To Seem the Stranger

Oh, Mother

2011-11-14T14:37:00.001-08:00

I am sitting here waiting for someone’s Mom to die. This is the sickness of being polite. Being Pastor. Maybe if I am polite. Maybe if I accumulate enough polite moments in a person’s memory, despite their tacit embarrassment to avoid talking to me about religious things, maybe when something bad happens, maybe when their mother dies they will think that I might have thought something about this before, that I might know an ancient tribe of primitive aboriginals that has spent millennia peering into tombs and wailing prayers for the living. Maybe I might know where to look or where to go when they realize that at the grave we all lose confidence in what we thought we knew or knew we thought. I imagine a late night phone call, quiet sobs breaking like dirty waves at T-Street in San Clemente on the other line, Dave? Yes? I’m so sad.

But the true truth is I have known and loved two different girls who began to turn toward the Lord when their mom’s were dying of cancer. But when these moms, these beautiful women, these radiant beings, finally fell to the idiot hideousness of death, the thought that their mothers might not be entering into eternal beatitude with Jesus Christ our Lord, the thought they might be somewhere else, was sufficiently and understandably terrifying enough to crush all faith. Their dead mothers became their faith through a transaction of grief. Platitudes or the memory shawl of the beauty of peculiar humanity. Mother’s eyes. To these casts they fell and grieved and washed the stone with their tears and hair and fled from the sight of Him and the possibility that history might end. The poet, she was another. She read poems about her mother dying and they were beautiful poems, a beautiful temple and oblation, the same faith in the memory of the dead. And we clapped when she was done reading. And she smiled—smallish, polite, and graceful. Just like a Pastor.

Oh, Mother

2011-11-14T14:37:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here waiting for someone’s Mom to die. This is the sickness of being polite. Being Pastor. Maybe if I am polite. Maybe if I accumulate enough polite moments in a person’s memory, despite their tacit embarrassment to avoid talking to me about religious things, maybe when something bad happens, maybe when their mother dies they will remember that I might have thought something about this before, that I might be acquainted with an ancient tribe of primitive aboriginals that has spent millennia peering into tombs and shouting prayer. Maybe I might know where to look or go when they realize that at the grave we all lose confidence in what we thought we knew or knew we thought. I imagine a late night phone call, quiet sobs breaking like dirty waves at T-Street in San Clemente on the other line, Dave? Yes? I’m so sad.

But the true truth is I have known and loved two different girls who began to turn toward the Lord when their mom’s were dying of cancer. But when these moms, these beautiful women, these radiant beings, finally fell to the idiot hideousness of death, the thought that their mothers might not be entering into eternal beatitude with Jesus Christ our Lord, the thought they might be somewhere else, was sufficiently and understandably terrifying enough to crush all faith. Their dead mothers became their faith through a transaction of grief. Platitudes or the memory shawl of the beauty of peculiar humanity. Mother’s eyes. To these casts they fell and grieved and washed the stone with their tears and hair and fled from the sight of Him and the possibility that history might end. The poet, she was another. She read poems about her mother dying and they were beautiful poems, a beautiful temple and oblation, the same faith in the memory of the dead. And we clapped when she was done reading. And she smiled—smallish, polite, and graceful. Just like a Pastor.

Stan the Man

2010-05-31T18:51:00.000-07:00

Religion and Violence from CPX on Vimeo.

Reflections on Death from CPX on Vimeo.

Friendship and Community from CPX on Vimeo.

Christianity and the University from CPX on Vimeo.

The Birth of Personhood and Universal Dignity

2010-05-17T01:38:00.000-07:00

I can't resist posting this passage from Hart, but will return to Hauerwas subsequently.

"The ultimate power and meaning of the Christian movement within the ancient world cannot be measured simply by the richness of later Christian culture's art or architecture. the relative humanity or inhumanity of its societies and laws, the creativity of its economic or scientific institutions, or the perdurability of its religious institutions through the ages. "Christendom" was only the outward, sometimes majestic, but always defective form of the interaction between the gospel and the intractable stuff of human habit. The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences. If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was--in purely pragmatic terms--a more "natural" disposition toward reality. It required an extraordinary moment of awakening in a few privileged souls, and then centuries of the relentless and total immersion of culture in the Christian story, to make even the best of us conscious of (or at least able to believe in) the moral claim of all other persons upon us, the splendor and irreducible dignity of the divine humanity within them, that depth within each of them that potentially touches upon the eternal.

In the light of Christianity's absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; the exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. To look on the child whom our ancient ancestors would have abandoned to fate, and to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection--resplendent with divine glory, ominous with an absolute demand upon our consciences, evoking our love and our reverence--is to be set free from mere elemental existence, and from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. And only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history, within the very heart of our shared nature, that any of us can experience this freedom."

--David Bentley Hart

Hannah's Child

2010-05-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be posting bits and pieces from Stanley Hauerwas' recently released memoir over the next couple weeks as I work through it. I hope to start writing again more regularly myself, but I have been on a personal sabbatical as I read and think in new directions in preparation for my new calling to the secular academy.

This excerpt seems to capture the heart of why I think I am heading into the academy, as a Christian preacher (which is to say a "practicing theologian"), to do theological work in an English department...

"I think Christian 'ethics' depends on developing the eye of the novelist. If my work is compelling, I suspect it is so to the degree I am able to write like a novelist. If I have a novelist's eye, it is not accidental. I have, after all, spent many years reading novels. Reading novels will not necessarily make one better able to see without illusion, but it can help. My ability to see, moreover, depends on how I have come to understand what it means to be a Christian. I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth."

Dear Joyce, Dear Friend, Stephen Dedalus Am I

2010-02-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

-- O, Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

-- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.--

Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.

Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket. And one day be had asked:

-- What is your name?

Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus.

Then Nasty Roche had said:

-- What kind of a name is that?

And when Stephen had not been able to answer Nasty Roche had asked:

-- What is your father?

Stephen had answered:

-- A gentleman.

Then Nasty Roche had asked:

-- Is he a magistrate?

He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow said to Cantwell:

-- I'd give you such a belt in a second.

Cantwell had answered:

-- Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I'd like to see you. He'd give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:

-- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

-- Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton's yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from seventy-seven to seventy-six.

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers' slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell's Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.

Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey
Where the abbots buried him.
Canker is a disease of plan is,
Cancer one of animals.

It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell! Dante knew a lot of things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest but both his father and uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a well-read woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth: that was heartburn.

--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (excerpting chapter 1)

With A.A. Milne

2010-01-28T09:43:00.001-08:00

"And by and by Christopher Robin came to an end of things, and he was silent, and he sat there, looking out over the world, just wishing it wouldn't stop."

--The House at Pooh Corner

Ernest Hemingway in Venice

2010-01-19T07:28:00.000-08:00

He stooped to pick the tiny feathers
At its neck. It shifted like a sleeve of
Pudding when he brought it up in his

Hands.

"A different woman would be proud, Momma,
How I dropped this bird with a shot in the
Pond."

"I am proud of you, Papa. That's why I
Never leave you."

"I dropped it with a slap right off the moon."

"I know, Papa."

"One shot."

The Church in a Democratic Society

2010-01-15T18:14:00.000-08:00

Aristotle argued that the primary purpose of a polis is the creation of people who are better than they would be without the existence of the polis. Yet what does our society, our polis, do to us? The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs. Rather than helping us to judge our needs, to have the right needs which we exercise in the right ways, our society becomes a vast supermarket of desire under the assumption that if we are free enough to assert and to choose whatever we want we can defer eternally the question of what needs are worth having and on what basis right choices are made. What we call "freedom" becomes the tyranny of our desires. We are kept detached, strangers to one another as we go about fulfilling our needs and asserting our rights. The individual is given a status that makes incomprehensible the Christian notion of salvation as a political, social phenomenon in the family of God...

Both so-called conservative and liberal theologies begin with the assumption that, since we American Christians are fortunate enough to be born into a constitutional democracy where we have rights, we Christians have no fundamental quarrel with the powers-that-be. Of course, we may not be particularly happy with the current national administration, or certain aspects of the legal process, but we do have great power--unlike those who are not lucky enough to live in a democracy--to change what we do not like at will. And we modern people adore personal power above almost anything else. Our society, in brief, is built on the presumption that the good society is that which each person gets to be his or her own tyrant. Consider Bernard Shaw's definition of hell: "Hell is where you must do what you want to do."

Most contemporary Christians cannot say enough good about rights. The way to ensure the "freedom of the individual" as well as to create a limited state is to protect the "rights of the individual." It has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every human person has the "right" to develop his or her own potential to the greatest possible extent, limited only to the parallel of rights of others.

But as Leslie Newbigin has pointed out: "Once the concept of 'human rights' has established itself as an axiom, the question inevitably arises: How and by whom are these rights to be secured? With growing emphasis, post-Enlightenment societies have answered: by the state. The nation state, replacing the old concepts of the Holy Church and the Holy Empire, is the centre-piece in the political scene in post-Enlightenment Europe. After the trauma of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, Europe settled down to the principle of religious coexistence, and the passions which had formerly been invested in rival interpretations of religion were more and more invested in the nation state. Nationalism became the effective ideology of the European peoples, always at times of crises proving stronger than any other ideological or religious force. If there is any entity to which ultimate loyalty is due, it is the nation state. In the twentieth century we have become accustomed to the fact that--in the name of the nation--Catholics will kill Catholics, Protestants will kill Protestants, Marxists will kill Marxists. The charge of blasphemy, if it is ever made, is treated as a quaint anachronism; but the charge of treason, of placing another loyalty above the nation state, is treated as the unforgivable crime. The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state. National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide--freedom from fear, hunger, disease, and want--in a word: "happiness."

--Stanley Hauerwas, in Resident Aliens

The Naming

2010-01-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

The small, pretty woman in Tangiers poured water into a
Glass filled with ice and lemons,

Thought of the boy in One Hundred Years of
Solitude who turned to yellow butterflies when he was shot

From his lover's window. Mauricio Babilonia. The sweet,
Reaching child who drowned in her stomach.

"Mauricio Babilonia," encircled in drenched
Butterflies.

Maps

2010-01-03T21:41:00.000-08:00

He ranges it out like a sail between his fists. As
Important as the roads and snowfields and trees is
Knowing where we are, not merely being there.

We've crossed two covered bridges in one day, slowly, with
Cars behind us as he narrates the rarity of the opportunity and
Reads the old tin sign in brown and white, "'Bulls Bridge.'
Look, 'Bulls Bridge,'" he says, pointing to the sign that names
The bridge we're on.

Without thinking they flow out all day from him:

"We're following the Housatonic down to the Sound."

"Twenty-one minutes to Danbury."

"Look, 'Babbling Brook Farm.' That's funny. You
See that, Momma?"

"'New Milford,' Not to be confused with 'Milford'
Which is actually down by the coast."

At the first bridge we'd stopped for pictures. This was the
famous red covered bridge in West Cornwall. I'd wanted to stop
Because I didn't live here anymore.
He was happy I wanted to.

At Kent Falls we got our gloves on and rose
Carefully up the stone stairs slicked in thick ice and
Hidden under snow which had been falling
Since morning when we'd left.

On the way home in the dark my sister, nephew and
Mother rode quietly toward sleep. Up front I curled
With my knees against the dash and my eyes open.
"Look," he said, pointing at the full moon emerging just over the
Highway and the stickly tops of the black trees.
His voice went quieter: "I was riding the bus from New York
One time when things were real hard, when we were in crisis,
And I looked out the window of the bus and saw the
Moon right there just like that and I heard God say, 'If
I hung the moon on nothing like that do you think
This is too great for me?'
And I had this feeling of a great weight coming off of me
And I knew we'd be okay."

: A Prophecy of Trees

2009-12-29T19:02:00.000-08:00

I need to find my God here.
I need to know not that he is the tree or is
In the tree, but that he planted it.

That his words are great fleshy seeds with nests of synapses
Waiting to erupt in time and place, even
From a hull of snow.

God mustn't be the oak or pine or I'll have lost him.

The bogland here is frozen now and the birch and oaks have died,
Or are practicing their deaths like people without
Hope.

Out of the freezing pane of glass in my old window
A prophecy of Trees.

The Mud Wren: A Prosely

2009-10-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

: The Mud Wren

Mud mud the wren wheeled tug tug over the withering pinafores wondering the whether of his misplaced friendly could tuk tuk in mud too cool to slide, cried never I wheel run toward high flew up and them and them and fall and landed stickly fencing gripped around with thin twos the only he could hold in stead, there. Thinking wren where father go I father go where I falls on turf and never beguiled ages past him will I be when falls I higher than he, sad we, sad water gone slither under gray blue order of mountainsides and tops and call up they white hold me to free sore them and how they never lost a river but it scarred them dearly, feeling better for these my friendly told me hold me, kept slowly going old me with the white-blue wait of flight.

The Boy-Child Beneath the Pines

2009-10-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

Signal the boy-child beneath the pines I love you young son hulloo, I love you across the waterlight and waving to the trees, hulloo, it was you I remembered when I first missed the snow, you I remembered when the cars went like ants into vacation pits of sun and I knew you were not there but were another place of pines and riverrun and Mother, sweet Mother who took you up into her arms like she held the sky in you and laughed and how she cried to laugh how she hurt to sing how she took up her small bones and caged you against the dying world going mad against her, how she took up her small bones to ring, ring glory, ring salvation from our elder Brother, how she crawled into his bones to cage herself and you and hung there against his heart as the world around her peeled back and died, dropping like red leaves to a jar of prayer.

