her speech was mostly incomprehensible except, apparently, to the friend she brought with her. Occasionally a phrase would be intelligible but otherwise we were left to wonder at her translator's ability to make sense of things.

What amazed me was the patience, grace, and enthusiasm shown by her audience. They laughed, they applauded, they cheered. They seemed -- and maybe I was just projecting here -- genuinely interested not only in hearing her story, but in seeing her succeed in the telling. The story, on the surface, didn't seem terribly compelling. It was the story of her first relationship, one that culminated in her first sexual experience; so while there were no lurid details, the story seemed at once pedestrian and a little salacious.

The way she told the story, however, was as a woman who wondered if she'd ever have that kind of relationship, wondered if she'd ever be seen as desirable. As she concludes the story, she speaks of the joy of having been regarded as a woman and not as a disability. At this, the audience erupts into raucous applause and I admit to being moved to tears.

It's this that I want my son to understand someday -- that as important as questions of belief might seem to us, and are to many, to someone like me they are really just a backdrop to the human drama of needing our stories to be heard, of needing to be loved, of needing to be seen as desirable. As much as we'd like to tell ourselves we're more sophisticated than that, we aren't. I'm not.

Maybe when he's thirty.

Crack the Sky

2010-02-18T05:46:00.016-05:00

The other night our eleven-year-old daughter came downstairs after bedtime. By itself, this is not all that unusual -- she likes to stall, and I've seen her come down three times in the space of an hour claiming to need the bathroom. This time, however, she came into the kitchen and just kind of milled around. At first I braced for the timeless question -- "What is there to eat?" -- to which my loving and kind answer is always, "Same stuff there always is." But she didn't ask the question, and I began to sense that this was more of an I'm-waiting-for-you-to-notice-I'm-milling-around-and-ask-me-what's-wrong sort of milling around. I'm not the most observant parent, but this one made my radar. I asked her what was wrong.

"Well, I was reading my Bible," she told me, "and I got to the part where Jesus says the world is going to end, and that's a little scary." She's got a bit of a precocious streak when it comes to the Bible. She asked for one for her birthday, and set out to read through it from cover to cover. I'm not sure how far she got, but it was an impressive effort. In fact, it's possible her question meant that she was still at it, and had made it as far as the Gospels. Like I said: impressive.

There are several ways to handle this kind of question. Dismissal came to mind: "Oh, that's nothing to worry about," but that wouldn't have satisfied her. I remember reading Matthew when I was around 14 and being scared to death. It led to one of my first re-conversions; I'd been baptized at 12 but after just two years I had already lapsed. I suppose a good Evangelical answer might be to remind her that she's a baptized believer and thus one of the good guys in the apocalyptic drama, but that wouldn't have satisfied me. Instead, I told her to go get her Bible, and she practically ran up the stairs to do so; I was taking her concern seriously, and best of all, I wasn't calling her out for bedtime evasion. When she came down, I asked her to turn to Psalm 18, which she did.

For awhile I held a theology which said, in effect, that all the bits in the Bible about the Second Coming were fulfilled in the first century -- that they had to do with the destruction of Jerusalem and the ratification of a new covenant between God and humanity, and this was a done deal. I don't really have the metaphysical framework to make sense of that claim anymore, but I remain friends with some of those people and I learned a lot from them, especially with regard to apocalyptic language. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.

I asked her to read verses 7-15:

⁷ The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the mountains shook;
they trembled because he was angry.
⁸ Smoke rose from his nostrils;
consuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it.
⁹ He parted the heavens and came down;
dark clouds were under his feet.
¹⁰ He mounted the cherubim and flew;
he soared on the wings of the wind.
¹¹ He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him—
the dark rain clouds of the sky.
¹² Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced,
with hailstones and bolts of lightning.
¹³ The LORD thundered from heaven;
the voice of the Most High resounded.
¹⁴ He shot his arrows and scattered the enemies ,
great bolts of lightning and routed them.
¹⁵ The valleys of the sea were exposed
and the foundations of the earth laid bare
at your rebuke, O LORD,
at the blast of breath from your nostrils.

"What does that sound like?" I asked.

"The end of the world."

Then we looked at the description of the Psalm's setting, which is decidedly not the end of the world, but David defeating Saul. We talked about why David might use this kind of language to describe his victory. Then we turned to Jesus and why people in his day might use that kind of language to describe their expectation of deliverance -- or the destruction of a city.

"So it's kind of like a parable?" she asked, and that seemed like a good enough grasp to me. We discussed other things that were "kind of like" parables -- the creation accounts, Noah's ark, and so on -- and the need for discretion in how widely we broadcast the reigning "kind of like a parable" hermeneutic in our house. "Oh," she said, "I don't really talk about this stuff with anybody else." She went back to bed, confident that the world was not going to end in a cosmic conflagration while she slept, and much relieved by that.

A new reader recently asked me my thoughts on eschatology. I told him eschatology is a way of offering commentary on the present by imagining the future, which is one of many parallels to sci-fi, but that's another story. Whether we admit it or not, it probably has no correspondence to what the world might actually be like in some distant future, but it can say a lot about what we think about the present. It's a way of projecting our hopes and fears forward. Some people imagine a world in which there is no poverty, hunger, or injustice, and work to make such a world a reality. Others imagine a world in which there are no more Jews, or Muslims, or atheists, and -- well, you can connect the dots.

The world is going to end, of course, and no amount of interpretation is going to change that. Our sun could die out or go supernova. The earth's orbit could decay, and probably is decaying. We could go extinct, or evolve into something unrecognizable. We could blow ourselves up, or render the planet uninhabitable. These possibilities are either of unknown likelihood or happening on a timeline that can only be described as cosmic. We're all more likely to die first. This isn't very sexy -- more whimper than bang. We seem to crave some kind of more definitive closure, which is why I think the end of the world is such a titillating topic.

Believing that all the prophecies are fulfilled effectively takes the End of the World off the table, and I appreciate that. Another option, of course, is to just say that Jesus was wrong, that the New Testament is predicated on a non-event. It comes to the same thing, in many ways -- though I can see reasons for choosing each. By way of parallel, I like universalism because it effectively renders the afterlife a non-issue, even though my preferred way of handling the afterlife is to let go of it altogether. Whether we all go to heaven, or there's no such thing, we can focus on the human predicament of the here and now, and if the former is a more pleasant thought it's because it involves the perpetuation of our egos.

There's a song from White Christmas, a production number in the show (that is, the show within the movie) that indulges in a bit modern dance while making fun of it. It goes through several examples of old school dancing and laments the turn to the modern stuff. "Heps," one line goes, "who did steps...aren't steppin' anymore -- they're doing 'choreography.'" Maybe you just have to see it.

I'm not sure what it is we're not doing any more that's been supplanted by eschatology. Some ancient cultures believed that the world would never end, and this seems as well to have been part of early Hebrew thinking. This changed with the experience of exile, as they cried out that something had to give and implored their God to intervene. They seem to have found some of the mythology of their Persian oppressors useful and appropriated apocalyptic rhetoric to make sense of their own situation. Later, the expressions used by a particular apocalyptic sect (that of one Jesus of Nazareth) would be picked up by the wider culture and combined with Greek teleology, becoming more and more what we would recognize today as eschatology.

We can't escape it. We're locked into thinking that something's gotta give, that there's something waiting just around the corner, that there's a better future waiting to be realized. It may not be the End of the World or even utopia, exactly, but we seem to need something to look forward to, to hope for, something that helps us know how to comport ourselves in the here and now.

On the other hand, it might be possible to miss the here and now because we're obsessed with how things might be. I'm torn on this, not necessarily wanting to endorse the status quo, but not wanting to fall prey to disillusionment, either. Eschatology at its best mediates and modulates this tension; at its worst it exacerbates it. I'm wondering if there's a way to step out of it without becoming complacent. What's that line from The Shawshank Redemption? Something about making a choice to get busy living or get busy dying.

And maybe that's it: we're not living anymore -- we're doing eschatology.

On Being the Anti-Job

2010-02-02T08:12:00.008-05:00

I think I need a new schtick. I've been involved in a couple of internet ~~arguments~~ ~~debates~~ conversations lately in which I'm the resident skeptic/cynic/naysayer. Usually I'm trying (in vain) to point out that none of the things we say about God -- whether God exists or doesn't, what God might be like if God does exist, what might exist if God doesn't -- ever really touch the ground. Or maybe they never really touch the sky. Anyway. It's just so much shooting in the dark, and this seems really, really obvious to me in a way that almost makes me surprised that people argue so vehemently against it.

There's an extent to which you either get this or you don't. You either see it or you're allowed to persist in thinking that somehow your speculations about the divine touch something on the other side. Maybe that's a kind of blessing. Maybe that's one of those lies we're allowed to believe as a hedge against madness, and I'm the weird one for thinking I see through that, blinded -- as I must be -- to the lies that I believe that keep me from going mad.

But I'm tired of yammering on about it. My cultivated curmudgeonliness masks the joie de vivre remarked upon by people who know me in person. My resounding and defiant "NO!" to metaphysical speculation hides my consistent "Yes!" to life in all of its mottled glory.

I'm not really a stranger to faith, or an enemy of faith. I have stories to tell of abundance and provision, of stepping out and being buoyed by an unseen hand. Stories that continue to unfold long after I've stopped believing in a hand there to buoy me. I persist in thinking that my life is guided by something, I know not what, and this intuition is confirmed with remarkable regularity even though I claim no metaphysical commitments that might render it intelligible. If we listen to what my wife and I just call "that voice," things seem to work out for us; I've lived, and continue to live, what seems like a charmed life.