When All the World Was Green

2009-09-03T23:51:00.000-07:00

Hello? Jennie? I shouldn’t have come in the first place, I guess. Well, I’m here. Hello? Jennie, I don’t want to be here anymore. All they want to do is keep me here, I think. Ma’am, am I in Torrance? Ma’am is this Torrance? Ma’am? Hello? Jennie? I think I’m in Torrance now. What’s the number—what’s the number here ma’am—Ma’am? What’s the number here—hang on Jennie, one second…3-1-0…5-4-7….2-1-9-9, I think. In Torrance. Okay. I love you. Bye bye.

…Whatchoo doin, Ted? You want that? Richard called again. Wants me to come get him. I told him, Richard, how can we come get you if I don’t even have a car anymore. I don’t know what he expects. I feel sorry for him, though. I do. Teddy misses him. Teddy goes over by his chair and puts his nose up, looking for him. Don’t you Ted Ted? You miss him, don’t you? Yes, that’s a good pooty-poot. Come here. He gets awful sad with those eyes, don’t you? Come here. I don’t know what he expects though. He’s out there so many different places, wandering around. I just don’t know. There was a woman I could hear in the background, too, I forget where it was he said he was—if it was here in Anaheim or Torrance, I don’t know. I can’t keep track of him anymore. Ted and I walked over. He was just down here, just down a few streets over—he was upstairs in a house. A woman yelled up to him. If he can’t walk he sure walked up those stairs, so I don’t know what he’s up to. Ted and I walked by the house. I feel sorry for him, I do. And Ted misses him don’t you Ted? He always says on the phone that he loves me, that he should have treated me better. I say you didn’t treat me bad, Richard, he was always more of a father to Mindy than her own dad—she told him that. But he always says that. He says he’s so sorry to put me through all of this and I say that’s okay, we’re okay, but we miss you—Teddy misses you, I told him. He goes over to his chair—he doesn’t understand, do ya little pooty-poot? He goes over there and puts his nose in the air. He doesn’t understand, do you, Ted? He misses him, don’t ya? Yes you do.

End Times: A Prose Poem

2009-08-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

My grandmother in this area of the hospital means the ending the whole world fears has defeated everything else she could be doing. She enjoys terrible soap operas and the other day had thrown up her hands and told me that all of the people on her show had run out of people to marry. She said it almost hopeless for the people whose absurdity she adored, like she was worried about the inevitable end of their daily lives. Our dog Mr. Bogart died two months ago and my grandfather cried like a man who saw his friend try and go on ahead of him to a place they would meet later, but all the while knowing secretly that this hope might also be absurd. Now grandpa watches the TV more. He takes more naps. He is less patient. A desire to be patient does not make a person patient. Friends do. The other day when I walked past grandpa napping in his chair I thought to recommend to him a great book I had just read, but I didn’t. And I didn’t mention it later that night when I came home and he was wide awake in the same chair. I realize now that I didn’t bother him about the book because I forgot that I believe in the resurrection.

SDG

2009-08-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

I came across this article on the beheading this week of three pastors in the Nigeria who refused to recant or convert to Islam. One was a young theology student earning his MA who returned home between classes to help his family.
This article...in light of watching the Bonhoeffer documentry with the guys at the church tonight...I don't know guys. I know life here in Orange County is (its own kind of) extremely difficult because of the massive amounts of material, sexual, apathetic, and frenetic temptations. And that is all very very true. It really is. But...I don't know. I just don't know. What communion do we have with our brothers in Nigeria? What Jesus do they know? What Jesus do they see when they read the Scriptures? What Jesus do we see? Is it the same Jesus? I hope so.

"If the world hates you, remember it hated me first." --John 15:18

I'm afraid the world loves me. I'm fighting with my text for Thursday (James 4:1-10), and I'm losing.

The Preacher's heart is a weak, spent, stupid thing. Soli Deo Gloria.

The Just Man Justices; Keeps Grace

2009-06-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

I spoke on Justice last night at Emmaus, and thought it only right since I didn't have time to bring this poem into the sermon, to post it here, since this poem is essentially the entire sermon I gave, but much briefer and with much higher art. It remains one of my favorite poems and is an incredible exploration of identity and justice in and for Christ. I hope you take the time, give it a few patient reads, and see the rich beauty in each word and syllable as they bound, tumble, spill down like water, and rise like prayer.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The Irish Mission

2009-06-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

I have some Jesus family in town this summer called The Clancy Clan, formerly of America, West. They are Ray and Rebecca Clancy and their four kids. This is my pastor and good friend from Ireland. Near on ten years ago they planted a little church in Galway in the West of Ireland, where I went to University for my Masters in Writing. I love these people like kin, and they are in a place now where they are losing their old "mother" church's financial support, which was the only way they were making it in Ireland as the law forbids them from working (this has to do with the absurd amount of time and red tape necessary for work visas and the like).

They are just a hair away from officially being awarded dual citizenship (which will open several doors to Europe and that entire region for the work of the Gospel). But here they stand...convinced the Lord has not abandoned his work in Galway and in Ireland, convinced He is asking them to stay, though they have no way of seeing quite how this will work (such is faith's demand). They are looking into a few different avenues of becoming their own non-profit entity, or of finding and partnering with a new "home" church, or of coming under a missions organization. But all avenues have their time and other complications attending. I love these people like kin (I may have said this) and I would just like to ask for prayer for them and their future work in the cause of Christ and his Gospel on the Emerald Isle and beyond.

The Clancys are standing in a place of great faith, waiting on the Lord. I'm asking the church to stand with them! Pray for open doors, a financial pathway for this family to make it, and for the work they are living and dying for in Ireland.

For Christ, His Church, and His Gospel.

Miscellany

2009-06-13T14:36:00.001-07:00

Ten Norris-Approved Power-Thoughts:

1. Babies rule. Go Momma Tatum!
2. Emmaus is a better group of people than I ever deserved to be part of.
3. Jesus could beat up everyone at once if he wanted to...have you ever even thought about that?
4. I want to know what would happen if every church in Orange County and every pastor became intentionally Gospel-centered, started preaching the Gospel, gave up on being impressive, or cool, or popular and just fought and bled and died for the beautiful people that walk through the doors... Maybe they are. It's so easy to be critical. I hope we are. It ain't easy. But everything else is just silly.
5. Everyone needs to read the novels Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson. That is summer reading that will make you more human.
6. We need to do another Oral History night soon.
7. Listening to Beethoven's Late Piano Sonatas (23-32) is a better way to live.
8. Lisa makes me laugh. So does Jake. And JR. Jess makes me hate myself.
9. Babies rule.
10. Comedy is almost completely losing its creativity. This is really starting to tick me off. Where are the Mitch Hedbergs? The (old) Steve Martins? Dane Cook is no longer funny. Will Ferrell jumped the shark. Tosh and Chapelle have the most pure talent but nowhere to take it but down. Everything is disintegrating to pure uncreative raunch or cruelty. And by the way, if I read another movie cover in Blockbuster advertising "Unrated, Too Explicit for Theatres!" or "Rude, Lewd, Crude, and Nude!" as what must appeal to our embarrassingly juvenile culture...I'm gonna stick a fork in my eye. That the highest achievement of comedy today is to affirm that "men" in our society have the taste and IQ of thirteen year-old boys, and that women are treated so pathetically poor and still strain to be appealing to this normative thirteen year-old society...makes me wish Chuck Norris would throw me into the sun. Aristotle said laughter is what differentiates us from animals. But Aristotle believed in the Divine. The West does not. So we're left thrashing about in the shallows as semi-complex amoeba obsessed with our basest material impulses, pursuits, and ironies. In short, the death of our culture is the next joke you hear about a one-night stand.

11. But there's always hope (see picture above...to the right;)

Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre

2009-06-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

"Twenty years ago, on June 4th, 1989, the Chinese Army used tanks and guns to end peaceful mass demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Since mid-April of that year hundreds of thousands of people--students, workers, intellectuals--had demonstrated daily for freedom of the press, democratic elections, and against corruption. Thousands of students went on a hunger strike to underscore these demands. The images of tanks moving against unarmed citizens were broadcast around the world.

In China today, it is not possible to talk openly about the events of 1989, and nobody is allowed to openly mourn the victims of the massacre. Chinese Christians are using the anniversary of the massacre to ask for our intercession, both for their nation and their leaders, and for the church and the cause of the Gospel in that nation." --Dr. Karkkainen, FTS

Please say a prayer for the people of China, for justice and peace in that nation, and for the transformation that only the Gospel of Jesus Christ brings and sustains. And, self-reflectively, let us plead for the same things for our nation and the witness of the church here, lest we assume arrogantly and damnably that we need God any less than our brothers and sisters across the globe.

"But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

Amos 5:24

"He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you?
To do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly before your God."

Micah 6:8

From Christ for Christ.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

2009-06-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas, 1951

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Baptized on the Mountain

2009-05-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

I think this classic poem captures both the recent baptism we had at Emmaus and the camping trip to Palomar Mountain we just got back from...Hopkins spits hot fire! Check your neck.

God’s Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Prayer Requests and Miscellany

2009-05-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

Hello, all. I wanted to use this space to ask for prayer about some things coming up at Emmaus.

1. The Baptism on May 16th, that the Lord would add any and every one he wishes to the number of baptismal candidates. Pray for those being baptized and for the responsibility of the church around them to be there as a witness to their confession and covenant members of Christ's Body committed to them as their new family until the Lord returns and we enter the Kingdom of God with them. Praise God for the riches of His glory! Salvation continues to come to Orange County! The church lives.

2. Pray for Becky and the forthcoming ministry/support group she's heading up at Zoe for teenage moms and pregnant teens. We want to cover this in love and prayer and any and all support that is needed.

3. Pray for the leaders at Emmaus as we discern the Spirit's leading regarding which areas of Scripture the Lord desires us to explore in the coming year. Thus far, we are praying about teaching the Epistle of James this summer and then a series on the book of Genesis this fall. This is really exciting stuff. And I've just been so thankful for everything God has done to gather a people to life around the teaching of Luke's Gospel these past two years...it will be sad to say goodbye to that beautiful book.

3. Pray for the camping trip in a couple weeks. These tend to be beautiful sorts of things, seeing the stars finally, sharing different Scriptures (the Scripture for the trip will be Psalm 33), hiking, cooking, playing music, enjoying God's rich creation, getting away--all that jazz. Just asking for God's blessing and that He would give us a rich time of rest and fellowship that honors Him. And especially that newer folks would mark this as the time they really felt embraced into the little family here at Emmaus.

4. Pray that folks from Emmaus who need a true, solid, loving home church would be drawn to our home church at Zoe. Candidly, I wish that everyone who goes to Emmaus would make Zoe their home church. The buffet-bar, church-shopping individualistic, consumer crazy of this culture is producing more ADD Christians without pastors and church families that know and love them than ever before. I want our people to be grounded and committed and covered by a strong, loving home church, and my private hope is that Zoe will be that church.

5. I need prayer also as I prepare my applications for various schools this fall and winter to be considered for PhD programs. It's a ton of work researching and praying where, if anywhere, the Lord wants me to go. I will be applying to study theology at places like Duke, Notre Dame, Princeton, and Yale, and most of the schools I'm targeting admit something like "one to three doctoral students a year"...so it is obviously up to the Lord, cause those odds are pretty brutal. I'm also praying and researching what my overall focus would be and what I would write on. I'm quite drawn to theology and ethics, language, aesthetics, literature, but also homiletics and ecclesiology since my final passion is to be a better preacher (and pastor of a church) and to train preachers to proclaim the gospel at home and abroad and plant churches that worship Jesus as Lord. Anyway, I need prayer and discernment cause my brain is in overdrive on this stuff.

Miscellany:

1. One or two of you have asked about a reading group this summer and i am considering if that will be possible and what we should read. The thought from some of you right now, and I tend to agree, is that something by Bonhoeffer would be the order of the day. Let me know if you might be interested and if you have any thoughts on the matter...

2. Star Trek actually looks really good. I can't believe I just wrote that. Ugh. I have betrayed you, Solo.

3. I want to start a school called "The College of Preachers" within the next five years that is a part of whichever church the Lord calls me to pastor. And I want to have all of my best professors come in and teach (free) intensive courses to the students in their areas of expertise, and all of the students at the school will be called and gifted preachers with a fire in their bones to preach God's word... Let a brother dream!

Enough for now. Much love.

Two Poems

2009-04-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

Sanctorum Communio

Mute dumb brick lurched
a motion (my God!)
my God the thick mud head
speaks thee where thee where roam
landbound round bemoan
exile knowledge spin spin spin—
Sophic din—reach
down
mudclay breathe Abraham see saw servile
being born of
thee unmade maker beat
the thick mud head
break bread.