I can't reconcile that charmed life with the suffering of others, with the stories of my friends who do not seem to share that experience and yet possess what would seem to be a much stronger faith in the conventional sense. I don't know why we get to be happy while one of our friends was abandoned by a man who turned out to be a manipulative, lying snake, and while she now faces a custody battle as she struggles with cancer. I don't know why we, both introverted agnostics, get to stay together with a big family while another friend -- an extraverted evangelical -- lives alone, unable to find love after his wife left him.

As much as I might believe that things will be okay for us -- and I do believe that -- I find it hard to offer the same comfort to a third friend who has suffered permanent brain damage from a work injury and is trying to finish a college degree as his mind and body betray him and his disability income dwindles. He lives with a perpetual migraine and can only get relief by running cold water over his head, which lasts anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or large doses of Vicodin, which leaves him incoherent. He also happens to be in one of my classes, though I think he's my age or older, and the other day he asked me: "Was I in class on Tuesday? I lost a day."

And it's not like our life of relative blessing is enough that we can offer significant material help. We don't have the clout or the resources to offer much except our friendship and the stalwart refusal to trivialize their pain. That's not nothing, and that we offer it is, in a very real way, our faith. We give what we can -- sometimes more than we can, or think we can -- to our friends because they're our friends. To those who would say this is not faith because it's not accompanied by the right kind of intellectual assent to theological propositions, well -- fuck you.

I'll continue to listen to "that voice," and I'm sure I'll persist in the notion that things will be okay for me. I'm not much of a worrier, to be honest, a character quality that I think frustrates my wife. But I refuse to make my experience as one of the lucky ones normative for others, or try to explain their life in light of mine. I won't do it. I can't say that there must be a God, and this God must be good, simply because my life happens to be okay, or because even when it's not okay I happen to have the wherewithal to bear up under it (okay, I have had my moments). Much less would I suggest that God exists and is merciful simply because my friends' spirits have not been completely crushed -- yet.

Instead, I'll celebrate their goodness and resilience. We will mourn with them when we need to. And I'll plead their case to the skies, just in case someone is listening.

Off the Hook

2010-01-28T05:50:00.004-05:00

My daily prayer regimen -- "Prayer before Facebook" -- is plodding along, and I have, in fact, been praying every day, sometimes more perfunctorily than others. It has also brought attention to the fact that I don't actually find Facebook that interesting (though it does have its charms), or perhaps, in a moment of cosmic levity, it has become less interesting to me at just the moment I've decided to make it the carrot to help me keep my prayer promise. One reader suggested I write out some of my prayers, but to be perfectly honest they're a bit boring.

A couple of months ago I sent some of you an email about my future at the church -- namely, that there is some buzz about making my position full-time with me in it -- and several of you have been asking if there's any news on that front. The big question was: do I really want to be full-time at a church? Is this the right next step? And it caused no small amount of soul-searching and pondering on my part. I was only asked if I would be willing to have that conversation; I wasn't being asked for a decision, and it could be as long as a year before such a decision even became a live option. But I also indicated in the email that I felt if I leaned into this it would probably happen, so the decision isn't completely irrelevant to the here and now. How I think I'll answer that question when it comes up has some inescapable bearing on how I comport myself in the meantime.

As my wife and I have kicked this around, we keep coming up against our own reservations. There's a kind of built-in distance to being part-time, a kind of buffer against getting sucked in too much. There's a certain attractiveness to not having employment by people to whom my "real" thoughts would be anathema as my bread and butter. And, at bottom, there's just a basic intuition that this is ultimately a bad idea. Seemingly insignificant changes to the church's internal culture or to my own tolerances could leave me desperate to get out, and being full-time could in and of itself prove to be too claustrophobic. Moreover, I think my real passion is teaching and writing, and the church needs someone whose real passion is worship. Not just music, either. I do church music because I'm good at it and I enjoy it, but that's not the same as being a person who sees their life's work wrapped up in the liturgical life of the church.

What's interesting here is that I had one of my regular meetings with our pastor on Monday, which I went into wondering if I should bring this up. I didn't need to wonder, because he brought it up, and it seems there have been some developments in the conversation that I assume come out of a recent elder's retreat. Going for a full-time worship person has been made more of a priority, and the nascent job description leads more toward a comprehensive "worship arts" producer-type person, someone big-picture enough to oversee drama, dance, tech, music, etc. I'm not that person. And the pastor gently articulated some of the same concerns about my academic life; they would expect a full-time person to be "all in" in a way that he thinks would cause me to shrivel and I know I would balk at anyway.

He was hesitant to bring all this up but I saw it coming, and headed him off at the pass, for which he was grateful. My current job is not in jeopardy; the preferred option is to keep me on as more of a musical director (which I like better anyway) and hire someone to be my immediate boss. The pastor also indicated that he had a personal interest in keeping me around for my brain, though he added something to the effect of "If only I had half your brain, or maybe just 40%," an idea that I hope he doesn't take too literally.

Sweet Hour of Prayer

2010-01-09T08:24:00.002-05:00

In our planning for the services at church, January 3rd was what I call a one-off: it wasn't part of a series, just a stand-alone Sunday. Dec. 27 wrapped up our Christmas series, and January 10 begins a new series which will cast vision for the life of the church. Last Sunday existed, then, in a kind of limbo. Our pastor decided to use it to tie into the New Year's resolution vibe and call us all to prayer. For the next six weeks, we're supposed to pray every day, just to see what might happen.

I admit I was a little disappointed. This seems terribly typical, and prayer isn't really my bag. I recognize the place of prayer in the Christian tradition -- I always pray if I'm asked to, and I'm not squeamish about praying in public -- and it's hard to cast aspersions on a pastor calling his or her congregation to greater prayer. How is that not legit? Besides, it's rather shrewd, even if he didn't intend it to be; we sometimes get accused of not being "spiritual" enough, and this attention to piety will push some of the right buttons in a certain segment of our congregation. So I roll with it.

We've also launched a blog where the pastor can post something inspiring or whatever and people can comment. There's also a place for prayer requests, and another to record answers to prayer. Testifying goes Web 2.0. As staff, we were asked to "get the ball rolling" with some comments before the official launch, to seed things a little. I ignored this. Until the pastor called me.

He doesn't ask me why I haven't responded. He says, "I need your wit," and explains the plan to get some comments rolling before it goes public. He doesn't say "Hey, didn't you get the email," he just appeals to my vanity: "I was hoping you could add some color." Like I said, he can be shrewd. He's this weird combination of earnestness and savvy, and I can't always tell if I'm being played -- well, really I am being played; what I don't know is if this is calculated or just intuitive on his part. It doesn't matter, of course. I have to say yes, which means I have to come up with something to participate in the discussion.

So I post something lighthearted about already being a morning person and deciding that my new mantra is "prayer before Facebook." And what's funny is that, of all the staff pre-comments, the one that garnered a response is -- you guessed it -- mine. So now someone I don't actually know, inspired by my transparency, is joining me in my prayer-before-Facebook campaign. This means I'm committed, not because somebody joined me but simply because I said I'd do it.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sickness Unto Death

2010-01-08T08:38:00.002-05:00

I spent New Year's day with the stomach flu. I thought I had dodged the bullet -- the rest of the family had contracted it at different points but I was, so far, unscathed. Alas, as the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, I was praying to the porcelain god -- and not for the usual reasons. So, after a rough night, I spent the following day camped out on the couch, variously reading, sleeping, and watching Battlestar Galactica. Except for being sick, that would have made for a fun day.

It's funny how disorienting being sick can be, especially with a slight fever. Things seem surreal, like the aftermath of one of those naps where you sleep too late into the afternoon or evening and are then perpetually groggy. This is compounded for me by the already somewhat disorienting effects of a holiday break. Several days on end with no agenda, or a radically different agenda from the usual, and time seems to take on an added liquidity. It's actually somewhat anxiety-inducing for me, though I think I've done better this year than most, allowing myself to enjoy the respite (as well as getting some things done that I'd put off).

So, me being me, I couldn't just be sick -- I was also observing myself being sick, pondering the effects of sickness on my sense of self, pondering the fragility and contingency of that sense of self. It took only a virus to threaten it, a slight temperature difference to make me feel out of sorts. A change in routine, or suspension of it, can throw me off my groove. In a general sense, I am arguably a different person today, if only slightly, based on my choices and experiences of yesterday.

I have a friend who has worked hard to find the right antidepressant that allows him to feel "like himself." I don't begrudge him this. I used to follow a blogger who chronicled his own journey with depression and medication, and while the diagnosis and treatment was clearly a boon to his family, I felt like his writing was not as good. I'm sure the trade-off was worth it, but it's there. When we were young, my mother discovered that my sister became almost tolerable -- or at least less unbearable -- when we took sugar out of her diet. Our youngest can go from angel to demon and back again based on what (or if) he's eaten, or so it seems. A change in our blood sugar or brain chemistry can have significant results, even altering who we are or who we feel ourselves to be.

While we insist -- and probably must insist, for our own sanity -- that we are more than the sum of our parts, that we are not merely a sea of chemicals in a bag of fat and protein, that the brain transcends the bioelectrical matrix it comprises, this insistence is challenged by the sheer chemical and environmental malleability of that very project. In other words, if I need a particular drug, or diet, or routine to feel normal, then what is normal? If I need these things, or some combination of these things, to feel like myself, then what is this "self" that I claim as mine? Aren't we really just defining the parameters of a particular collective fiction, or choosing between competing versions of that fiction?

I haven't even addressed the internal factors -- how what we think or believe affects our sense of self, the extent to which we can change our whole world based on how we narrate that world to ourselves. A very simple part of my own journey is this: I don't like who I am when I'm trying to be either too religious or too atheistic. Both feel forced, like I'm trying too hard or protesting too much. What's funny is that the path that feels the most authentic is the one that leads me to the conclusion (which is mostly what I've been getting at here) that authenticity is bunk.

"Bunk" might be too strong, and anyway I'm tempted to pull back because the truth is, I believe in authenticity, or at least I find some version of it helpful in my own meanderings. It's just that, like so many things, it's slippery, shifting from view whenever we try to apprehend it directly. If I decide against this skepticism about the self, for instance, on the basis that I don't want to be that cynical, I only play into the same dynamic. It's like those people who argue that God must exist or we'll lose our moral compass -- which might be a reason to believe in God (though not a very good one), but it has nothing to do with existence.

My church gig is going well. Well enough that the conversation has turned to the possibility of making it a full-time gig. Some of you recently got a message from me about this very thing, and some of you have asked how that conversation is going. Here's where we are: the pastor and I agree that to do this job well, it needs to be full-time, and that -- so far, at least -- I'm a good fit. And though I'm sometimes tempted to put in full-time energy (and something close to the hours), simply because that's what it needs, I can't afford to do that. So there's some tension there. I, however, really need to finish my dissertation before that becomes a live option, and the church actually needs to hire two full-time staff people in other areas before we take the conversation further. This buys me at least a year, maybe closer to 18 months, before I really have to decide if I'm that person, or just the guy who's going to help them find that person.

What I have to laugh at myself about is the way this parallels the earnest believer's quest to discern the "will of God." What's the right choice? What's most authentic? What's at stake in making the wrong choice? Is there a wrong choice, or just competing versions of the good? Am I being pushed or led in a particular direction or am I facing a pure choice? What does the choice, either way, say about who I am?

I like what I'm doing here and I'm willing to run with it, especially if I can convince myself there might be some higher purpose involved. Or if it allows us to stay in an area we like a lot. Most of the people I queried said "go for it." But I can't give up teaching -- I'm getting PhD, for God's sake; what else am I supposed to do with that? -- and I've much more consistently wanted to be and envisioned myself as a college professor as anything else, including being a musician. I can teach part-time, of course, so the choices are not necessarily exclusive. But would I have time to write books?

There's also, as my wife points out (correctly), an added level of perceived duplicity to being a full-time minister and a deeply skeptical agnostic. As a part-time person, I can imagine myself still something of an outsider, a hired gun come alongside for a time. It's like being on assignment versus some kind of deep cover. Who I am on the inside doesn't matter so much. There are questions that just don't come up. Going full-time would seem to mean going all in; it narrows that critical, ironic distance in an uncomfortable way. Right now, I can theoretically look forward to a day when I don't have to be so careful about "Ira" versus my IRL persona (or would I still be careful so as not to jeopardize an alternative career path? I'm such a whore sometimes).

On one level, it doesn't matter right now. I have other fish to fry and things are fine the way they are. But there's part of me that doesn't do well with this "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..." which informs my blog title. I'm a a reacher. I think it makes a little bit of difference, which way I think I'll answer that question when it comes up.

Even if authenticity is a vapor.

Even if it's nothing more than the willingness to make the choice.

Event Horizon

2009-10-31T06:50:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-22T07:24:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-09T08:57:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-20T05:51:00.011-04:00

"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

2009-07-17T05:25:00.005-04:00

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

2009-07-15T05:14:00.005-04:00

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

2009-07-07T05:08:00.007-04:00

"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.

The Day of Small Things

2009-06-22T11:54:00.012-04:00

I love the new Star Trek movie. Unabashedly, unreservedly, and largely without qualification -- I loves me some Trek. Seriously, I thought it was great. The reboot is nothing short of brilliant. The acting is not Oscar material, but it's good. The character development, certainly a special challenge under these circumstances, works. Granted, the bad guy is not very interesting and the climax is a bit predictable, but it's a rollicking good time, and I'm willing to say it is consistent with the old Trek, modulated to a new key for a new audience without completely abandoning the tonality of the old. Besides, Leonard Nimoy loved it (he even said so in his "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" appearance), so I can too.

One thing missing from this incarnation of Trek, and I'm not sure I really miss it, is the heavy-handed social commentary. Roddenberry laid it on pretty thick in the original series (TOS for you geeks), and it had its place. Some of it lived on in the movies and the later manifestations from time to time. Really, however, it's mostly conventional wisdom in literary circles that sci-fi functions as social commentary, some more subtle than others, and I'm a fan of subtle.

Sometimes sci-fi offers us a chance to ponder what it means to be human. It's possible to read something like that into this new movie but it might be that as fans we're totally over that, and just want a good time with some familiar characters, a new vibe, and some way-cool CGI. It's not that we're shallow; it's just that we're not very deep.

Really, though, my fandom is actually a bit mild. I've never been to a convention or dressed in costume. I don't know a lick of Klingon. I've only ever bought one technical manual, and that was a gift for a friend, though I confess to having read some of it before I wrapped it. Okay, okay, I have read some of the novels, back in the day, and can even say I had a preference for Vonda N. MacIntyre's work. So there's that.

And I like science fiction in general, though even there I'm only mildly involved. I can boast having read all of Asimov's Foundations and Robot series, including the series where he clumsily tries to combine those worlds -- and if you know what I'm talking about, you are certifiably nerdy. But there's a huge (and by "huge" I mean really, really, unbelievably big) world of sci-fi out there, and a lot of it is not even on my long range sensors. I never even saw the new Battlestar Galactica series. Basically, when it comes to SF, I dabble.

When it comes to cyberpunk, however, I can claim a bit of street cred, or at least a certain level of scholarly familiarity. I've read almost everything by William Gibson, plus a good bit of Bruce Sterling, along with Neil Stephenson's witty, brilliant, and chaotic Snow Crash (imagine a cross between Gibson and Tom Robbins). I've seen both versions of Blade Runner (screw the director; I kind of liked the voice-overs). I've read a collection of scholarly essays on the relationship of The Matrix and cyberpunk, which I used in a cyberpunk-themed writing class. I can easily be out-fanned, but I've definitely got some inner geek going on.

The Matrix bridges the gap between cyberpunk and another sub-genre of fiction that sometimes intersects sci-fi: post-apocalyptic. Post-apoclyptic has to do with a narrative setting in which The Big One -- nuclear anihiliation or ecological devastation or cosmic conflagration -- has already taken place, and the heroes of the story must navigate their way through what's left after the end of the world as we know it.

Mad Max is post-apocalyptic (in this case, post-peak oil) but not necessarily sci-fi. Ditto The Stand. The Terminator invokes a post-apocalyptic world, though the action in the first couple of films actually takes place before the purported apocalypse via time travel. Some, like Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (as well as his upcoming 2012, which looks cool if for nothing else than the destruction scenes) are a kind of apocalyptic disaster fiction, in which the definitive event takes place in the narrative present.

This brings me to The Road, Cormac McCarthy's almost quintessential post-apocalyptic novel. The cataclysm is not identified, and neither are the main characters, who are simply referred to as "the man" and "the boy." The style is spare, even austere. Very little actually happens in the story -- there's a narrative arc but not much of a plot. It's bleak and yet hopeful in a strange way. Or, rather, it explores what hope looks like in a world where it seems that every last shred of hope has been taken away. The reader's sense of expectation is ground down to almost nothing in a kind of literary minimalism, such that the slightest glimpse of meaning or hopefulness becomes mesmerizing, even cathardic. McCarthy doesn't leave himself much to work with, and yet somehow manages to write something moving and brilliant.

Some want to make The Road into an environmental cautionary tale, but I don't think that gets it. I don't know what McCarthy had in mind beyond creating a world to explore, but I can't help but think that the world he conjures is not one we might somehow create if we're not careful so much as the one we've already inherited. We're back to the idea of social commentary, and it seems almost axiomatic that since the future is unknown to us, our prognistications -- literary or otherwise -- are always about the here and now. Apocalyptic as a genre, including the apocalyptic fiction found in sacred texts, tells us much more about the present than it does the future.

It might be cliché to suggest that the postapocalyptic geography of The Road is somehow a metaphor for the denuded nihilistic landscape of postmodernity -- but it's there. We live in a world where hope seems a luxury, where nothing really happens. We've reached Francis Fukuyama's "end of history." The cataclysm was not nuclear annihilation or environmental collapse but the implosion of meaning. Such things, or peak oil or something else, could still happen, but they'll be but bumps in the road, anticlimactic blips in a world with a narrative arc but no plot.

And yet, as bleak and crochety as he seems, McCarthy does not leave us without hope. Instead, he leads us to look to the faint glimmers, the tiny pinpricks of light, to ratchet down our expectations so that joy can come in the shape of small things. Just as musical minimalism uses repeating patterns to slow down our musical metabolism so that the slightest change becomes significant, McCarthy's narrative minimalism brings us to a place where the otherwise insignificant breaks forth with abundance of meaning. "Who despises the day of small things?" the Hebrew prophet Zechariah asks rhetorically. Who indeed.

Bag of Hammers

2009-05-25T08:00:00.003-04:00

"Baptism!" George Clooney's character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? says derisively after learning that his traveling companions have had their sins washed away. "You boys are dumber'n a bag of hammers." Having grown up Church of Christ, where believer's baptism for the remission of sins is something of a doctrinal distinctive (to the point that we get accused of being "water regenerationists," a charge we deny a little too vehemently), we found this hilarious. So much so that we bought one of our fellow disaffected CoC'ers a bag of hammers for her birthday. We made it a decorative thing -- they were some sort of cute little craft hammers -- and for all I know she still has it on her wall.