Nietzsche’s Ordination, or, The Heart of The Sea

I cried today, thinking of you, Friedrich,
Lying in bed with the window open
Enough to hear out,
The speechless stones
Stained with gunmetal rain, the deep
Fitful silence of knowing, the floorboards
Uncreak, the wind shifts
Off the windowsill, returning to the sky, the rain
Ascends
To certain swollen treasuries, the exhausting
Practices of silence that keep the
Effulgence at bay—the discomfited dance of a priest
Resisting ordination.
—Oh, how like Ezekiel on the banks of the Kabor laying
Down his harp.
—He shouldn’t have come to you, you demanded
To bear in your flesh the image of
The Invisible God
—At most supposed him chained to the Temple of the
Ancient Jews.
—He was not. He appeared upon the bladed backs of the
Savage Olympian host, agitating in vermillian
Beneath his feet.
—Plagued? Hardened? Loved? He placed his oracles
And judgments into your
Mouth
like
Giant eggs, swelling, spidering, splitting the slack jaw,
Spilling forth,

And the children of God passed through the heart of the sea.

Discipleship Training II (an ongoing Emmaus reading list)

2009-04-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies
by David Bentley Hart
: Erudite, blunt, and appropriately impatient with poor scholarship and sophomoric and corrupt accounts of history, one of our most brilliant thinkers steps down to help correct the recent spate of atheist authors who refuse sincere engagement with what they hope to critique in favor of shrill and unsupported fanatical praise of the god of secularism and nihilism. A particularly good line finds Hart suggesting that in order to truly apply the scientific method to a critique of Christianity, these "new atheists" should, at the very least, "begin praying, and then continue to do so with some perseverance." Otherwise it is like critiquing, "scientifically", the experience of love without having ever loved. Such a project proves to be nothing more than insincere sham and uncritical fideistic loyalty to other gods.

The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and The Roots of Modern Conflict
by William T. Cavanaugh
: Cavanaugh is as good as we got. And he writes back when I email him! Haha, an entirely gracious person. Pre-order this.

Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why it Matters What Christians Believe
by Ben Quash, Stanley Hauerwas, and Michael Ward
: Knowing the challenges to the ancient church and how faithful Christians struggled and held forth the truth will be one of the only ways to navigate the challenges and in-house dangers facing the church of Jesus in postmodernity. This book is a lucid little volume that helps us learn how to see, think, and act faithfully with the whole company of saints through time.

Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity
by Mark Noll
: In keeping with the need to know where we have come from and how, this is an excellent primer on church history.

A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic
by Stanley Hauerwas
: This is a profound explication of what the church would be if she took her Lord and her neighbor seriously. Do Work.

A Rude Interruption

2009-04-12T23:57:00.001-07:00

from David Bentley Hart's "God or Nothingness"

‘Nietzsche, the quixotic champion of the old standards, thought jesting Pilate’s “What is truth?” to be the only moment of actual nobility in the New Testament, the wry taunt of an acerbic ironist unimpressed by the pathetic fantasies of a deranged peasant. But one need not share Nietzsche’s sympathies to take his point; one can certainly see what is at stake when Christ, scourged and mocked, is brought before Pilate a second time: the latter’s “Whence art thou?” has about it something of a demand for a pedigree, which might at least lend some credibility to the claims Christ makes for himself; for want of which, Pilate can do little other than pronounce his truth: “I have power to crucify thee” (which, to be fair, would under most circumstances be an incontrovertible argument). It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars. This slave is the Father’s eternal Word, whom God has vindicated, and so ten thousand immemorial certainties are unveiled as lies: the first become last, the mighty are put down from their seats and the lowly exalted, the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent empty away. Nietzsche was quite right to be appalled. Almost as striking, for me, is the tale of Peter, at the cock’s crow, going apart to weep. Nowhere in the literature of pagan antiquity, I assure you, had the tears of a rustic been regarded as worthy of anything but ridicule; to treat them with reverence, as meaningful expressions of real human sorrow, would have seemed grotesque from the perspective of all the classical canons of good taste. Those wretchedly subversive tears, and the dangerous philistinism of a narrator so incorrigibly vulgar as to treat them with anything but contempt, were most definitely signs of a slave revolt in morality, if not quite the one against which Nietzsche inveighed—a revolt, moreover, that all the ancient powers proved impotent to resist.

In a narrow sense, then, one might say that the chief offense of the Gospels is their defiance of the insights of tragedy—and not only because Christ does not fit the model of the well-born tragic hero. More important is the incontestable truth that, in the Gospels, the destruction of the protagonist emphatically does not restore or affirm the order of city or cosmos. Were the Gospels to end with Christ’s sepulture, in good tragic style, it would exculpate all parties, including Pilate and the Sanhedrin, whose judgments would be shown to have been fated by the exigencies of the crisis and the burdens of their offices; the story would then reconcile us to the tragic necessity of all such judgments. But instead comes Easter, which rudely interrupts all the minatory and sententious moralisms of the tragic chorus, just as they are about to be uttered to full effect, and which cavalierly violates the central tenet of sound economics: rather than trading the sacrificial victim for some supernatural benefit, and so the particular for the universal, Easter restores the slain hero in his particularity again, as the only truth the Gospels have to offer. This is more than a dramatic peripety. The empty tomb overturns all the “responsible” and “necessary” verdicts of Christ’s judges, and so grants them neither legitimacy nor pardon’.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2009-04-03T14:01:00.001-07:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--Wendell Berry

A Meeting

2009-03-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

--Wendell Berry

A Pornographic Culture

2009-03-12T01:18:00.000-07:00

(This is an excerpt from an article by the theologian David Bentley Hart. The rest of the article is here--this will give much more context for those wondering where this article came from and its larger argument.)

The damage that pornography can do—to minds or cultures—is not by any means negligible. Especially in our modern age of passive entertainment, saturated as we are by an unending storm of noises and images and barren prattle, portrayals of violence or of sexual degradation possess a remarkable power to permeate, shape, and deprave the imagination; and the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of desire, of personality, of character. Anyone who would claim that constant or even regular exposure to pornography does not affect a person at the profoundest level of consciousness is either singularly stupid or singularly degenerate. Nor has the availability and profusion of pornography in modern Western culture any historical precedent. And the Internet has provided a means of distribution whose potentials we have scarcely begun to grasp. It is a medium of communication at once transnational and private, worldwide and discreet, universal and immediate. It is, as nothing else before it, the technology of what Gianni Vattimo calls the “transparent society,” the technology of global instantaneity, which allows images to be acquired in a moment from almost anywhere, conversations of extraordinary intimacy to be conducted with faceless strangers across continents, relations to be forged and compacts struck in almost total secrecy, silently, in a virtual realm into which no one—certainly no parent—can intrude. I doubt that even the most technologically avant-garde among us can quite conceive how rapidly and how insidiously such a medium can alter the culture around us.

We are already, as it happens, a casually and chronically pornographic society. We dress young girls in clothes so scant and meretricious that honest harlots are all but bereft of any distinctive method for catching a lonely man’s eye. The popular songs and musical spectacles we allow our children to listen to and watch have transformed many of the classic divertissements of the bordello—sexualized gamines, frolicsome tribades, erotic spanking, Oedipal fantasy, very bad “exotic” dance—into the staples of light entertainment. The spectrum of wit explored by television comedy runs largely between the pre- and the post-coital. In short, a great deal of the diabolistic mystique that once clung to pornography—say, in the days when even Aubrey Beardsley’s scarcely adolescent nudes still suggested to most persons a somewhat diseased sensibility—has now been more or less dispelled. But the Internet offers something more disturbing yet: an “interactive” medium for pornography, a parallel world at once fluid and labyrinthine, where the most extreme forms of depravity can be cheaply produced and then propagated on a global scale, where consumers (of almost any age) can be cultivated and groomed, and where a restless mind sheltered by an idle body can explore whole empires of vice in untroubled quiet for hours on end. Even if filtering software were as effective as it is supposed to be (and, as yet, it is not), the spiritually corrosive nature of the very worst pornography is such that—one would think—any additional legal or financial burden placed upon the backs of pornographers would be welcome.

I am obviously being willfully naïve. I know perfectly well that, as a culture, we value our “liberties” above almost every other good; indeed, it is questionable at times whether we have the capacity to recognize any rival good at all. The price of these liberties, however, is occasionally worth considering. I may be revealing just how quaintly reactionary I am in admitting that nothing about our pornographic society bothers me more than the degraded and barbarized vision of the female body and soul it has so successfully promoted, and in admitting also (perhaps more damningly) that I pine rather pathetically for the days of a somewhat more chivalrous image of women. One of the high achievements of Western civilization, after all, was in finding so many ways to celebrate, elevate, and admire the feminine; while remaining hierarchical and protective in its understanding of women, of course, Christendom also cultivated—as perhaps no other civilization ever has—a solicitude for and a deference towards women born out of a genuine reverence for their natural and supernatural dignity. It may seem absurd even to speak of such things at present, after a century of Western culture’s sedulous effort to drain the masculine and the feminine of anything like cosmic or spiritual mystery, and now that vulgarity and aggressiveness are the common property of both sexes and often provide the chief milieu for their interactions. But it is sobering to reflect how far a culture of sexual “frankness” has gone in reducing men and women alike to a level of habitual brutishness that would appall us beyond rescue were we not, as a people, so blessedly protected by our own bad taste. The brief flourishing of the 1970s ideal of masculinity—the epicene ectomorph, sensitive, nurturing, flaccid—soon spawned a renaissance among the young of the contrary ideal of conscienceless and predatory virility. And, as imaginations continue to be shaped by our pornographic society, what sorts of husbands or fathers are being bred? And how will women continue to conform themselves—as surely they must—to our cultural expectations of them? To judge from popular entertainment, our favored images of women fall into two complementary, if rather antithetical, classes: on the one hand, sullen, coarse, quasi-masculine belligerence, on the other, pliant and wanton availability to the most primordial of male appetites—in short, viragoes or odalisks. I am fairly sure that, if I had a daughter, I should want her society to provide her with a sentimental education of richer possibilities than that.

My backwardness aside, however, it is more than empty nostalgia or neurotic anxiety to ask what virtues men and women living in an ever more pervasively pornographic culture can hope to nourish in themselves or in their children. Sane societies, at any rate, care about such things—more, I would argue, than they care about the “imperative” of placing as few constraints as possible upon individual expression. But we have made the decision as a society that unfettered personal volition is (almost) always to be prized, in principle, above the object towards which volition is directed. It is in the will—in the liberty of choice—that we place primary value, which means that we must as a society strive, as far as possible, to recognize as few objective goods outside the self as we possibly can.

Of course, we are prepared to set certain objective social and legal limits to the exercise of the will, but these are by their very nature flexible and frail, and the great interminable task of human “liberation”—as we tend to understand it—is over time to erase as many of these limits as we safely can. The irreducibly “good” for us is subjective desire, self-expression, self-creation. The very notion that the society we share could be an organically moral realm, devoted as a whole to the formation of the mind or the soul, or that unconstrained personal license might actually make society as a whole less free by making others powerless against the consequences of the “rights” we choose to exercise, runs contrary to all our moral and (dare one say?) metaphysical prejudices. We are devoted to—indeed, in a sense, we worship—the will; and we are hardly the first people willing to offer up our children to our god.

Wendell Berry: Kentucky Farmer, Poet, Prophet

2009-03-10T00:15:00.002-07:00

“Questionnaire”

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

Church Music

2009-03-03T10:38:00.000-08:00

He looks right at me sometimes during
church. He turns his whole body around during worship and just looks at me,
at the people sitting behind me,
at Lisa,
at me again.
I shift a little in my chair and smile. What do I
tell him by how I look back at him,
by how my eyes break away from his after only a moment?
It’s a habit of courtesy that I don’t stare back.
In polite society, this would be considered rude.
But Zack doesn’t care about that.
He just looks at me.
I glance back, smile again.
What does my face say to him in that moment?
Do I look overly-kind? Fake?
Condescending?
Do I look uncomfortable?
I probably look more comfortable
ignoring him, looking away,
pretending to be distracted by the music written on the wall.
It is not a glance, it is a look that keeps going on into me and
through.
Twisted flesh,
Downs Syndrome.
What if we were meant to realize how uncomfortable
we are with God?
What if
we were meant to see that we would prefer to
fix things, to cure things,
to coax
Jesus
down
from
the
cross,
to place band-aids on his wounds,
to maim or kill
in order to protect Him.

What if instead of this we were meant to be a people who are

patient,

who bear our utter
bewilderment on Friday in the hope that we may one day call it

good.

What if Brittany’s brother Zack means we might actually

see
Jesus and be saved

Discipleship Training (an Emmaus reading list)

2009-02-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

“To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ” --Bonhoeffer

1. Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (I will keep listing this book until everyone reads it)
2. Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon
3. Christian Ethics: The End of the Law by David Cunningham
4. The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson
5. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (all American Christians should read and think long over this novel)
6. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken
7. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics ed. Wells and Hauerwas
8. The Blackwell Companion to Poltical Theology ed. William Cavanaugh

Nihilism With a Smile!

2009-02-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

Terrible God

2009-02-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

Terrible God,
I’ll not
no longer will I wrap
you in sinewed steel bonds uncarnate,
raging
against the form I put forth--there ethereal phantom
god, a Freudian slip-dress girdled hammock-lying therapeutic deity of my
interior self-wondering confession, paid for on the
hour
since my gold is mine—
pious sterile hoops we ring around the rosies, playing church games until the I
you grab is we, and our ragged skins swing out,
wailed at through huge cream teeth
“SILVER AND GOLD HAVE YOU NONE But what you have you give away” in JESUS’
fleshed name breathed,
God-With-Lungs wriggling off this barbed hook with guts
bleeding King James wine
glorious descending
from imperial
self-deception
to the low-slung sat wood cup passed by the grizzled brown homeless
hands of the Jew in the corner,
“TAKE”
up the earthenware limbs of the living God’s terrible soil-
pounding hope,
“EAT.”