The church we're at now, which is technically Presbyterian, has a fairly open baptism policy. They will baptize infants but there's no pressure to do so, no concern that the child's salvation is at stake. Most baptisms are by effusion but they will, upon request, baptize by immersion. I'm a little troubled by the way in which this parallels the service economy, with the church offering religious goods to the spiritual consumer, but I'm not particularly bothered by pedobaptism or effusion.

A friend of mine argues that infant baptism is inherently Constantinian -- an artifact of the church/state apparatus -- and thus suspect, but I'm more inclined to see it as an earnest attempt to deal with the second generation problem. Adult baptism does seem to be the norm in the New Testament (though one wonders at the implications of entire households being baptized, which happens in a couple of places) but the faith was new. Everyone was a first-generation believer. What happens when new babies are born in to a Christian household? They had to deal with that somehow, and the earliest recorded debate on the matter, from the second century, had to do with whether infants should be baptized on the third day, as had been the custom, or the eighth day, to more closely parallel circumcision. All of which is to say: I'm sympathetic to those who want their babies baptized, and calling it an imperialist ploy is a little too simple.

From the standpoint of ritual, I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference whether a child is baptized and then goes through confirmation class or is "dedicated" and then goes to church camp. I don't think this is entirely because I've rejected the immortality of the soul and therefore don't see a lot riding on it. Or maybe it is. I just don't see the big deal. I do think that baptism is presented in the New Testament as the normative means by which one becomes part of the community of believers.

But when it came time, recently, for our middle two children to be baptized, we went back to the Church of Christ, with which we still have some connection and of which we are still, technically, members. We didn't want them to have to go through catechism. I'm not opposed to catechism -- in fact, a more robust catechesis might be a good thing -- but I don't really want to be Presbyterian (no offense to John Knox) and don't want the ordeal of catechism or "new member" classes. (Can you imagine me at one of those classes? I'd be a complete pain in the ass). At our old church, it was simply a matter of calling the youth minister and saying it was time to dunk some kids.

And so we did. One night after a youth event, I baptized our daughter and the youth minister baptized our son. A small crowd stayed and there was the requisite well-wishing afterward. This was all very interesting to me because it was abundantly clear that this ritual meant something to the crowd, and to the kids, that it doesn't for me. For me it is almost mundane, par for the course, and a bit of a foregone conclusion: they've grown up in church, and this is an accepted rite of passage. For others, this means that they get to go to heaven. We don't talk about heaven and hell at our house, but I'm sure they get that in other venues, and it's definitely one of those topics where I don't really need one of my kids blurting out "but my dad says..." in those venues. So I keep quiet.

Plus -- and this is more significant -- I wonder if maybe they don't need a heaven/hell, good/evil kind of universe at this stage of their psychosocial development. I try to live by a kind of "prime directive": I don't jack with somebody's worldview as long as it seems to be working for them, and by "working" I think I mean that it generally encourages them to be decent folk. I'm not afraid to tweak, challenge, poke, prod, or question -- but I've found that it is best to do so within their current framework. Present an alternative too soon and all they hear is rank goofiness. Someday -- and for my kids, being my kids, it might happen sooner than later -- they'll begin to ask questions and ponder deep mysteries and the usual answers won't work anymore. And it will be time for the Talk.

Anyway, I do enjoy the symbolism of baptism, of death and rebirth, of the cleansing waters. And of course we baptized them "in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit," which apparently (like praying "in Jesus' name") means you just have to say that. I suspect we're missing something here, some original context that might well be unrecoverable. If the passage where this phrase occurs is an interpolation of a later baptismal formula, which I find plausible, then any original meaning was lost before the words got put into Jesus' mouth.

What I like to think it means, which I'm not sure is supportable by the text itself but is at least consistent with the ecclesiology of the book of Ephesians, is that we are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that we are immersed in the divine Name, swimming in the eternal Logos, bouyed by the amniotic waters of the Spirit from before time began. That we breathe the very breath of God and become the Body of Christ.

And maybe -- just so they don't take themselves too seriously -- we should give the newly baptized a bag of hammers.

When We All Get to Heaven

2009-01-19T07:04:00.004-05:00

The benefit concert came off just fine, and was fun to do. We got a chance to reflect for a moment on our purpose for being there. Our front man and bandleader, whose wife is the one facing cancer, told us the story of the doctor visit where they found out the cancer had returned.

"I really couldn't believe it," he said. "I felt like I had missed something, like this couldn't really be happening. We got what information we could, and then drove home. She was real quiet for a long time and then said, 'You know, heaven's gonna be awesome.' I told her that was true, but she wasn't dead yet. I'm praying for a miracle."

The rest of us played our part by hearing the story, by honoring the telling. Some offered vague affirmations, or a hand on the shoulder. It would not have been out of place for someone to pray right then, but none of us was willing to take on that level of spiritual responsibility. The most likely candidate, by virtue of having some ministry experience and recognizing the moment, was me, but I wasn't up to it. We let the silence linger as an unspoken prayer and then one of us -- it might have been me -- offered a "Well..." and then articulated a need to get a bottle of water, or go to the bathroom, or visit the food booth, before it was time to play. We transitioned out of that liminal moment by invoking our groundedness in the physical.

I'm fascinated by the role that heaven plays in our friend's handling of adversity. I'm sure my own rejection of a conscious afterlife would be unthinkable to him, and not just because it flies in the face of Christian doctrine. For him, I think, it would a denial of hope that goes far beyond the jots and tittles of theological speculation. To say "heaven's gonna be awesome" or "I'm praying for a miracle" is to affirm the fundamental goodness of the universe. Women who get cancer, women with husbands and children and friends who will be left behind to sort out the aftermath, will either be miraculously healed or they will be welcomed in the pure, unadulterated joy of heaven. Nothing else would be right, or good, or true.

The closest thing I've had to a mystical experience is the time -- I think I might have been dabbling in centering prayer -- when I saw, with what seemed to be pristine clarity, that there is no conscious afterlife. Or at least I saw, with pristine clarity, that I don't believe in one. It's hard to explain. It's like the core of the universe opened up to me and I saw: this is it. I can doubt the experience but the conviction stays with me, gleaming and white like a sun-bleached bone, beautiful and stark and horrifying.

It wasn't completely a bolt from the blue, though. I'd been thinking about such things. I'd done some study that suggested most of our visions of heaven are really miscontextualized metaphors of covenant renewal. We literalize those images into a concrete expectation of heaven as a place. Maybe the ancients did, too, but I find it interesting that the early Jews had no concept of afterlife, at least not a strong one. (Actually, a Jewish friend of mine corrected me on this, explaining that afterlife teachings were passed down in a secret oral tradition so as not to distract from a proper focus on Torah, an explanation that I find understandable but historically dubious).

The image of the afterlife in the story of the rich man and Lazarus had long struck me as crudely literal, and it seemed to me that arcane information about the great beyond was not at all the point of the story. Jesus seemed altogether too "with it" to be earnestly offering wooden descriptions of Abraham's bosom. But I could see how he might be using the common understanding of such things to illustrate his point about how the poor are to be treated. Some will complain that I'm projecting my own bias onto Jesus but we all do that so it's a wash.

Then I began to wonder: what if it's all like that? What if the Bible actually gives us no reliable information about the hereafter at all? "Today you will be with me in paradise." What else do you tell a man in the throes of his own execution?

Today I have a somewhat different view of Jesus' relationship with the text. I'm more likely to interrogate the rhetorical strategies behind a given gospel writer's use of a story or saying than I am to wonder what Jesus really said or did and why. But the thought stayed with me, and probably set me up for my so-called epiphany.

Look, it's all I've got. Maybe I was scraping the bottom of the mystical barrel. Maybe it's the contemplative equivalent of a lump of coal in my stocking. Some people get the beatific vision; I get "There is no afterlife." I'm not complaining.

My musical friend doesn't need any of this. Like the thief on the cross, he doesn't need to stare directly into the eclipse I call reality. I am invigorated by the idea that this is it. It plunges me into the experience of the present moment. It speaks to the sacredness of all things, the holiness that surrounds us. It helps me to see every bush ablaze with what I can only call the glory of God, shining like shook foil. But I don't expect this to make any sense to someone who earnestly believes Jesus paid his way to heaven and his cancer-stricken beloved will get there before him. It doesn't need to.

He believes these things not because he is weak or benighted or needs a crutch any more than we all do. He believes these things because he has hope, because he wants to affirm the universe as a good place, because for him that blaze of glory needs to be backed by something Real. It's like being on the gold standard, and my own existential floating-point currency isn't worth a damn to somebody like that. So I nod, and I listen. Maybe I place my hand on his shoulder and let the moment speak.

And maybe I should have prayed.

The Teaspoon -- an Irritable Quote

2009-01-13T19:59:00.002-05:00

"I was diverted by NPR when a disembodied male voice said that a mere teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh a billion pounds. As a literature person I at first missed the point and wondered at the preposterous strength of the teaspoon."

- Jim Harrison, The English Major

Cage and the iPod Shuffle

2009-01-08T06:12:00.003-05:00

I got an Mp3 player for Christmas. (It wasn't an iPod Shuffle, but the brand name makes for a better title.) I've never had one, and I wasn't expecting it. I certainly hadn't asked for one; it never occured to me that one might be useful. Despite being a musician (and a classically trained composer, which isn't as interesting as it sounds), I'm not a big consumer of music. I don't really have time to sit down and listen for the sake of listening, and I'm often in situations -- at home, or in my shared office -- where listening to music would be distracting to others. Moreover, it's often distracting to me, as I have little concept of background music.

At least I used to. There seems to be a difference between music as ambient noise and a personal soundtrack pumped directly to my ears. I can't explain it. Plus it offers a cocoon of sound that can itself be a little distracting, but can also be helpful when silence is not an option. It might be some sort of sonic ADD thing; music that is familiar and expected is less distracting than random interesting sources of noise that seduce my attention with their very novelty.

I'm also less self-conscious. On one hand, I'm not tempted to choose a playlist based on its effect on my public image, which I've been known to do. Yes, I'm that vain. But on the other hand I'm also not leery of enjoying things like Stravinsky or Berg or Arvo Pärt that others might find odd, or might set a strange mood. I have my limits -- I have no taste for Wozzeck, for instance -- but there's some stuff I like that's a little out there. My current source of self-consciousness is the fact that I'm wearing headphones and might find myself audibly interacting with an auditory landscape known only to me.

Part of that landscape is sacred music, especially the Masses of Palestrina. According to legend, Palestrina single-handedly saved polyphony (singing in parts, basically) from the cutting-room floor of ecclesiastical history. Back in the day, chant was monophonic. Everyone sang the same thing. Gradually, composers added parts, working the voices against each other, until by the 16th century things were pretty complicated. People were complaining that these compositional flights of fancy were obscuring the words, so one of the minor items of the agenda of the Council of Trent was the idea of busting everything back down to monophonic chant and being done with it.

The Tridentine council was a major apparatus in the Counter-reformation. The church was beset with scandal and losing parishioners to Lutheran upstarts, and had bigger fish to fry than trying to deal with artsy-fartsy musical types and people complaining about worship. There is nothing new under the sun. Besides, according to another legend the chants were dictated to Pope Gregory by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. That's a pretty rousing endorsement.

So anyway, the story continues with Palestrina gaining an audience with one of the cardinals and arranging for a performance of a Mass. The cardinal, upon hearing the majesty, beauty, and sublime clarity of Palestrina's work, determined that such wonderment could not be lost and persuaded the council to adopt measures that would not prohibit polyphony but restrict it to a style that roughly corresponds to that of Palestrina. To this day it is the work of Palestrina from which we derive the rules for 16-century counterpoint.

When I teach music appreciation, I proceed historically, so by the time I get to Palestrina they've heard chant, which is serene but somewhat flat, and some quaint and rather odd-sounding Renaissance dance music as well as early polyphony. Palestrina (and of course Victoria or Lassus would work just about as well) comes in like a breath of fresh air, something almost ethereal, something rapturous in its austerity.

I tell them the apocryphal story and then I play one of Palestrina's Masses and ask them to consider that even if the story is not true, it is not hard to imagine someone wanting to keep this music around. If we were to see the heavens break open and hear the angelic choirs, I tell them, they'd be singing Palestrina. Never mind that I don't believe in heaven, or angels, or the ethnocentrism of assigning the celestial chorus selections from the Western canon. The idea is that I really, really like Palestrina.

The Mass, as an artistic medium, has left an indelible imprint on Western music. The five-part construction of the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) is almost certainly the forerunner of the classic multi-movement works such as the sonata, the concerto, or the symphony. Not only that, but the tripartate structure of the Kyrie -- kyrie eleison, christe eleison, kyrie eleison -- probably has some bearing on the more developed ABA format, called sonata-allegro form, that characterizes most first movements of such works. (My counterpoint teacher made a similar claim about the Sanctus, I think, and the minuet and trio of the classical symphony, but he never elaborated on this).

The gist of ABA form, its esoteric secret, is that the repeat of A is not the same, even if it is identical note for note to its previous iteration. It has been transfigured by B. Its context is different. It is post-B. In sonata-allegro form there is the exposition, or statement of thematic material, then the development in which this material is sliced and diced in various ways, and then the recapitulation, which re-introduced the original material, with some modifications. But the modifications only heighten the sense in which these ideas have shifted in context.

This lives on in jazz, where the classic structure is a statement of the head, or main melodic idea, then the solos which function as a kind of development section, then a final statement of the head. It is also given a nod in pop stylings, where the last few choruses emerge after contrasting material in a bridge. Country songs sometimes heighten this with narrative material in the bridge or final verse that significantly alters the context of the chorus lyrics, often making use of wordplay or double entendre.

20th century composer John Cage took this to a different level. Among his numerous experiments was to find ways to randomize the order of elements in a piece of music. Musicians would have to roll dice or consult the I Ching to determine the order of various aspects of a composition. Thus, each performance was different, not only because things were in a different order, but because the change of order meant that each section would be heard in a different context from another performance. The D section you hear last if the section are playes ABCD is not the same as the D section you hear if they're played BDAC.

So far on my Mp3 player I haven't got past "shuffle" mode. In this, there are no decisions to be made; faced with about 5G (so far) of music I like, I can fearlessly hit "play all" and let the digital fates control my sonic destiny. So far the only variation I've employed is to ocassionally limit my listening to tracks designated "classical" (and I've learned that it is important to pay attention to this designation when loading the player, lest some gem mislabeled "symphonic" or "orchestral" or "choral" get left out of the rotation).

This horrifies classical purists, who insist that one must take in all of a symphony in one fell swoop to get the full effect, or liturgists who might complain that the Agnus Dei is meaningless without the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo and Sanctus preceding it. And they're correct that it might be different, but I'm enjoying the grab bag. Brahm's Academic Festival Overture takes a different cast when it follows a cut from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. A short movement of a Phillip Glass string quartet makes a fine introduction to a wistful Natalie Merchant song. When you hear Stravinsky after Def Leppard you wonder what he might have been like as a rocker. So the purist might object.

I think John Cage would have liked it.

Many Rooms

2009-01-01T07:29:00.009-05:00

I'm fascinated by the historical Jesus, which is to say that I'm fascinated by the various "quests" for such a Jesus and the literature that is generated from those quests. I certainly haven't read all of it -- I haven't even read the classics like Schweitzer or Sanders. My exposure consists mostly of "new quest" types, and what I enjoy about this literature is not its ability to shed light on the historical personage of Jesus, which I consider a fool's errand, but what it can tell us about the sociohistorical context of the texts in which Jesus figures prominently.

As for the historical Jesus, there is no habeas corpus, no body in custody that we can present. The tomb is empty. All we have are texts, a literary corpus. Or, if you like, the Corpus Christi, the gathered eucharistic community, the living tradition left behind in the wake of the Christ-event, whatever that might have been. Like any project of meaning-making, the Christian tradition is suspended over an abyss, flailing about in a cloud of unknowing. We are always just this side of a semiotic event horizon.

On one end of the spectrum we might find those for whom the Jesus of the Gospels and the "historical Jesus" are coterminous. The Gospels are history to this way of thinking, a position that is naïve but understandable. While the idea that all four Gospels are historical in this way creates intractable problems of harmonization (anyone who has read a Gospel harmonization, or worse, had to create one for a class on the Gospels, knows what I mean), I suppose we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that at least one of the evangelists -- Mark seems the most likely candidate -- is pretty much giving us the straight dope.

At the other end are the biblical minimalists, who argue that the Gospels are complete fabrications. For those of us who grew up in church, this sounds utterly batty, but it's really not that absurd; however many gospel manuscripts we might have, none of them can be reliably dated early enough to point unambiguously to a real person, nor is there slam-dunk extrabiblical evidence of Jesus' life as described in those manuscripts. The light of the world is shrouded in shadows.

The value of the minimalist approach is that it places the focus entirely on the texts and why the communities out of which they sprang might have told such stories. If the charge of fabrication seems a bit strong, it can't really be ruled out, and focusing on the social context of these stories and the rhetorical purposes to which they were put seems a responsible and fruitful way of handling the texts. That a real person is somewhere behind the texts seems reasonable to me -- Jesus is more like Daniel Boone than Paul Bunyan -- but I certainly can't prove that, and wouldn't bother trying.

In between, then, we have the historical Jesus questors, those who believe there was an historical Jesus, but that he is not -- or not quite -- the Jesus of the Gospels. N.T. Wright finds a largely orthodox Jesus, one who is consistent with the Gospel accounts even if those accounts are not straight history. (Wright's reconstruction does not completely avoid the harmonization problem, but his approach to the texts at least bears an attentiveness to history that he seems to have lost by the time he gets to the wretched Surprised by Hope.)

Crossan and Borg (whom I enjoy quite a bit) look into the well and see a sapiential, or wisdom-focused Jesus, a cross between a sage and a revolutionary. In this episode, the part of Jesus is being played by Ghandi. Dale Allison sees an apocalyptic Jesus a la Schweitzer, a reluctant prophet-turned Messiah expecting a ngab gib (the opposite of a big bang) that never comes.

It's tempting to suggest that we find whatever Jesus we need, and to some extent this is true. I think it's way too cynical, however, to assert that historical Jesus scholars simply find a Jesus that looks like them. I think Crossan's Jesus makes demands on him that he's not prepared to live up to, and Allison knows full well that if he's right about Jesus, Jesus was wrong about the end of the world. Surely Wright needs his orthodox savior, but what he comes up with does not seem exclusively Anglican, and it's hard to imagine Wright's Jesus as the Bishop of Durham. Jesus is pliable, but he is not exactly a Rorschach test, and he's hardly a mirror.

To be sure, we are human, all too human, and when we stare into the abyss it stares back. When we speak into the void we hear a unique voice but it is not necessarily, not always, not simply ours. Or it is ours -- it is for us -- but it is not our own. We get the Jesus we need, but this does not mean we get the Jesus we want, which would be far too obvious. When we become too conscious of our personal mythologies they stop working for us.

Even if the historical Jesus cannot be found -- does not, in a word, exist -- the reconstructions are still helpful. They're interesting to read, some of them piss off conservatives, and their immense popularity justifies the existence and salaries of academics who like to write about religion, a project that I'm wholly in favor of. One should be able to make ludicrous amounts of money writing about religion, and one should be supplied with free coffee while doing so.