Language and Hope in Babylon

2009-01-23T14:14:00.000-08:00

The narrative in Genesis 11 on the Tower of Babel serves as the pivot and transition between the primeval narrative and the patriarchal narratives of the first book of Moses. It is one of the most intentionally and carefully constructed texts in the Hebrew Torah, situated between the post-flood genealogical account of Noah’s sons in Genesis 10 and the particularist sacred-historical narrative of Abraham.

The Tower story functions in a telescopic way similar to the second creation narrative in Genesis 2:4-25. A clue to this is found in the logic of the preceding “table of nations” as in some ways a genealogical-geographical description of the scattering the Lord accomplishes in the Tower pericope that follows. The former is a larger forensic description—a what—and the latter deepens the why, even the how in local, spiritual-moral terms. That the reader is not to read the passages as a chronology is cemented by the digression on Nimrod in Genesis 10:8-12, which is a kind of preparation for the political and geographical context of the Tower narrative, and then the subsequent explicit mention in Shem’s genealogy of “Peleg,” whose name means “division”, “for during his lifetime the people of the world were divided into different language groups” (Genesis 10:25). This gives a rough chronological context for the Tower narrative and prepares us for the returning and telescoping movement inaugurated by the opening line of the Tower narrative: “At one time all the people of the world spoke the same language and used the same words.”

What is crucial is the theological-historical context of both the table of nations and the enfolded Tower narrative, which is the world made new after the judgment of the flood and the token of grace, the preservation of the noahic family. In this new world the movement from Noah and his three sons to the genealogy of the dispersed nations is a call back to the edict in Eden, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it” (Gen. 1:28). There is hope in this new beginning that sets up an immediate tension—this is familiar territory. Will the human race repeat its blatant rebellion against Yahweh’s rule with even the great flood in its collective memory? Taken alone, the table of nations might be a confirmation of faithfulness to the divine command to fill the earth , but in the Tower narrative we run headlong into an utterly contrary will: “Come, let’s build a great city and a tower…this will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world.” Thus the Tower narrative functions particularly to describe how the nations dispersed, given this was neither a natural occurrence nor a faithful act. The plurality of nations which the genealogy offers is thus recast and understood over against the actual human desire for a single nation/city/empire described in the Tower narrative and in the increasingly important digression on Nimrod where he is described with something like irony as “the first heroic warrior on earth” and “the greatest hunter on the earth,” a mighty man who attempts to rule and centralize power under his rule by building an empire in the area of Babylonia.

Nimrod is thus set up in this fuller context as a foil to Yahweh, under whose authority the city and tower-building described in the Babel passage likely was instigated. The desire for self-wrought union and consolidated power is delineated as a primeval desire of man contrary to the divine command. In Israel’s history this is most obvious in the demand of the people for a King to rule over them like the other nations. In the tower narrative this desire is a defense against the fear of being scattered, a fear of the world as such, whether by physical threat or by the existential threat of anonymity: “let us make a name for ourselves.” The Tower, in this light, comes to symbolize a salvation made by human hands. So while a tower that “reaches into the heavens” may not describe an actual physical assault on heaven, the intention proves to be just that. This tower is an assault on Yahweh’s rule and Yahweh’s command and Yahweh’s means of protection—it’s an assault on heaven entirely.
The tower is an emblem of self-rule, an altar, a declaration of independent identity, the rejection of Yahweh for Nimrod or for Empire or for posterity. Dostoevsky describes this incurvature, alluding to the third temptation of Christ, as what all people seek on earth:

Someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, incontestable ant-hill —for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men . . . Great conquerors, Tamerlanes and Ghengis Khans, swept over the earth like a whirlwind yearning to conquer the cosmos, but they, too, expressed, albeit unconsciously, the same great need of mankind for universal and general union.

To this list of conquerors we might add Nimrod, and what Dostoevsky describes as an “ant-hill”, we should willingly elaborate: “tower” or “ziggurat”. That Satan tempts Christ with crude dominion over the kingdoms of the earth —with power according to the world’s terms—is thus foreshadowed by the attempt at Babel to secure salvation through political unity and power.
Geographically this rebellion is also foreshadowed by the description of the people migrating to the East, to the plain of Shinar (Babylonia). Victor Hamilton points out that the Cherubim are posted with fiery swords on the East side of the garden of Eden and that Cain migrated to the East after murdering Abel , described in Genesis 4 as “[leaving] the Lord’s presence and [settling] in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Additionally, the mention of city-building in the Tower narrative harkens back again to Cain, who after the murder and his eastward migration, founds the first city mentioned in scripture. Theologically, movements east are tenuous at best in the primeval history, and potentially ways of emphasizing a departure from the Lord’s presence or will.

Unlike the flood story, the Tower narrative finds no direct parallel with Near Eastern myths, but several points of contact prove illuminating commentary. Gordon Wenham notes how in Enuma Elish the building of Babylon and its “temple tower” are particularly celebrated achievements. Geerhard von Rad adds that even in Palestine there was “legendary knowledge of [Babylon’s] gigantic cultural achievements, especially of the mighty stepped towers (Etemenanki) in which the united civilized will of this strong nation created an enduring moment.” The tower may parallel Enuma Elish’s description of the building of the tower of Esagil, the dwelling place of the Babylonian gods Marduk, Enlil, and Ea. Later discovery of these “cult buildings” show a temple at the top of the ziggurats, which often honored a particular god such as Marduk. The original meaning of the word “Babylon” itself is believed by most commentators to have been something like “gate of the god(s).”

Wenham points also to the Sumerian epic “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta” where a universal world language is mentioned, which is described as a “golden age” free from danger and anxiety. The god Enki is then described as changing “the speech in their mouths” and “bringing contention into the speech of man.” This is seen as an attack on the god Enlil who had been spoken to (read: praised) by humanity in this “one tongue” that Enki disrupted. The Genesis story is correcting this tale of “polytheistic competitiveness” with a tale of the One God’s rebuke of an arrogant humanistic attempt to secure an identity and protection apart from Yahweh. With one language humanity builds an altar of praise to itself that Yahweh disrupts as judgment. Over against Babylon’s experience in Mesopotamian writings as the mecca of an improving humanity, Genesis casts the city and tower as supreme emblems of folly and arrogance. A survey of the canon bears out this trajectory as the very name of “Babylon” soon becomes synonymous with sin, human depravity and judgment—a place in scripture of both physical exile from the promised land and spiritual exile from the presence of God.

Moving toward the subject of names and naming returns us first to the deliberate art and structure of the Tower narrative as a literary unit which enacts through diction and composition the tale it tells. Comprised of exactly 120 Hebrew words, the Tower narrative is best described, perhaps, as a prose-poem, structured as one single extended chiasmus. The logic of the chiasmus is a deliberate linguistic mirroring, a tightly held parallelism traced out along the nine verses, with verse five as the pivot: “But the Lord came down…”

The first four verses are the presentation of events according to human will and activity, “But the Lord came down…” and disrupts their trajectory, literally folding the language and their progress back on itself. Through mirroring the writer shows that the human plan and goal will not extend, it will be confounded, absorbed into the language of God, and returned in both judgment and grace. The true seat of authority—the main contention in the narrative—is declared by the subject and activity located in the crucial pivot verse. It is the Lord and his coming down to the place mankind has been reaching up with their tower who has the power and authority to bend humanity and their language back to the ground and scatter them over the face of the earth, thus completing the chiasmus.

In keeping with the tight parallelism of activity and language in the passage, we find the diction deliberately repetitious, intentionally simplifying the vocabulary of the 120 words to mimic the behavior of a single common language. Another way of simplifying the effect of language is to simplify the phonetic sounds the words themselves make, which the author accomplishes through excessive external and internal alliteration (one can see the chiasmic structure as a kind of internal alliteration as well). Yet doubling over on itself is the brilliant effect alliteration and repetition play in the narrative’s etiological conclusion of “Babel” and “Babylon” as phonetic Hebrew puns on the place where God “confused” their language. Wenham writes, “As soon as the men of Babylon start speaking they use words that contain the consonants b and l, or p and m . . . while some words just rhyme with babel.” A particularly dramatic example is in the parallel between the men of Babylon saying “let us make (bricks)” (nilbenah) and the Lord saying in the parallel verse “let us mix up (their language)” (nabeleh). Wenham explains, “The Lord literally mixes up nilbenah through his judgment.” And Robert Alter adds, “Here difference is subverted in the very style of the story, with the blurring of lexical boundaries culminating in God’s confounding of tongues.”
What is remarkable is that while the lexical boundaries are disrupted and the phonetic effect is increasingly muddy the order and control of the passage in form and structure is impeccable. This seems to be a literary way of describing the sovereignty of God, where the simple uniformity of a man-made attempt to secure salvation and the frenetic confusion of his spirit, as well as the confounding of language and the potential chaos implied by “disruption” and “scattering” all occur under the controlled, sovereign rule and plan of God.

Returning to the importance of names and naming in the passage, we note the central interplay between the people desiring to make a “name” for themselves from the outset and what is seen as a literary pun in the concluding etymology of the name “Babel/Babylon” as the place where the Lord “confused” their language. Names to this point and throughout Genesis and the larger context of scripture, are seats of identity. Preceded by the seventy particular names in the Table of Nations, it is a stark contrast that that the author names no particular person or people group in the Tower narrative itself. While this may be a building project under Nimrod, the narrator seems to deliberately omit his and any other name. The theological effect is at once ironic and instructive. Desiring to make a name for themselves, to establish their own reputation and identity apart from Yahweh, the people are left nameless and faceless in the passage. Their self-made identity is declared invalid. The identity they are left with is the literary etymology of “Babel/Babylon” as a place of “confusion”—which plays quite deliberately against the actual etymology of something like “gate of the god(s).” What may have been built as a temple of human salvation, a self-styled “heaven”—the gate of the mini-gods—or a temple praising false gods, which things are the same, is actually nothing more than a spiritual confusion which the language mixing incarnates.

The contrast is all the more revealing when one notes the arc of naming from the Table of Nations to the judgment of the nameless confused to the call of the particularly named vessel of God’s grace—the man “Abram” of Genesis 12. Abraham’s call shifts the primeval history to a particularist sacred history. That Abram is renamed “Abraham” is a deliberate re-creation following the judgment of Babel. It is an act of restoration wherein God alone is shown to bring order and identity out of chaos/confusion/Babylon. It can hardly be overstated the extent to which the name “Babylon” becomes descriptive of sin and judgment in scripture. This will be the legacy of the name which man seeks to make for himself. The infamy of Babylon is the infamy of human rebellion and self-worship.

The primeval capstone is a summary of the height of human identity-making and salvation securing. Mankind, despite the repeated tokens of grace, is set on sin and self-glorification. “Nothing,” the Lord says, “will be beyond them”—their sin will extend and multiply, presumably, until the earth is antediluvian in its comprehensive evil. So the mixing of languages is a preventative, while the call and naming of Abraham will be the channel of rescue and return—grace’s bending back of evil through subversion and hope. Throughout the canon it is the Lord who names His people, or His people who are named in a way that tells a truth about God. It is Yahweh who gives men and women their identity. In Him they are known, no longer nameless, no longer confused.

But also, and more locally, the mixing of languages is in itself a token of grace, for people are still able to find and form families and tribes—communities. There is hope in this preservation of community. Perhaps more, this dispersion into difference might be seen as the creation of true community since it creates a world where essential things held in common are now distinguishable and the opportunity for distinct others is created. Stanley Hauerwas writes:
In response to humanity’s rebellious attempt to replace their dependence on God by creating their own heaven, in response to the attempt of people to overcome their contingency, God benevolently scattered the world so they might learn to respect the other and to learn humility.

The confusing of languages is indeed a token of grace that resists the simplistic and banal uniformity of empire, a uniformity that proved arrogant and fatal, increasingly less human, a nameless mass echoing each other rather than a community of particular persons called things like “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
This benevolent judgment on the false community gathered in the name of man foreshadows the future restoration of a single human community, marked by the difference made possible at Babel (every tribe, every nation, every tongue), gathered in the name of Christ, where all the languages are caught up into one ascending language called “Gospel,” as on the day of Pentecost, where Christ-made-flesh is the tower and temple with its “base on the earth and its peak in the heavens,” upon whom the angels ascend and descend, and in whom we have our identity, security, and hope. This is the one language of God, the Word made flesh. Jesus as the Speech of God whose speaking makes sings over Babylon and gathers a people re-created by grace. Christ’s church is God’s response to Babel—a nomadic people who do not cling to the salvation the world offers, since their hope is not bound by the shadow of death.