A guy can dream, can't he?

What fascinates me is the sense that we're collectively looking for some lost or hidden truth, hoping the real Jesus will please stand up not just because he's an important character in the drama of Western history but because we think he's holding out on us. We want Jesus to give up his secrets. We are wrestling with the angel, hoping for a blessing. The unspoken assumption is that if we can just figure out what Jesus really said, or who he really was, there will be some magic left in that old silk hat we found. Even people who have deep misgivings about Christianity in general sometimes feel compelled to do something with Jesus.

I think we want Jesus to mean something beyond our constructions and the slippery bastard refuses to cooperate. James Carse argues, in The Religious Case Against Belief, that it is precisely Jesus' protean and polysemic character that makes him so valuable to Christianity as a religion -- by which Carse seems to mean a living and long-standing tradition of cultural meaning -- and so troublesome to Christianity as a belief system.

Nobody gets the last word on who Jesus was, or is, or is to come. He can't be just anything, but he's certainly been a lot of things, and there's no reason to think he's going to settle down and start a family any time soon. He has no home, no place to rest his head, nothing but a borrowed tomb. Even dead he was a squatter. At least he folded the sheets.

Jesus is God in the Christian tradition because he stands in for God as the plastic signifier of something beyond ourselves. We project onto Jesus our deepest fears and most profound longings, but he is not a tabula rasa, taking anything we might dish out. Those projections would be different if they were aimed somewhere else, just as they would be different if they came from somewhere else. It is this intersection, this nexus, this liminal space, that I think defines Christianity as a tradition. We are a part of this tradition, in the broadest possible sense, as long as we insist on doing something with Jesus, whatever that might be.

There are many, many rooms.

Our Privilege -- an Irritable quote

2008-12-31T08:34:00.003-05:00

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

- Marilynne Robinson, from The Paris Review

You Did Everything Right -- an Irritable Review

2008-12-30T18:20:00.002-05:00

Ellery's latest offering, You Did Everything Right, is something of a provisional work, a demo-cum-EP that was not originally conceived as a stand-alone product. In that sense it is less a coherent project than a collection of songs -- but oh! the songs.

The songs conjure an eclectic admixture of impressions, and allusions, of hints and allegations. There's a little Sarah McLachlan here, a little Become Me-era Indido Girls, but those are all too obvious. It's possible to hear hints of Coldplay or later U2, maybe some Aimee Mann or Steve Earl. I'll be damned if there isn't a little Linda Ronstandt in there, skulking about, hoping not to be noticed.

All of this to say that there's at once an ineffable familiarity and an undeniable freshness to these songs. This is probably Ellery's most mature work to date, which might go without saying but not all of us are graced by Time in the same dignified way. There is a grown-up sensuality here, more caress than climax, more subtly than outright seduction. These songs come to us unfolding slowly, languid and bittersweet, like old friends. We've moved beyond the fresh earnestness of "Song for Lovers" or the precocious wide-eyed wonder of "Long Coat On," which is not to diminish where those earlier offerings found us -- or left us.

But there is something almost approaching angst here, something more self-aware and less innocent. What we haven't left, and never want to leave, is Ellery's uncanny ability to conjure a whole life in a four-minute pop song, or weave a melody out of what would for others would be just an ostinato. Ellery's songs have never been pretentious but these are more relaxed and surefooted. They have nothing to prove, and much to offer. They are generous, like lovers.

Of course, there are things that give me pause: the curiously lo-fi toms and guitar sounds on "After", or the constant dangerous negotiation between distinctiveness and diction in Tasha's vocals. Any use of chimes skirts the edge of cliche, and it's hard not to fall on the other side.

But there are other moments that make any liabilities utterly forgiveable. These are small touches -- the delightfully jangly tambourine on "What I Need." And the Rhodes. Dear Lord, the Rhodes -- is that real? (Don't tell me.) The consistently artful and understated drumming. The use of ambience, of space, of delicate textures and evocative soundscapes. "After"'s plaintive harmonies (and it's good to hear Justin's voice). Proof that the electric guitar can sound good clean (or mostly so).

Or this:

Darling, don't be frightened
There are skies under your skin
In a wide array of white and gray
On wild winter winds.

There's a moment in the title track where the bottom drops out and Tasha is left suspended over almost nothing, vulnerable and naked, which she faces without flinching. And as the song unfolds from that moment, do we actually hear Tasha let her voice crack?

God, that's fetching.

Prodigal Son, part 2

2008-12-19T19:37:00.003-05:00

It is true that some find, in the conversion experience, the impetus toward some measure of a better life. They get clean and sober. They find friends and stave off loneliness. They turn their lives around and become productive members of society. These improvements come in tangible terms that are not to be discounted.

The dark side of this dynamic is twofold: One, such improvements are often concomitant with a process in which such people are mainstreamed into an oppressive culture. Giving your heart to Jesus also means learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb. They gain an identity as part of a demographic or even a voting bloc but their true political agency is largely eviscerated.

Two, those whose lives do not manifest room for such "improvements" -- which I submit is the majority of American evangelicals -- must continually seek narrative satisfaction in the repetition structure I describe above. They must seek, in evangelical media and church programming, ways to inscribe themselves as sinners who can find absolution in the message of God's love and redemption. They must do this over and over again in Sisyphean [Sisyphusian? Sisyphal?] futility.

This mimics and mirrors the way in which capitalism continually constructs and then partially alleviates consumer desire until eventually it is the desire itself that we are after. We want the catharsis of wanting. We seek the pathos of seeking. There is an addictive element to this, but also a more deeply pathological dimension, hinted at in Fight Club, in which the narrator says of insomnia (which seems to be a trope for capitalist malaise), "nothing is real; everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." Everything solid melts into the air.

Evangelical spirituality freezes the religious subject at the point of conversion much as capitalism freezes the economic subject at the moment of desire. The religious identity must be continually performed in ritual and in narrative recapitulation just as our consumer identity must be continually performed in the act of consumption but also in the structuring of desire. Being defined in perpetuity as a "consumer" is not structurally different from being consistently defined as a "sinner saved by grace." These identity constructions are at the very least complementary, if not mutually reinforcing.

The "practical application" of much evangelical preaching and teaching -- The Purpose-Driven Life comes to mind here -- is therapeutic and generally serves to either assist us in gaining access to the mainstream of consumer culture (this is especially true of theologies of health and prosperity) or to bear up under the demands of such culture and mitigate its more damaging effects. This is roughly the argument Slavoj Zizek makes against self-help culture and many Americanized versions of eastern religion. In the ramped-up rhetoric of a first-century rabbi, we make our converts twice the sons and daughters of hell that we are.

N.T. Wright argues that the context of prodigal son parable is eschatological, that the original audience would have heard the parable not as much in terms of individual repentance but of the restoration of both houses of Israel. As much as Wright and I disagree on other things, I think he has a point here. But I'm not sure how helpful a socio-rhetorical analysis is in this case, and I think in our efforts to correct for modernist individualism we have a tendency to swing too far in the other direction.

If we are to recover this parable as something useful, if we are to channel its affective power into something truly life-giving, we must complete the circle. We must teach this parable not simply as a tender story of the possibility of homecoming, but of the sacred responsibility to become the weloming father. The narrative gap that we must close is not the prodigal son's empty place at the dinner table but the kenotic absence of God himself.

The human social matrix is our ecological home. We are adapted to the tribe much in the way whales are adapted to life in the pod, or crows to the murder. This is not to celebrate any particular form of tribal life nor is it to deny the need to consciously adapt to the available forms of social organization in the present. But the basic tribal impulse, the need for human interaction, is not one that we have had time to adapt out of, and I can't think of a good reason that we should.

Coming home, then, for whatever prodigals that there be, must mean coming into a welcoming human community. This does not need to be exclusively or specifically ecclesiastical. But we need, in various and varied forms, pockets of human solidarity performing the necessary political task of re-membering the disembodied capitalist subjects, seeking not merely retreat or sanctuary but genuine agency.

For far too long evangelicalism has offered simply the idea that God loves us. But this God only exists to the extent that such love is made manifest in genuine human contact. What we need is not a narrative transaction constantly repeated but a divine presence continually embodied. Those with ears to hear must become that presence, must bear the ring and the robe and order the feast to begin. Nothing less is salvific. The idea of God is not enough.

For what does it profit us to save souls and lose the whole world?

The Prodigal Son, part 1

2008-12-19T06:33:00.008-05:00

Sundays when I was little our beleaguered mother -- single, in school, raising three kids -- put us on the church bus, put a roast in the crock pot, and settled in for a couple of hours of respite. She got a much-needed sabbath, we got some churchin'.

And churchin' we got, at some sort of rowdy revival church focused on soul-winning. It seems to me it might have been a Nazarene church, but I'm not really sure. We weren't Nazarene, but I don't think my mother was picky. They had a bus.

I don't remember much, except that for some reason I went forward. A lot. I vaguely remember the minister, on what was probably one of many trips to the altar by that point, being kind but mildly condescending. It's not that I blame him; who was this nerdy kid who kept coming forward? I'd been saved several times over by that point, like someone who places reservations at more than one restaurant, just in case. I'm not sure he knew what to do with me.

For my part, I think I probably took the invitation too literally. This is why I think it must have been a revivalistic church, heavy on the altar call, and I was easily swayed by the rhetoric. I was "suggestible," probably a good candidate for hypnosis, or a shamanic trance. I think that's one of the reasons I'm such a skeptic now, as a way of steeling myself against such suggestibility.

I hadn't really missed the point, however; I had simply over-identified with it, or over-internalized it. For it is precisely this repetition that lies at the heart of a lot of evangelical spirituality, and betrays both the vacuousness of evangelical soteriology and its parasitism upon capitalism -- and even this is redundant.

Our church recently did a series on the parables, spending two weeks on the Prodigal Son. It was handled well, with one week on the wayfaring brother and the second week on the grumpy, judgmental homebody. I have to admit I'm a bit of a sucker for this story, a sap for any parent/child story and easily surrendered to the catharsis of a homecoming tale. I'm suggestible, in other words.

It is hard to resist the affective power of this parable. In most tellings, the reader/hearer gains access to this power, gets enjoyment and release from this story, by closing the narrative gap and identifying with the role of the prodigal. To do this we code ourselves theologically as errant waifs in need of the loving embrace of our father-God, which is generously and lavishly granted in the narrative. Our minister, the second week, invited us to identify with the other brother, adjuring us to learn from the father's grace in receiving the prodigal.

But it is the first understanding, of ourselves as the prodigal, that is the mainstay of evangelical conversion. The narrative transaction of the evangelical conversion experience, which forms the frame in which Luke 15 is usually read, must be continually repeated in the life of the believer. Sermons, songs, various and varied aspects of the evangelical media machine -- most of these are designed, in some way, to get us narratively lost and found over and over again, that we might somehow continually relive the conversion event.

In a similar way, romantic comedies and love songs invite us to repeat and relive the experience of falling in love, or the pathos of breaking up. It is an empty parody of the Benedictine vow of conversatio, or perpetual conversion, the life-long process of becoming to which monks commit themselves. But this is not to let the Catholics off the hook, inasmuch as I wonder if this isn't also steeped in the perpetual sacrifice of the Eucharist. (Indeed, William Cavanaugh reads consumerism as a parody of the Eucharist, for which the remedy is a robust re-invigoration of eucharistic theology.)

My childhood appropriation of this dynamic, however much it might presage some of my instability regarding religion and the construction of identity, serves as a kind of living reductio ad asburdum of the need for repetition. For me this had to be literal, and it manifested in my going forward week after week. But my reaction differed from the norm in degree but not in kind -- in expression but not in essence.

[To be continued...]

Christmas

2008-12-18T06:08:00.000-05:00

It is fashionable, this time of year, to bitch and moan that Christmas is not what it used to be, or what it is supposed to be, or has become in one way or another sullied and denigrated. There is a broad range of jeremiads on the topic, from complaints that Christmas is too commercial and consumer-oriented to hand-wringing over the excision of explicitly Christian content from our public celebrations of the season. Some even take exception to the use of "X-mas," complaining that Christ has been "X-ed out" of Christmas -- apparently unaware that the use of the Greek chi, or X, has been a shorthand for Christ in the Christian tradition since long before Macy's had a Santa Claus. One way or another, however, we are barraged with diatribes berating us for forgetting the "reason for the season."

The real reason for the season, however, is that it's so damn dark. The Christian holiday is piggybacked onto a melange of pagan celebrations, most of them having something to do with the winter solstice. Just on the other side of this longest night the sun slowly begins to reclaim its authority over the sky and our pagan ancestors found cause to celebrate. For some this becomes just more evidence of the "war on Christmas," and there are always those encouraging us to forgo trees, or the use of "yuletide," or Santa, because these accoutrements are tainted by their pagan lineage. The Puritans we will always have with us. (Actually, the Puritans went so far as to ban Christmas altogether, finding its worldliness irredeemable.)

The irony here is that the birth narratives themselves are probably constructed out of the raw material of pagan mythologies. That and some bad translating: in a key prophecy in Isaiah, the Greek Septuagint uses the word for "virgin" to translate a Hebrew word meaning "young woman." This is not linguistically untenable in a world where a young woman could reasonably be assumed to be virginal, but the original context probably refers to the prophet's wife, who -- without prying too much into the prophetic personal life -- was probably not a virgin. Either God can't read Hebrew, or, in the interest of narrating Jesus' life as a fulfillment of prophecy, somebody was a little eager.

Jesus doesn't even get born until later in the tradition. For Paul, Jesus seems to have been "declared the Son of God by the power of his resurrection" (Rom 1:4). The writer of Hebrews evinces a similar perspective. Mark's Gospel has Jesus declared the Son of God at his baptism, 'Son of God' being a royal or messianic designation. Only Luke and Matthew give us (somewhat conflicting) birth stories. John is bullish on pre-existence and incarnation but is silent about the actual birth, which almost seems a bit Gnostic but maybe he just didn't get the memo. At any rate, John's take on "only begotten" seems far more cosmic, and much less literal, than parthogenesis.

A cruder version of divine conception lay at the heart of Rome's etiology; mythical founders Remus and Romulus were the semidivine twin sons of a woman raped by Mars. The god Mithra was born in a cave at the winter solstice, attended by shepherds (which might explain a few things) but he was actually birthed from a rock, which seems a bit mundane (pun intended). As a mythological trope, virgin birth was not unheard of, and ancient kings -- who were often also gods -- were often assigned some kind of miraculous birth appropriate to figures of great importance.

The details are contested, of course; some take all such references to be mere copycats. The early church fathers, for whom such "signs and wonders" were exceptional but not, strictly speaking, impossible, regarded the similarities as Satanic counterfeits. The more modern C.S. Lewis cleverly argued that in Jesus, God made these mythological elements come literally true so that Christians could have bragging rights. My virgin-born savior can beat up your virgin-born savior.

The common Biblical trope for special nativities is to have a child born to a barren woman, like Hannah or Rachel, or to a woman beyond childbearing years, like Sarah -- but Luke used that one with John the Baptist, so he had to dig deeper into the collective unconscious to get Jesus into the world in something beyond the usual way. Suffice it to say that there's a strong hint of syncretism here, and those who would excise all things pagan from our midwinter celebrations might find themselves going all Thomas Jefferson on the Biblical text itself. There is no pristine, unadulterated Christmas. If anyone should be grousing about having their holiday hijacked, it's the pagans.

The consumerism angle hits a little closer to home. I am not a fan of capitalism. Pace the famous speech by Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street, greed is not good. It does not "work." It might be harnessed for brief moments of corporate glory but it is a lousy long-term strategy and it will destroy us. The invisible hand is giving us the finger right about now. Our current economic "crisis" comes down to a shortage, not of basic human needs or raw materials, but of credit -- something that is not, in a material sense, even real. Parts of the world struggle to have clean drinking water or basic health care; we've got our panties in a bunch because we can't get a car loan.

As strongly as I feel about this, as much as I believe that if a sustainable future exists, it is a post-capitalist future, this is not a problem with Christmas. Granted, there are ways in which the Christmas buying season might put a finer point on things, laying our contradictions bare (and nobody gets trampled in a Wal-Mart on, say, St. Patrick's Day), but the problems of capitalism are not limited to Christmas, nor is the commercialization of Christmas terribly new. Christmas, like truth, was never what it used to be.

So, if we filter out those elements that are not specific to Christmas, and the grumblings of those who think the entire world should validate their belief system, what are we left with?

In the midst of the darkest time of year, we string lights and decorate with shiny things. We pay attention to children. We give each other gifts. We think about the poor and the less fortunate, and while it would be better to do this all year, at least we do it. We throw more parties, and visit more relatives. We wish each other well on a regular basis. We invoke something called "Christmas spirit" as an excuse to momentarily shed our cynicism and look beyond our selfishness. We sing songs, and show a higher tolerance for jazz than at any other time of the year. We make cookies and drink eggnog. We make snow angels and write Christmas cards. We go to church and light candles and even the most skeptical of us are tempted to strain for a glimpse of the numinous.

Christmas makes it fashionable to talk about things like peace and love without getting strange looks. Christmas gives us the gumption to share our feelings with that person we've been admiring all year, or the fortitude to extend grace to that pain-in-the-ass down the hall. Christmas, for all of its saccharine sentimentality, for all of its sappy sitcom send-ups of A Christmas Carol, for all of its tendency to degenerate into an ideological battleground, encourages good things in us. Does it "work"? I don't know about that.

But it beats the hell out of greed.

God

2008-11-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I miss God.

By this I mean I sometimes miss my old ideas about God.

And by this I mean a vague nostalgia for a time when those ideas did some kind of real work.

There's a sense of innocence lost. Like Bob Seger, sometimes I "wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." To speak of knowledge, rather than simply belief, might be arrogant but it's honest. I know things, and even if ultimately these are just things I know about my own belief, I know them. I claim them. I own them. Nostalgia notwithstanding, I wouldn't go back. I can't even imagine what it would be like to go back, though it would make certain things a bit easier.

Because we're home-schoolers, and the stereotypical homeschooling family is a bastion of right-wing wackiness, we ended up on an Answers in Genesis mailing list. "Why do we have this," I hissed to my wife the first time I saw their literature among our mail. I looked at it warily, hoping I could incinerate with my eyes. This is science written by people who don't understand mythology, and that means that we are not friends.

The evolution ship sailed a long time ago for me. I recognize an ineffable bias toward life in our little corner of the universe, some sort of elan vital that animates the process by which we have come to exist and to be able to face the paradox of our own existence. But that existence evinces the rough-and-tumble of adaptation more than it does the pristine hand of design. There's a delightful haphazardness to the whole thing, just as much Loki as Thor, as much Coyote trickster as Great Spirit. To put a single, omnipotent, agentic deity in charge of the whole shebang is to create a totem to absurdity, a shrine to silliness. The older I get, the more creationist propaganda bugs the shit out of me.

I'm a Christian. This is my background, my faith, the mythological language I speak as a native tongue. But I like my Christianity as mythology, as religion, as something that is life-giving and meaningful but not intended as substitute for critical thought. As something that impels me to greater compassion, something that inspires me to contribute to the greater good. Something that binds me to the rest of humanity. We're in this together.