The modern church must recover the warning of Babel and not seek to become a State or an Empire. The church must recover the language of humility and difference, where a single culture or race or gender is not preferred and others sublimated for the sake of uniformity, or, God forbid, efficiency. With its hope not of this world, the church must be the patient community that seeks no salvation from this world’s offer of power, pleasure, security, and renown. The church must, with Christ, reject Satan’s temptations in the wilderness and be free from the world in order to serve the world. In the modern American West this is the challenge of faithfulness to the Gospel. Never have there been so many “towers built to reach the heavens” with the escape hatch of the secular to tempt even the faithful into believing this or that isn’t actually idolatry because it isn’t actually spiritual—it’s just the free market, or it’s just patriotism, or it’s just practical. Bill Cavanaugh calls this America of secular devotion the “empire of the empty shrine.” We are willing to die for things like “freedom of choice” (not a “good” or a “freedom” unless the “good” is actually chosen) but not for anything like Christ and His church.
We can all agree on the flag, but our religious differences are best left out of our engagement with anyone who does not mirror us. We may name this “tolerance”, but “tolerance” is just an acceptable way of saying not loving more than indifference permits. Truthfully, our secular devotion to uniformity is a Babylonian rebellion against the particularity of persons formed by Christ and given names, an attempt outright to secure a unity and a protection (ultimately from one another and from God, in this scheme) apart from the salvation Jesus offers and the church which reconstitutes what it means to be human and to be one.

Welcome to the Welcome Wagon

2009-01-20T14:37:00.000-08:00

Rarely does music intended to draw me to God draw me to God. Welcome to the Welcome Wagon does this. Reverend Vito and wife Monique and the ineffably hopeful and haunting Sufjan Stevens (producer) make this the freshest set of God songs since, not ironically, Sufjan Stevens' grand collection Songs for Christmas.

Here's a little wordstring from Asthmatic Kitty Records why it's all the lovely:

"The debut album by The Welcome Wagon unveils a ramshackle sing-a-long enterprise of a Presbyterian pastor (the Rev. Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) wrestling out the influences of folk music, religion, popular culture, and church tradition in a collection of songs that is as soulful as it is good-humored. This gorgeous brew is reflected in the group’s repertoire, which unflinchingly consolidates a vast history of “sacred” song traditions: from Old Testament psalms, to Presbyterian Psalters of the 17th century, to iconoclastic pop innovators of the 1960s (The Velvet Underground), to charismatic Catholics of the 1970s (Lenny Smith), and into the melancholy lovelorn pop of the 1980s (The Smiths). There are even a few originals. Armed with a particleboard parlor guitar and a plastic glockenspiel, pastor and wife stumble their way through an arresting catalog of hymns—hallowed and unholy—with the simple desire to know their Maker—and to know each other—more intimately. The result—due, in part, to producer/arranger Sufjan Stevens—is an awe-inspiring collection of hymns, pop covers, and originals that render soulful stunts from quiet skirmishes of home recordings. Gathering together a camaraderie of musical helpers (among them members of Vito’s church: a gospel choir, lap steel guitar, upright bass, and a brass ensemble), Sufjan enlivens The Welcome Wagon’s quaint haberdashery of songs with epic flourishes, drawing out allusions to honky-tonk, Broadway theater, and funk with the curatorial eye of an over-excited musicologist. The final product results in a stunning cross section of rehearsals and home recordings serendipitously captured in living rooms, churches, and home studios across Brooklyn and Queens over the course of some eight-odd years.

The Welcome Wagon observe a musical tradition conjoined with marriage that pays tribute to a long line of iconic couples—Johnny Cash and June Carter, Sonny and Cher, Ike and Tina, Captain and Tennille, and more recently, The White Stripes. The Welcome Wagon also reside in the fussy category called “church music,” where family and theology have long accompanied the musical deeds of married partners: the Original Carter Family, Bill and Gloria Gaither, and Mom and Pop Winans are a few examples. You’d be hard pressed to call the Welcome Wagon a groundbreaking supplement to the genre of gospel duos. They are not flashy performers. Their hymns— when stripped of a producer’s vigorous arrangements—are modest, understated, and idiosyncratic shrugs compared to the furious pathos of Blind Willie Johnson and his wife Willie B., or the bluesy emotion of The Consolers. But the apparent lack of hyperbole and didacticism, the absence of rhetorical drama and religious fervor are what make the music of the Welcome Wagon so fascinating. It doesn’t impose its religious pitch on the listener with hyped up garnishes of sound; it merely conveys the deepest of convictions with the deadpan verdict of a surgeon. Sure, their debut album unveils showy guitar riffs, piano codas, harmonica solos, a rowdy chorus, and an imposing flourish of brass instruments like wartime canons. But at the heart of it—if you really listen carefully—there’s really just a pastor and his wife tentatively singing in the quiet privacy of their own home."

Even so, Come Lord Jesus! Clap hands, church, toward praise of He Who shall again Descend!

Some Notes on Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Aesthetics of Christ

2009-01-12T23:37:00.000-08:00

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the Apollinian as the dream world, which, even at its most intense, is one of “mere appearance.” Required of the Apollinian modality is a coolness, a voyeuristic detachment from which the plastic arts (image-making: sculpting, painting, etc.) might be constructed no matter the surrounding, and essentially illusory, conditions. An artist, in this case, is one who conjures the dreamt. And in the “beautiful illusion of the dream worlds” every figure is immediately understood and important; “there is nothing unimportant or superfluous.” What is being invoked here is something like an artistic Platonism (or a careful needling of Platonism as a ‘plastic philosophy’), where the ‘plastic’ artist dreams (and develops) in ideal forms, unencumbered by the world of defects and excess and mystery. What is meant by “there is nothing superfluous” is the artist finds everything useful to his task as an artist. Having dreamt the world himself and instrumentalizing it by himself (as such for himself), this type of artist, with Apollo, is “the divine image of the principium individuationis.” He, in practice, is the eminent rationalist. Everything in his seeing is known and corresponds to his goals. He is Socrates with a chisel; when he strikes the stone nothing falls away, though forms arise, clean. There is perfect correspondence between his dream and his project. He is undifferentiation.

The Dionysian “world-artist” is contrarily the “intoxicated” reveler beat upon by the true world’s chaotic excesses of suffering and ecstasy, mystery and revelation. The Dionysian man is hewn not from dreams but from nature who, once alienated from her offspring, once subjugated and hostile, becomes reconciled through her prodigal son whose flung-wide spirit can receive whatever inheritance she proffers now that he is freed from wayward notions of moral (read: useful) valuation. The Dionysian artist is thus consumed entirely by the world and is rebirthed, sounding the world’s cries. He does not instrumentalize the world but is himself the world’s instrument: “he is no longer the artist, he has become the work of art.”

What a young Nietzsche describes here without particular hostility, even somewhat sympathetically, finds muscular and vicious recasting, though with an amazing amount of conceptual integrity, when he levels his charge at the composer Richard Wagner sixteen years later. Wagner, who had been the young Nietzsche's great hope for the rebirth of tragedy, has instead become a conjurer of plastic arts—Apollo. Wagner becomes “despicable” to Nietzsche because he uses what he knows of people to his advantage, to his reputation. This is that instrumentalization which one who stands away from life can decide on in a way that understands and knows and is not overcome by life but manages it to a certain effect. For Nietzsche Wagner uses life, or art, as a means to selfish ends. This is the height of blasphemy. It tells a lie about life. It instrumentalizes something about life and creates a buffered unreality that is safe from the Dionysian chaos, one that is a dream, a safe corruption, an illusion.

In what way does Wagner instrumentalize? Nietzsche begins with the assertion that artists do not often know themselves. They are too vain. The things they may succeed at become perversions because their aspirations or personal assessment is out of sync with their skill:

They are intent on something prouder than these small plants seem to be which grow on their soil, new, strange and beautiful, in real perfection. What is ultimately good in their own garden and vineyard they esteem lightly…their love and their insight are not equal.

As a result of this inequality the insight they do have becomes stretched beyond itself to leverage something it cannot bring off, or shouldn’t. Wagner, Nietzsche notes, is "the untouched master of finding the tones in the realm of suffering, depressed, and tortured souls…giving language even to mute misery. None can equal him in the colors of late fall, in the indescribably moving happiness of the last, truly last, truly shortest joy; he knows a sound for those quiet, disquieting midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to be out of joint and where at any moment something might originate 'out of nothing.'”

Wagner is master of the silent cry of utter, gasping vulnerability, and because of this, his treasonous instrumentalization is a higher offense. Entrusted with seeing man at his bitterest, his most desperate, his most confounded, for Wagner to turn notes of spent suffering, notes of last and failing joy, to his own gain describes a beast feeding on human blood, sweat, and tears for sustenance. His hiddenness from himself creates space for a false image to surface and seek food. “His character prefers large walls and audacious frescoes,” when in truth his spirit “prefers to sit quietly in the nooks of collapsed houses.”

To rationalize desperation for use is to choose for self-gain to describe things that might truthfully be indescribable. Consider Nietzsche’s appraisal of his “talent” for “giving language even to mute misery.” Is this not to lie? The artist brings his insight to a place he may not belong in order to produce a sound suffering cannot make. This is a presumption upon reality, dripping paint across a clear, thin mountain stream. The preference for canvas space, for visibility, stretches canvas paper over budding trees, crushing silent life in favor of a subject and a sound.

When Nietzsche describes Wagner’s talent for finding sounds for “the disquieting midnights” where the rational impulse fails to understand, where correspondence disintegrates and where there is such abandonment of the apparent joint of things, the gasping life is seen at its most vulnerable, “where at any moment something might originate ‘out of nothing.’” The invocation here is of an “apparent” creatio ex-nihilo wherein the vulnerable subject’s perspective leaves him so pressed down he is willing to look up for a god that might conjure from nothing sounds of intelligibility. Thus, the corruption of a mute misery with sound forms the instrument that trumpets the descent of the god who has explained silent suffering.

Christians recognize this “sin” of Wagner’s as the sin of Adam, as he was drawn to the impossible temptation “you will be like God.” Nietzsche describes this lie well in his depiction of the Apollinian artist creating images, of which he himself becomes the central manufacture. Whereas the Dionysian world-artist images the world in himself and Adam images God in himself, disconnect from understanding that self always leads to image-making, the creation of idols, what sin is. Understanding oneself, then, is understanding one’s role or telos, not merely one’s personal desire—personal desire often leads to a claim the telos cannot vindicate. The Apollinian tells a lie by creating idols. But the lie he tells begin with the temptation of a corrupted telos, “you will be as God.” Having accepted this temptation he accepts his own estrangement and his art is subsequently subjected to propping up this estrangement.

Consider the temptation of becoming god-like. This creatio instinct indicates the artist’s desire to be infinite, to be released from death through artistic means into immortality. Yet Nietzsche describes music in Contra Wagner as “the last plant among all the arts which grow on the soil of a particular culture—perhaps because it is the most inward and hence arrives last, in the fall, when the culture which belongs to it is fading.” Music is always (in practice) posthumous work, looking back and realizing glories that have since crumbled: “Only in Handel’s music did there resound what was the best in the souls of Luther and those related to him, the Jewish-heroic trait that gave the Reformation a trait of greatness—the Old Testament become music, not the New.” Not subtly, a weary man is decrying his early enthusiasm for Christus Wagner, but he turns over something vital here in his aesthetic understanding. Even if it is celebratory, art, in practice, is consistently lament: “All true, all original music, is a ‘swan song.’” Nietzsche is furious at an aesthetics that participates in instead of hammering to bits a German culture estranged from reality just to the extent it feeds its personal glory in the present by instrumentalizing a dead past. All this guarantees there is no future: “The Germans themselves have no future.” More than hyperbole and vitrol, this is consistent with Nietzsche’s understanding of music as the “last plant” growing from a particular, cultural soil. If the last plant is dead, the soil is spent.

In this way music about the past does not live now. It merely effects delight for something vain and non-real like nationalism. This is the hopelessness of the state, which is necessarily Apollinian in its appropriation of life for a series of dominant poses. If the German people’s hope is in the glory of the state, then they will celebrate Wagner’s booming ancient sagas and perish. “Every art, every philosophy, may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either growing or declining life.” This music appropriates the dead and kills the living. We might understand this hopelessness as the hopelessness of a people lacking an inaugurated eschatology.

Christian ecclesiology describes a people whose present song is a promise from the past about a future hope. Christians do not appropriate the dead, for the Christian dead do not witness to their own time or their own glory; the Christian dead witness to Jesus. In Jesus the song of witness extends as an eschatological hope which gathers a people in the present whose glory is not themselves or each other but the God who has given them time and reason to gather. Christians never appropriate since they are never the ends of life. Christians are a people who have been appropriated into God and his purposes.

Nietzsche had believed Wagner’s music was the unleashing of a Dionysian hammer upon a wayward culture. Nietzsche blames his aesthetic error in judgment on not knowing himself, a remarkable ethical turn: “It is plain what I misunderstood in, equally plain what I read into, Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself.” There are two misunderstandings described here. Of the first we could say that, not understanding himself, he misunderstood those around him. The second way would be to say what he misunderstood in them was seeing himself in them rather than seeing them in themselves. Both forms involve a distortion of the individual that distorts the other. This is how the self experiences the aesthetic/ethical dilemma created by the Dionysian-Apollinian collision. For the Dionysian, Nietzsche, an undifferentiated experience of the self and nature ought to mean that the self mirrors the other and the other mirrors nature and nature mirrors the self. But confronted with radical individuation (the lie of estrangement that estranges), the Dionysian misunderstands the other and himself and must overcome this through separation and exposure.

Christian ecclesiology affirms differentiated undifferentiation, a harmonious extension of the self into the other which images the self-giving God who has appropriated them into His own life. Christians are a radically Dionysian community whose opposite is Apollinian self-glorying and denial of mystery. Hiddenness from themselves and misunderstanding of the other is overcome by this imaging and they are re-interpreted to one another as expressed difference whose harmony is the Body of Christ.