Theology is not ontological discovery. Theologians -- including those us of armed with only a few Bible classes and a high-speed internet connection -- are not uncovering what God is "really like." Please. Can we really be that delusional? I know, I know -- we can. We are. It's probably in our genes. But seriously. It's not that what we think about God is unimportant; I love the prophetic passages where the Hebrew God whom Jesus worshiped is pictured as a champion of the poor, the downtrodden the alien. I'm a good liberal. I believe in that shit.

But it's the justice I believe in -- the picture of God that communicates such justice to us is just window-dressing. I believe in it because it resonates with what I see in the world, it speaks to my concerns for our survival as a species. Something's gotta give, or someday -- years or centuries or millennia from now -- we're going to destroy ourselves. I agree with those conservative voices who suggest we can't really destroy the Earth. I'm sure they're right; the biosphere is remarkably resilient. And I tend to be leery of predictions of immanent catastrophe.

But I have no doubt we could make our planet a really, really uncomfortable place for mammals -- and this, I submit, is not in our best interest. This much I believe. I can even go so far as to say that there's something larger than ourselves to which we are in some way accountable. I'm willing to call that something "God" as a way of keeping conversations shorter. But this is a vague sentiment, a misty notion. I don't know what this "God" is like; to me it's more like the Tao than something personal, but my Taoism only goes so far.

I have difficult ascribing specific intelligence or agency to this divine whatever-it-is, only because our concepts of intelligence and agency are anthropocentric. Mammalian brains are generally more complex than reptile brains, and primate brains are more complex than those of their four-legged cousins. Human brains are the most complex of the primates, and it is this difference that we laud as intelligence. Then we ascribe that same kind of intelligence to God, only more of it, so that God is a big celestial uber-primate, king of the mammal-brains. Am I the only person who has a problem with this?

As much as I love theology, or maybe I just love biblical literature (which sounds more like me), the deeply ontological stuff -- the nature of the Trinity, hypostatic union, that sort of thing -- starts me eye-rolling. A friend of mine likes the Trinity because of the picture of God-as-community, and because it can serve to temper some of the more strident side effects of strict monotheism. I can dig that. But not all conversations about such things evince this kind of literary awareness, this slightly ironic bent toward the aesthetic.

Tell me that the Trinity is a poetically beautiful idea, that it reflects a longstanding predilection for "threeness" that shows up in our earliest religious formulations, that it rounds out and roughs up our conceptions about God, and I'll listen. Start using lame metaphors -- as if the Trinity, like basic sanitation, is something we really need to understand -- or complaining that The Shack is undermining trinitarian doctrine, and I'm checking out. (And no, I haven't read it. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd enjoy.)

I may have more support from my tradition than is immediately obvious. Rock star of critical theory Slavoj Zizek suggests that Jesus' "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" beats Nietzsche's "God is dead" to the punch. John Caputo develops a similar idea in The Weakness of God, a Derrida-soaked theology of the Cross. My own take on this requires us to imagine a time before Mark's gospel gets its Easter ending, a time before the Gospel of Luke and its sequel narrate the resurrection and ascension as discrete events, a time when these ideas were conflated, before anti-gnostic sentiment demanded a literal resurrection which then demanded a literal and separate ascension in order to explain where Jesus went. A time that, I admit, might not exist.

To claim ascension was to claim kingship -- ascension was to a throne, primarily, in this case a heavenly one. It marked Jesus, a dead guy, as the awaited king; a dead guy, not Herod, was king of the Jews, the Passion his grisly coronation. A dead guy, not Caesar, was the divine ruler of the whole world. A dead guy, not Caiaphas, was High Priest -- and his own sacrifice to boot. This is the morbid scandal, the "perverse core", of Christianity (the phrase, if not this meaning, is Zizek's). Is God dead? Not exactly -- but a dead guy is God. The rest of the history of Christianity is the story of trying to hide this shame, this nakedness, this stark existential reality. We hide it like we hide the evidence of our own animality, ashamed of what we really are, like so many cats in the litter box of systematic theology.

Amazing things can and do happen, and I'm all for karma, but when we take a good, hard look at winning and losing, at success and failure, these sorts of things seem less determined by a single locus of divine benevolence than an anarchy of fates or the interplay of chaos and complexity. Meaningless? That's assuming a lot. I see patterns in my life, threads and trajectories out of which I fashion meaning.

But I can't tell you why my life is so rife with such raw material for meaning-making when the only patterns available to some of us are those of squalor and shame, of loneliness and isolation, of destitution and defeat. I got lucky, and there's a temptation toward a kind of pre-emptive survivor's guilt, but that's not helpful at all. The hungry can't eat our guilt.

What if the real secret of the Christian message, the real meaning of the Cross, is that there is no God to save us from ourselves? It's not that God doesn't exist, necessarily; it's just that whenever we think that God is on our side, justifying our position, poised to swoop in and vindicate our good standing in the world, he's busy doing something else. Sure, he might raise us from the dead, if we're willing to believe in that sort of thing, but he's not taking us down from the cross.

There are other ways to get here, but I'll only speak for my tradition. In Christian doctrine, Christ is God. The Church is the Body of Christ. And people make up the church. Do the math. We're it. We want to shrink from this, to deny this, to blame God but at a certain point, if we dig deep enough, think hard enough, pray fervently enough we can't help but run up against this. We can be ennobled by it or we can continue to shrink from it. How many of our invocations of God are just ways of dodging responsibility?

"Our deepest fear is not that we're inadequate," Nelson Mandela said in his inaugural address: "Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

Size Matters

2008-09-18T19:35:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to pay attention, to see if this whole "snapped" thing is going to take. Have I crossed some threshold, or is this more of a momentary lapse of obsession? I'm not depressed, which would be a red flag (depression tends to interfere with things like sober, rational judgment and honest and accurate self-appraisal). In fact, I'm more relaxed and happy in general, tempted to use phrases like, "I'm just really in a good place right now," though I do have my dignity to maintain. I'm busy, but not terribly anxious. Life seems charmed but not particularly magical. I have a hard time believing in a theistic god and almost as hard a time believing in nothing. In other words, I seem to be myself.

If I'm really more of a liberal than a cutting-edge radical, this is due not so much to the things I can't take literally and my distaste for metaphysical speculation -- that's part of it, of course -- but to my suspicion that religion, if it is to have any value, must serve the common good. That there is some broader, if somewhat nebulous, notion of the Good, the Beautiful and the True that is not the purview of any particular religion or ideology and against which any such manifestation might be measured in some way. That sounds hopeless Platonic, but it's all I've got. The thing that is galling, I think, even to really open-minded, social justice-oriented radical types, is that I don't think my religion -- or yours, or anybody else's -- gets to decide what the common good is.

Look, I'm not kowtowing to the spectre of objectivity. I just think we collectively have a notion of something beyond ourselves that no one of us -- and no group of us -- can lay claim to, and that it is both the possibility of this larger perspective and our failure to fully apprehend it that ought to keep us humble. And so it's not just that I'm skeptical or cynical or too full of myself or that I fancy myself too smart for God (though I am guilty of all of these things from time to time), but also that I believe in something else, in some greater possibility, in something always frustratingly beyond our grasp but tantalizingly within our reach.

The circumstances of my life conspire against any plans I might have to go apostate. I've tried this before, thinking it was the honest and honorable thing to do, and it doesn't work out so well. I think the truth -- and I really don't mean this in quite the cynical way it sounds -- is that my Christian friends don't want me to be honest. They want me to be, maybe even need me to be, that quirky musical guy they see on stage from time to time, banging away on his "protestant guitar" and leading them in songs of comfort and affirmation. They're willing to live with the brooding intellectual side of me as long as they get those songs. I'm no Rich Mullins, but if you were paying attention at all you know that the evangelical world put up with a lot from Mullins -- he was definitely a misfit -- because they loved his music.

I'm telling the tale, so I have the prerogative of casting myself as the guy who breaks free from Plato's cave and sees the clear light of day. Call me uncharitable, but that's what it feels like. And I know what happens when you rush back in to tell the others what you've seen. It's not pretty. They're not ready for that.

There's a kind of postmodern cop-out that says there is no clear light of day, no outside to the cave, just an endless labyrinth of more caves, none closer to the light than any others. So learn to love your own cave, or find another if you must, but give up any notion of outside. The light is an illusion, and any claims to see it are just manifestations of your own arrogance and hubris.

This is a bunch of crap.

Please: I get the whole postmodern thing. The landscape has changed -- I don't deny that. And I like the changes. I know the real definition of "deconstruction." I drink lattes. I use the word "narrate" a lot. I think it's cool that the scenes in Pulp Fiction are out of order. I read Douglas Coupland, and I've used the word pastiche in an academic paper. I have pomo street cred. But I'm also something of a dissenter: all narratives are not created equal. Some are life-affirming; some are dangerous. And we get to decide which is which, we have to decide. If there are no inherent, objective criteria then we make them up, and if what we made up doesn't seem to be working we make different stuff up. This is our lot. We can't just give up and say to hell with it.

Maybe Plato's allegory is too simple; there's not just a cave and the light. There are lots of caves, and some of them spill out into what is probably an infinite regress of larger caverns. Maybe we never reach the light. But some are bigger than others. Some people have an expansive, embracing view of the world. Others have a narrow, constricting view of the world. Some of them want to foist their narrow, constricted view on everyone. Some of these people are from Alaska.

If I've snapped, it's not because I'm a defective believer. It's because I see more than I ever used to, and I've been seeing it for a long time, and it's not going away. I've got a goddamned bigger cave, and I like it. I'm thinking about roasting some marshmallows. You can come.