Art and philosophy, Nietzsche asserts, always presuppose suffering and sufferers. There are two kinds of sufferers: “first, those who suffer from an overfullness of life and want a Dionysian art…then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and demand of art and philosophy…revenge against life itself.” The Dionysian man suffers from embracing the true excesses of life and he demands his art speak truthfully of the same effusiveness of ecstasy and pain. He wants a tragic insight from his art in order to make life, not intelligible, but noble. He exalts in everything, rejects nothing, and his music climaxes in the “incomparable world of harmony.”

Contrarily, those who suffer from the impoverishment of life want of their art an anesthetic, a balm, a stillness that gives them peace against the chaos. They want a lie because this revenges them against the reality that has crushed them under. “Humaneness” in thought and deed is what those who suffer most and are poorest need. This is the aesthetic of the sick. It is in this place that things like “souls” are invented as a way of negating life. This is the need of the poor and weak, to have a false buffer against life from which to live. If self-denial and life-denial can be made into a good, then the sick are granted a meaning and a strength beyond the meaninglessness and weakness they feel. In this soil “a god for the sick, a healer and ‘savior’” is the highest hope. For Nietzsche, Jesus is the aesthetic of the poor and weak. He is also the logic that gives their ‘idiotic’ existence intelligibility. Yet Jesus is in fact the Dionysian man par excellence. For Jesus is the one in whom all exists. Jesus is the one who embraced the excesses of life—all joy and all suffering. Jesus is the one who received into his body the pain that he would turn to joy. For in the tragedy of the crucified God the collision of all difference—ecstasy and suffering, mystery and intelligibility, the Dionysian and the Apollinian—is brought to climax in a new birth called “resurrection” and the creation of an “incomparable world of harmony” —the true church of Christ’s Body.

The church is that “primordial unity” that is rediscovered in Jesus through Christ’s tearing of the Apollinian veil of estrangement (what reconciliation is). Nietzsche says that for the true Dionysian world to be seen, the foundations of Apollinian culture must be made visible. For the church to be the church it must make the world the world. For the kingdom of God to be seen and submitted to, the kingdom of man must be exposed.

Christmas Reflections

2008-12-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

Few people have mattered as much to me as the poet James McMichael. On the first cold, rainy day I've had to myself since I lived in Galway, it is McMichael who I turn to now that I am done with school and can read whatever I like. As a mentor and a friend, it was McMichael that taught me what good writing was and could be. His book-length work Each in a Place Apart, Four Good Things, and Capacity mark like boundaries and swung gates the major turns in my life as a reader learning to write. They matter to me in a way that good prayer matters to me. They last. They stay. They teach. They accompany me through. They do not deliver and move on. They are not instruments. They are not useful unless we are near enough to God and soil to finally say that only beauty and friendship are truly useful. For beauty and friendship are what God means when he says "Jesus." And "Jesus" is what we mean when we say "God." The one who lasts. The one who stays. The one who accompanies us through.

So "Christmas" is a poem God told the world and became.

Here is James McMichael reading the last poem he completed.

The Believed-In

Enjoy the weather's opportunities for time, poetry, and prayer.

Dave

homeward

2008-12-08T10:50:00.000-08:00

a san juan overcast and the clouds biggish and swollen with thoughts of rain. i was told the earth confesses Christ from the rivers first. so the clouds from the cold banks of the corrib and the black ledge rise as prayer to God's nostrils for friends I miss and want to see and can't.

may Christ be friend to lonely men.

Giving Thanks

2008-11-27T11:35:00.001-08:00

Giving thanks, for Christians, means bringing forward to God the world as we understand it--people as we understand them, politics and economics as we understand them, friends and enemies as we understand them, justice, love, family, freedom, forgiveness, hope as we understand them, evil, sadness, depression, loneliness, fear as we understand them--we bring all of this forward to God's table and lay it down before him. We lay down the burden of our understanding of the world. We give it back. We admit we possess nothing. And we take up into our empty hands the body and blood of Christ--the Gospel--the world according to God, and we allow that world to transform us and our understanding of everything around us. All thought and understanding must now pass through Christ first or it will not tell the the truth about God and the world he has already changed in Christ. Colossians 3:17 says that we can only give thanks to God the Father through Christ. This is literally true.

"Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to the cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die."

--from Rock of Ages

Happy Thanksgiving, friends and family.

From Christ for Christ,

Dave

On Certainty and Systems

2008-11-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

(This is an excerpt from a Ben Witherington Post I am particularly fond of...)

All too often, the apparent intellectual coherency of a theological system is taken as absolute and compelling proof that this view of God, salvation,the world must be true and all others be heresy, to one degree or another. But it is perfectly possible to argue logically and coherency in a hermeneutical or theological circle with all parts connected, and unfortunately be dead wrong-- because one drew the circle much too small and left out all the inconvenient contrary evidence. This sort of fault is inevitable with theological systems constructed by finite human beings.

A minutes reflection will show that intellectual coherency, as judged by finite fallen or even redeemed minds, is not a very good guide to what is true. The truth of God and even of the Bible is much larger than anyone's ability (or any collection of human being's abilities) to get their mental calipers so firmly around it that one could form it into a 'coherent theological system' without flaws, gaps, or lacunae. That includes Calvin's very fine mind as reflected in his Theological Institutes. The real paradox about the God of Calvin is while Calvin does all in his power to stress the enormity and consequent sovereignty of a great God over all things, sadly but inevitably even his God is too small to encompass everything that is said about God in the Scriptures, even just everything that is said about soteriology in the Scriptures.

While I certainly believe that God's own worldview is coherent, and that some of it is revealed in the Bible, the facts are that the Bible does not reveal everything we always wanted to know about God so we could be certain God exists and form that body of knowledge into a self-sustaining fully coherent theological system with one idea leading to another idea, and so on (and now we can all sing a chorus of 'Will the Circle be Unbroken').

A strong sense of assurance provided by the living presence of God in the person of the Holy Spirit in our lives is not the same as intellectual certainty. Nor does God reveal so much about the eternal mysteries that a finite human mind could form it into an airtight theological system of any kind. Indeed, the Bible is pretty clear that God quite deliberately did not 'tell all' either in general revelation in creation or in the Scriptures(read Job), not least because God wants us to trust him and to build a trust relationship with him. What God has done is that God has revealed enough so that we may be redeemed but not so much that we do not have to trust God about the future.

I must confess that as a NT scholar I am inherently suspicious about theological systems like Calvinism or Dispensationalism or even Arminianism and the like which seem to foster certain kinds of feelings of intellectual certainty and even smugness about things that are in fact profound mysteries.

When someone brings up a topic like "why is their evil in the world, and why do even God's people suffer so much" rather than give a pat answer I am more apt to repeat the words of John Muir who said words to the following effect-- "We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally God's light shines through the tapestry and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence."

I must tell you that whenever I have had a profound experience of God through reading his word or encountering God in worship or community, it tends to just humble me, and make me want to say something like what Joni Mitchell said about love--- "its love's illusions I recall, I really don't know love, at all". I have barely touched the hem of the Master's garment, I hardly know him though I long to know him better. In the face of the divine-human encounter, even Barth's Dogmatics appear to be little more than a good start to understanding God.

Please understand that I am not suggesting that we should not think logically and coherently about our faith, and do our best to connect the dots. Nevertheless, we should be placing our faith in God, not in a particular theological system. There is a difference. In the former case the faith is largely placed in whom we know and whom we have encountered. In the latter case the faith can be too often placed in what we believe we know about God and theological truth.

I always want to ask the 'theological certainty' folks who have this great conviction that their theological system must surely be exactly what the Bible says and means-- Where exactly does that conviction and ardor come from?

Not even Paul in the Bible dots all the i's and crosses all the t's of a particular theological system and more to the point, he has no compelling interest in doing so. He is interested, as are all the Scriptural writers in simply bearing witness to a truth and a reality they have not merely come to believe in, but which they have experienced and which has changed their lives. They still have questions and intellectual doubts, and we hear about them in various places and ways in the Scripture. Their faith in God is not based on a conviction that they have a coherent theological system which they in essence fully understand and can explain. Their faith in God comes from having a personal relationship with God which provided them with enough evidence to produce faith in God. They know enough to know-- that they don't know enough to produce a comprehensive system called 'the knowledge of God'.

Humility is fostered more by a recognition of and an owning up to what you don't know about God, than what you do. This is not because we do not know a good number of things about God both from the Word and the through the Spirit. We do. We know enough to trust God for what we do not know and understand. And in the end our posture should be that of Anselm-- 'fides quaerens intellectum' faith seeking understanding, not 'intellectus quaerens fidium' 'Understanding seeking and defining and limiting faith'.

Eat These Books.

2008-11-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

1. The Prodigal God by Tim Keller

Because Christians need saved. I was re-converted three years ago while living in Ireland by listening to Pastor Keller's sermon on the Prodigal Sons of which this book is an elaboration. Read this and understand the Gospel for the first time. This is especially important in an age of nominal (read:fake) Christians who think Jesus came to make good people better.

2. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Do Work. This is Steak. Everyone needs to read Bonhoeffer. Cheap Grace is the mortal enemy of the Christian Church. Read and be consumed.

3. Being Consumed by William Cavanaugh

A nice segue and a better book. Slim and to the point. Christians chained to the age of consumerism are Christians dominated by the principalities and powers of Satan. Wanna know how powerful sin is? Try and stop being a consumer. (thank you Dr. Hauerwas)

4. Systematic Theology by Robert W. Jenson

For those ready to cut their teeth on some aggressive theology of the highest order. Volume One ("The Triune God") is excellent but I am currently smitten with Volume Two ("The Works of God"). I have a dream that people at Emmaus will one day casually walk up to me and say, "How about what Jenson says about Angels, eh?" A Pastor could die happy if he knew his people were enjoyng the riches of the Church and her thinkers :)

5. Death by Love by Mark Driscoll

Driscoll is getting better and better with age. This is creative, pastoral, and ruthlessly for the glory of Christ. Jesus is God. You don't know Jesus if you don't know the Jesus of cross and resurrection.

The Death of Peter Pan (final pt.)

2008-10-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Two Worlds and a Third"

And here we must also leave Macintyre, who is insufficiently particular (exploited irony) to provide us an alternative for Peter. We are certain of this not just for Wendy’s or our own detached declarations of the tragic at work in Peter, but for drawing near enough to notice we are implicated in the incoherent life of Peter Pan, and that this incoherence means that Peter necessarily strains against his own categories, unsettled, exhausted. Peter, who despises even the idea of mothers, brings Wendy to Neverland to be a mother for he and the lost boys. This is an invitation beyond himself for something outside himself that disagrees with many of his own claims. Further still, Wendy finds that Peter cries at night in his sleep many nights without waking, and we are told that his tears have to do, the narrator believes, with the riddle of his existence. Creating and sustaining detachment is exhausting work for a boy who misses his mother.

A coherent alternative is required of any friend. Wendy offers London and the nursery, her own parents—but Peter declines. The lost boys, whose memories of mother are fresher, leap at the chance to have parents again. But turning to the final pages of the story, we are left aching. The lost boys return with Wendy and are adopted and loved and grow up well, attending school and getting jobs as lawyers and bankers—but their memories of Peter and Neverland dwindle and fade. And while this might be necessary for growing up, we are left feeling that this business of growing up might itself be a tragedy all its own. What of friendship and memory and games and song? Is becoming a banker and lawyer not its own description of tragedy? It might have a telos and a narrative quest that can be articulated, but it is all tragically uninteresting. We are convinced this alternative would have been an even greater despair for Peter (and for ourselves). As we watch the lost boys grow in a matter of sentences into old men dressed in dark, proper clothes walking seriously through gray London streets to stone banks and courthouses…we feel dread. We feel Peter’s rebellion is justified. We wonder or plead for a third reality, not London and not Neverland—not modernism’s bleak march nor postmodernity’s pell-mell flight.

If our critique is one of friendship to Peter it must arrive from and return to an alternative in time that is embodied and free of tragedy. We will ask John Milbank to go the distance with us from Macintyre’s able critique to a particular ecclesial alternative in time.

For Milbank the church is both tradition and telos, one which fundamentally requires a unity and inter-communion of members in order to fulfill its tradition and telos of salvation. The church is the world between the worlds, extending down from a present heavenly reality into time and space, as that which transcends the violent and tragic ontology of coherent and incoherent human being by a concretized social embodiment of a salvific moral philosophy defined and animated by abundance, gift, and friendship.

This ecclesial community is one of freedom extended from each freed person toward each other freed person, since the origin and telos of each is friendship with God, which is the harmony of difference—salvation. Such a freedom generated from friendship for friendship participates in the abundance of God, and is thus infinitely expansive as the gathering and extending of finite notes into a heavenly reality that both transcends all and continually arrives in all as heard symphony, particular and unbound.

Thus a freedom arriving out of friendship with God enacts a community of perfect freedom, which is not each self’s arbitrary ability to exercise will into each emotional instant, but which is true freedom—each self’s ability to become what each was created to be—a friend of other and of God. This is freedom that expands for all as it expands from each. Freedoms that are opposed, that are understood as ends, or “rights” of an individual for an individual will always collide, resist, war in disharmony, shatter into discrete, violent, instrumentalized slaveries, believing without hope in scarcity.

So true freedom is neither London nor Neverland—neither growing up (unity) for its own sake (the universal reason of modernity) nor perpetuity (disunity) for its own sake (the antagonistic incoherence of postmodernity). The true telos found in the ecclesia of God is not individual glory, or even collective glory. It is neither the production of heroes (London) nor the heroic city (Neverland); instead it is the active generation of friendships between distinct persons and God.
There are only two realities, anyway. Neverland is merely frustrated London resisting itself, sustained in incoherence, destined only for a somewhat more interesting tragedy. London is a bleak bore of heroic individualism that attempts to explain away all enchantments with economics and law. Neverland is a chaos of heroic individualism that foolishly enchants incoherence and is always thus in vague danger of (romantically) killing itself.

But Milbank assures us and Peter, who is waiting impatiently again at the windowsill, that,
[w]hat matters is not the cultivation of excellence in the heroic present, which cyclically appears and disappears, but rather the ever-renewed transmission of the signs of love and the bringing to birth of new members from the womb of baptism. Mother church is mediated by real female generation —

“Mother,” Peter repeats softly, stepping down.

And seeing him draw closer, we are reminded that he is only a boy. We are reminded, too, of the hope of baptism and the rising tide that surrounded him and Wendy after the fierce battle with Hook at Mermaid Lagoon. We remember Peter was wounded and weary and the water was rising round the rock they lay upon. We remember Michael’s kite floated toward them and that Peter said it would only carry one away and insisted it be Wendy. We remember thinking then that this was what friendship was.

See Peter alone now, in the lagoon, and the rock getting smaller and smaller…
Pale rays of light tiptoed across the waters; and by and by there was to be heard a sound at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the world: the mermaids calling to the moon. Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

To die, to plunge, to be reborn.

The Death of Peter Pan (p. 4)

2008-10-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

“The Never Never Land”

A Moral philosophy—and emotivism is no exception—characteristically presupposes a sociology. For every moral philosophy offers explicitly or implicitly at least a partial conceptual analysis of a relationship of an agent to his or her reasons, motivations, intentions and actions, and in so doing generally presupposes some claim that these concepts are embodied or at least can be in the real social world…Thus it would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.

In London Peter fights to attach his shadow. His perpetual incoherence, while feeding each emotional instant, keeps him effectively disembodied. The Neverland, however, is itself that embodiment. It is an entire sociology of Peter’s emotivism. The Neverland emerges as his true shadow, the proof of him wholly, the context of his brute will:

Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter. In his absence things are usually quiet on the island. The fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life.

The island rouses at the return of its hero and ruler. The narrator signals the overwhelming fullness of Peter’s influence by allowing even his language to be converted from what is correct, or true, to what Peter would prefer. The collective consciousness of the island and its inhabitants responds to Peter’s return in the way that appeals most to Peter. The entire island is an instrument of his will. There are no impersonal criteria. All value on the island is based on Peter’s ability to appropriate it.

This does not, however, mean that it is a safe place. In fact, the Neverland is a wildly violent and dangerous place—indicating that this violence is necessary to Peter’s tautological incoherence and instrumental glory. Peter’s morality is entirely dependent on negative virtue. As we saw before a child plummeting toward death can be a magnificent thing if Peter can glory in the act of rescue. There must be danger so that Peter can be proven brave. There must be wonderfully evil enemies like Jas. Hook and the pirates so that Peter can crow wonderfully at their defeat. There must be violence so there can be virtue. There must be violence also because it is the most effective form of coercion. Consider the activity the island immediately falls into upon Peter’s return:

On this evening the chief forces of the island were disposed as follows. The lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island, but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate. All wanted blood except the boys, who liked it as a rule, but to-night were out to greet their captain.

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.

All of the major parties of the island are locked perpetually hunting, ready to kill. And in this image the absurdity of the emotivist tautology is again physicalized to indicate that the purpose of the hunt and the kill is simply the hunt and the kill—who can hunt and kill best. There is no reason and no goal. It is a giant perpetual game of war that rages so long as Peter is entertained. We learn later that Peter will even suddenly switch sides and declare himself redskin and start fighting the lost boys with the same joy and fury (until the lost boys realize the switch and follow their leader—forcing the redskins to declare themselves lost boys). And there is no false threat. The dead bodies pile up all over Neverland, clear in the casual way the narrator mentions the number of lost boys always fluctuating “as they get killed and so on.”

Even more brutal is the subtle way the narrator describes Peter’s thinning out those lost boys he deems to be growing up, which is against the rules (his rules). Peter doesn’t send them away. He kills them. The only adults on the island are pirates and redskins, predictable and manageable threats he can glory over in war. A lost boy who seems to be growing up violates Peter’s commitment to perpetuity and tells a dangerous lie against his devotion to the emotional instant. Growing up admits a past and anticipates a future (even in the simplest categories), and as such is the greatest threat to Peter (and the island). Killing off suspected lost boys is the easiest way for Peter to preserve his system.

This is the violence necessary to preserve the fictional category of detachment. This is the embodiment of disembodiment—the purest expression of subjective valuing. Yet if the Neverland is the social embodiment of true emotivism, the critique and refutation of such a moral philosophy is described in the thing itself, for Macintyre asserts: “It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied.” If emotivism embodied is a “Neverland”, which is not locatable, which requires flight from the “real social world” (London, the nursery) then emotivism is refuted as a viable moral philosophy. Emotivism’s required detachment from tradition and telos detaches it entirely from the real.

The Death of Peter Pan (p. 3)

2008-10-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

“Let Him Keep Who Can”

What is even more interesting is that the collapsed emotivist telos of self-glorification means that Peter cannot be a good friend. This is made clear on the flight to Neverland. It is late and the flight is long, so Wendy, John, and Michael begin to get very sleepy. But this is very scary because while Peter can fly while he sleeps, when one of the children falls asleep, they literally plummet from the sky. And:

The awful thing was that Peter thought this funny.
“There he goes again!” he would cry gleefully, as Michael suddenly dropped like a stone.
“Save him, save Him!” cried Wendy, looking with horror at the cruel sea below.
Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.

Macintyre writes: “Insofar as a moral culture is emotivist the relationship between individuals will be manipulative.” Peter cannot be relied on because his relationships are only important to him as long as they serve his interests of amusement or glory. Instrumentalization of moral fragments, or of people, is a serious work of violence and manipulation that requires a disregard of the other’s narrative union. Just as the moral argument is torn from its tradition and telos in order to satisfy the attitude of an emotional instant, so too an individual other is stripped of past and promise and appropriated to the self’s interest in the present. This violence knocks off the particularities that identify coherent, unique persons. Their narrative quest is effectively suspended through disregard.

For Wendy, John, and Michael this is depicted physically in the flight to Neverland. They have trusted Peter with their uncertainty and he persuaded them to follow him out the window, to leave the nursery that embodies their belonging to a particular past. They have followed him into the skies that suspend, to a place where he is essential at every moment to lead them and save them if they fall. But as their presence becomes less interesting and their pace a bother, Peter begins repeatedly to strand them in the sky. Feeling especially responsible for John and Michael—having allowed the initial severance from her parents’ home due to the temptation of mermaids and fairies —Wendy quickly realizes the potential danger they are in as a result of Peter’s fickle nature and unreliability. This motivates her practically to rebuke John and Michael when they grow frustrated at how Peter only seems to play flying games that show his superiority:

“You must be nice to him! How could we ever find our way back without him?”
“Well then, we could go on,” said John.
“That is the awful thing, John, we should have to go on, for we don’t know how to stop.”
This was true. Peter had forgotten to show them how to stop.
John said that if the worst came to the worst all they had to do was go straight on, for the world was round, so in time they must come back to their own window.

The children are suspended in perpetuity, cut loose and floating between their window and the Neverland, not knowing how to arrive at either past or future. The only reliable thing is their perpetuity—they don’t know how to stop. This leads John to try and make use of the new narrative by explaining how they might still arrive at their window. The tautology of narrative disunity is described here both by the earth’s roundness and their inability to stop flying (a physical description of detachment from contextual embeddedness). Separated from the window and unable to chart the course to Neverland—torn of tradition and telos—Wendy, who is our chief foil to Peter’s emotivism, does not take movement forward implicitly for progress, but instead understands it primarily as non-linear, mere perpetuity, the very thing feared. Only able to trust their inability to stop, a desperate type of manipulation sneaks in as Wendy and John worry for their survival. Wendy commands John and Michael to be nice to Peter, whether he deserves it or not, because they need him to survive. Peter’s unreliability as a friend forces Wendy toward a subtler manipulation of Peter for the sake of survival. The instant any hope in friendship for its own sake is fragmented by Peter’s selfish whims and instrumentalizations, all parties are thrown back on themselves and the abundance friendship enacts is emptied for the scarce game of self-preservation. And there they thus float, suspended between the worlds, disembodied.

The Death of Peter Pan (p. 2)

2008-10-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

“Peter Breaks Through”

But for now, enter finally the boy-child who has been waiting impatiently at the windowsill and who is longsince tired of our boring stories (though he would crow if he knew we spoke entirely of him). Notice how he is conveniently adorned in tree-blood and the skeletons of dead leaves. Notice also that he is here in search of his shadow, though so light is he at tiptoeing and flying about, we are sure he will not wake the children. Finding where his shadow has been locked up, though, he pounces wildly for it with delight. Almost as soon we find him in despair. The narrator tells us of the boy, “If he thought at all—but I don’t believe he ever thought—it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water, and when they did not he was appalled.” See him try to stick it on with soap? But this fails, too, though he cannot discern why. A shudder passes through him and he sits down on the floor and begins to cry.
This is his state when Wendy, who is waking up just now, first discovers him: “Boy,” she says courteously, “why are you crying?” Peter bows, also courteously, but does not answer her. Instead he asks her name,

"Wendy Moira Angela Darling," she replied with some satisfaction. "What is your name?"
"Peter Pan."
She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.
"Is that all?"
"Yes," he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
"I'm so sorry," said Wendy Moira Angela.
"It doesn't matter," Peter gulped.
She asked where he lived.
"Second to the right," said Peter, "and then straight on till morning."
"What a funny address!"
Peter had a sinking. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
"No, it isn't," he said.
"I mean," Wendy said nicely, remembering that she was hostess, "is that what they put on the letters?"
He wished she had not mentioned letters.
"Don't get any letters," he said contemptuously.
"But your mother gets letters?"
"Don't have a mother," he said. Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very over-rated persons. Wendy, however, felt at once that she was in the presence of a tragedy.
"O Peter, no wonder you were crying," she said, and got out of bed and ran to him.
"I wasn't crying about mothers," he said rather indignantly. "I was crying because I can't get my
shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn't crying."

When Wendy offers to sew it on she warns him it may hurt and that he might cry. Peter declares, “Oh, I shan’t cry,” and the narrator tells us that Peter was already convinced he had never cried before in his life. I present to you the endearing, tragic god of forgetful modernity—the purest heroic individual, the greatest moral emotivist, the perpetual youth, Peter Pan.
The instances of detachment are everywhere. We’ll begin with the act of forgetting. Peter has to this point trained himself so well in out-narrating his coherences that he no longer coheres. The struggle and despair over his detachment from his shadow is what Macintyre would point to as the disunity of a human identity, which reveals itself in relief of Macintyre’s positive description of the unity of a human life as the unity of a narrative quest.

The issue of the shadow illustrates in a striking way the direct connection between Peter’s forgetting through incoherent narration and obsession with the emotional instant and Peter’s loss of actual wholeness, unity and coherence. There are two important shows of forgetting here, the most obvious being Peter’s claim to have no mother. This is directly related to the question of letters. Letters are messages arriving out of the past that are sent to and from known and particular persons. Letters signal particular investment, claim, interest. Letters take time, thought, care, often love. Letters are things that simultaneously narrate and surmount the distances between persons, making pasts and persons present through their enactment as accountings-for. Most significantly, Peter “wished she had not mentioned letters.” This prepares us for the narrative incoherence that follows. It is clear that Peter already has a feeling about letters. They are acts of remembering. Their absence is no less powerful an act of remembering, and remembering absences particularly. Specifically, letters remind Peter of his mother’s absence, because mothers are the sorts of persons who send and receive letters. Wendy knows this and asks about his mother. When Peter retorts that he has no mother, the narrator inhabits Peter’s very short response, revealing that Peter has thought a great deal about this, or battled a great deal with this. We are assured, “He had not even the slightest interest in having one. He thought them very over-rated persons.” There is a great deal of history and tension revealed in these lines. The posture is wounded and resentful, and his curt narration of detachment seeks to assuage his having to remember.

This cyclical narrative incoherence that seeks to avoid the demands coherence places on the subject is the expression of an emotional instant. Peter does not want to remember the past and become sad, nor does he want to find or admit he can’t remember the past, which discovery might preclude hope. In serving the emotional instant of dread at what remembering might do, he actively narrates incoherence, which strengthens his ability to forget, which is his ability to believe he is an unencumbered self—safe, not vulnerable to what he cannot decide on or control.

Describing the emergence of emotivism as the result of the enlightenment attempt to “uproot moral traditions from the theoretical and social contexts that once gave them coherence” and organize a universal morality along the seam of secular reason, Alasdair MacIntyre notes that when the project failed what was left was several antagonistic stances that claimed reason as their justification:

A consequence of these unsettled and unsettlable debates was the releasing into the culture at large of a set of moral concepts which derive from their philosophical ancestry an appearance of rational determinateness and justification which they do not in fact possess. So that appeal to them appears to make an objectively reason-supported claim whereas in fact such appeals lack rational backing and can be put to the service of a variety of rival and antagonistic purposes. Because they disguise the purposes which they serve, they are useful fictions.

That his narrative of “no mother” is the useful fiction of an emotional instant and not a reliable expression (we are after all in the realm of myth) is supported by the subsequent incident in the nursery when Peter tells Wendy, in fact, that he ran away from home the moment he was born because he heard his father talk about Peter’s growing up and Peter had resented the notion. Whether this narrative can be trusted is unlikely since the narrator adds, “He really knew nothing about it; he merely had his suspicions.” What’s clear is he is quite proud of this story and assumes Wendy will be impressed with him. Useful fiction. This deployment is effortless, as seen in his ability in a matter of seconds to go from crying openly to being convinced that he has never cried before in his life. Wendy warns him he might cry—an involuntary, vulnerability—and his immediate response is that he never cries. And he is immediately convinced his response is true.

This constant deployment of useful fictions with no contextual justification is the activity of forgetting, and it affects Peter’s regular memory. The narrator’s remarkable off-hand disclosure that Peter has likely never had a thought —a deliberate reference to his living obsessively in the emotional instant—illuminates the inevitability of Peter’s incoherence and disunity. This is followed by a comment about Peter’s description of how to get to Neverland, where the narrator notes that these were really impossible directions to follow, and anyway that “Peter really just said anything that came into his head.” Further on, during the flight to Neverland, Peter flies off from the three children to entertain various adventures (since they are slow and he is easily bored), but when he comes back, laughing about something he said to a star or covered in mermaid scales, he cannot recall what was said or what had actually occurred. “And if he forgets them so quickly, how can we be sure he’ll remember us?” Wendy asks fearfully. Indeed he flies away several times and does forget them when he crosses paths with them and stops briefly to pass the time. Wendy can see the slow recognition return to his eyes, but at least once she has to tell him with frustration, “I’m Wendy.” He apologizes to her, but tells her quietly that if she ever sees him forgetting again, just to remind him over and over again until he remembers again. Wendy is not encouraged by this. It is apparent in this that Peter’s active forgetting trains him to forget in general. His denial of a narrative coherence to assuage the attitude of an emotional instant works to leave him generally incoherent and increasingly trapped in the emotional instant. His active denial of parentage is exactly what keeps him from growing up. His narrative incoherence enacts the thing it points to, is the emotivist self’s perverse sacrament.

The incoherent narration of the unencumbered self is vital to the modern project of the autonomous individual and the emotivist ethic. Macintyre argues that an individual without a unifying narrative embedded in a social tradition cannot have a telos. Peter’s inability to articulate a coherent past frees him from arriving out of any tradition that might put claims on him or describe him, but this same freedom collapses him in the perpetuity of the emotional present, without a proper telos. Hacked of intelligible roots beyond himself, the boy-child’s notion of the good cannot get beyond himself either. Unable to understand his past, Peter’s only telos is his personal glory in the present. This entire scenario culminates when Wendy sews his shadow back again to his feet. Peter suddenly leaps up in delight and crows and dances about and declares his cleverness for having sewn his own shadow back on. It is such an absurd adulteration, the narrator leans in and says confidentially: “It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness: there never was a cockier boy.” So extreme is the violation of the truth and the immediate past in favor of the self’s glory that the narrator resigns himself to find it charming. Wendy, however, not used to Peter and having just been discredited, is appalled. Peter apologizes, but he apologizes by explaining that he simply must crow when he is so pleased with himself. He can’t see why he has offended her and assumes she is offended by his glory.

The Death of Peter Pan: Tragedy and Hope for Modernity's Lost Child (pt.1)

2008-10-12T19:58:00.001-07:00

In a different culture, with much worse lighting and a voice like poured lava, the following sentence could be expected to initiate a tragic, even grotesque fiction: All children, except one, grow up. We can see the small ones shudder around the fire at the thought of perpetuity without enlargement, at the terror of innumerable impossible futures receding endlessly away like the revolving tide, always place-changing, never achieving, never creating even the possibility of crossable space required for hope. But in the West these words, rather than stirring fear or sadness, introduce the greatest quality of our greatest hero.

Any theology, if it is to be taken seriously, must at some point deal seriously with the stories we tell our children. Our subject here is J.M. Barrie’s remarkable 1911 novel of the eternal youth who dips and soars, wheeling magnificently through the London skyline—forgetful, arrogant, irresponsible, free. Peter Pan is the great child of the West, the utterly liberated individual, the glorious unencumbered self flying at ease between the worlds. Heir to modernity’s crown of autonomous selfhood, his trajectory a century later can be seen to anticipate with almost surreal accuracy the subsequent intellectual and moral debris strewn across the West following the destruction of the Enlightenment in the 20th century’s shower of bullets, bombs and blood.

The argument of Alasdair Macintyre’s seminal work After Virtue feels something like a pale but deepening dawn lifting on a battlefield years after a great war has passed through. The field is still littered with human carcasses covered in mud and gray. Few, if any, have come to actually collect the dead. The broken bodies have instead been picked over for watches, rings and wallets, then discarded.

Macintyre describes our contemporary moral situation as essentially ‘emotivist,’—that is, as gaining its character, shape, and justification not from any particular tradition from which it draws form and description nor from an overarching telos toward which it is inclined, but primarily out of the instrumentalization of scraps of varying and even rival moral accounts which serve a particular moment’s ‘attitude and feeling.’ This position is strangest not for its rude instrumentalization of fragments but for its ability and willingness to continually understand itself as incoherent. Arriving at emotivism and remaining there is not a seamless development—in fact, it is contra-development. It requires a continual devotion to discontinuity only achievable through a renewable obsession with the self and the present, what I will call devotion to the emotional instant.

The simplest image is that of a tree bent double and gasping, hacking desperately at its roots and recoiling from the sun. The anthropomorphism is helpful in illustrating that this moral position takes considerable work. It is important that the roots and sun are present, positive qualities of the image since emotivism requires at every emotional instant of instrumentalization what is actively unnatural for generative things—denial of actual source and ends, roots and sun, tradition and telos. This is a serious work that cannot simply be glossed by allowing for what it claims is absent. Emotivism depends on the profound energy of absenting. First an emotional instant must be hewn and held (suspended from tradition and telos), then the pattern must be repeated in order to create and instrumentalize any other given moral fragment detached from its particular tradition and telos. The sounds of hacking and tearing and recoiling may be largely drowned out by what is used and how, but they are never absented. All acts of detachment must be continually hewn and continually held.

These acts of detachment are effectively acts of refusal, of forgetting. While remembering is often described as a practice, a virtue, an activity requiring work, I would like to offer that forgetting is equally an activity requiring work. Forgetting requires the work of out-narrating coherence with incoherence. Forgetting is not a discrete act, therefore, but the work required at each moment of the emotivist’s deciding and self-understanding. It will be shown later that this tautology is so ironclad it effects perfect disembodiment from particular space and time.

The Gypsies of the Universe

2008-09-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Christians don’t seem like the kinda people ready to die for things anymore, ready to bleed out paint and tell people there 's a better way of seeing. We don’t seem able to conjure writing and painting and singing the same way the pagans do since we don’t see art as our redemption. But it is our redemption if it’s our calling, we just get it wrong and believe we have to be screwed up, sweared up, twisted up, drowning in sex and electric lights and cigarettes and whiskey (keep the cigarettes, your fine), because these things still sound romantic to us. We seem afraid of teeth and desperation, afraid to believe God might be the only one responsible for music and the way pain can gleam like light. Christians need to be the kind of people who need rain in order to make sense of things and who fantasize about enchanted truths, hammering sounds and lights and a willingness to be wild without having to be sin-soaked and failing constantly in order to get it right--who are we, we are ramblers and gamblers, a long way from home...

What if we saw ourselves rightly as the gypsies of the universe, singing and dancing through towns of boredom and safety and lies, and people afraid we might actually be able to steal their souls into our music if they got too close, these Christ-haunted gypsies smacking bells with a purpose, a meaning, a calling, from a place to a place, from and for a death-killing King more mysterious than hell and his giant wailing hound at his side whose eyes are blue with fire and who hammers the earth with his paws, chasing you. Some kind of blasphemy that the gypsies are the 2.2 with fences, like we even want to own anything, like it cold possibly matter if we ever owned anything, like we aren't chasing a homeless Gypsy King who carries no coin, what fools and nonsense pretending to own suits like praying for death—what if we realized what we said we believe and coudnt hardly keep from tearing our faces in half when the reality of our songs sink in and everything actually matters forever, FOR-freakin-EVER...We may be ugly but we have the music, so sling out your guitars and harps, your fiddles and upright bass, such as these were made by God to keep us crazy from the world trying to make sense of everything like 24 hour news that youre pretty sure is Satan saying hi all day and daring you to nudge someone and point him out, which you don’t do, you blame them instead, the people in the box, your friend entranced, everyone else but yourself and Satan. Satan. Gypsies call evil evil, Satan Satan. The world can’t accept this. To name evil. The world says screw that. And we say screw Satan and the world and its powers. But give us the beautiful and the damned and we’ll carry them to the Gypsy King whose face is like lightning and whose eyes are like fire and He shall make us beautiful, please God, beautiful and desperate and true.

A Theology of Loneliness (p.5)

2008-09-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Lonely Community

Bonhoeffer writes, “Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship (Discipleship, 99).” The community of God are individuals united by their common loneliness for Christ. They are united by what they have left (everything), and for whom they have left it (Christ). The “same mediator who makes us into individuals . . . becomes the basis for entirely new community (98).” Since Christ as the mediator is “the only true path to the other,” one only truly has the other in Christ and through Christ. As with Abraham and Isaac, if Abraham had only had Isaac through himself, Abraham would not have been willing to sacrifice him. He would not have been willing to obey God’s will, which is unity. By clinging to his own attempt at unity with Isaac, Abraham would have actually enforced his disunity both with God and with Isaac. There is no unity without God, no covering without God. Had Abraham rejected God’s will he would have shown that Isaac had become for him a false covering, an idol, and Abraham would not have Isaac as he actually was. Having him through Christ is having him as he actually is, as he beautifully is—a gift and not a possession.

So the community of Christ’s lonely, seeing Christ in the other, serving Christ as the other, are given one another by Christ and through him as they actually are. In Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer writes, “All are united with each other, and yet distinct.” All are united and yet distinct because all have the other only through Christ—all unities with the other are mediated unities. Christ always stands between the person and the other, giving the other to the persona and the person to the other. They are unities only through the loneliness of discipleship: “Each possesses God totally and by themselves in the grace-filled dual solitude of seeing truth and serving love, and yet never is solitary because they always live only within the church-community (S.C., 289).” This is Bonhoeffer’s greatest statement about the church. The Body of Christ on earth is a community of grace-filled solitude. They are the corporate lonely. Moving as each member of the community does by grace between “seeing truth,” recognizing their alone-ness from God, and “serving love,” pursuing Christ out of loneliness for him, the church-community is one of perpetual and mutual solitude. Only in recognizing Christ as the other and serving Christ in the other is a person kept from idolatry and disunion. Only with Christ standing between two individuals can there be community. Thus in everything Christ’s grace-filled mediation creates space for each from each.

And in a community based on such mediation that true “intimacy which is the intensification of the other” is born (Dr. Anderson). Bonhoeffer says, “Social relations must be understood, then, as purely interpersonal and building on the uniqueness and separateness of persons. The person cannot be overcome by apersonal spirit; no ‘unity’ can negate the plurality of persons (S.C., 55).” This is the principle of Christ-mediated unities. Through Christ’s mediation a person is given space to not be fully knowable but to be fully loved. The quest to know another person entirely is the (apersonal) quest to create a man-made union with that person. Holes of knowing are always filled or fudged for the sake of such ‘unity,’ but the result, as we have shown, is in fact estrangement or idolatry. It is like standing with your nose touching a Monet. Nearness must not be mistaken for understanding, nor for communion, nor for love. It is only when Christ steps us back from the globs of paint and we by our separateness can see its uniqueness—only then can we appreciate heaven’s art. Though we can’t be sure what every single brushstroke means or how many layers of paint are underneath and what qualities they give the final, we can adore it. Where there are holes in knowing, they are respected, so that from the place of grace-filled solitude we can have actual intimacy and union with the other.

And through the intensification of the other, through right unity with the other, we ourselves are intensified, increasingly actualized. As Bonhoeffer notes in the same thesis, “There is no self consciousness without consciousness of the other, Individual personal spirit lives solely by virtue of sociality, and ‘social spirit’ becomes real only in individual formation; thus genuine sociality itself presses toward personal unity. One cannot speak of the priority of either personal or social being (S.C., 55).” Just as the fall brought disunity between us and God, us and our selves, us and each other—so Christ reconciles all three through the same process. Led into loneliness for Christ we seek out the other, where Christ is, and in serving Christ there, we are reconciled to the other. Being reconciled to the other we are finally being reconciled to our selves. Living other-centered, selflessly for Christ’s sake, we are being mediated from ourselves by Christ so that we might evade personal idolatry and no longer be estranged from who we actually are—Christ’s.

Finally, the grace-filled dual solitude of Christ’s mediation necessarily prevents the aforementioned loss of distinction which is not only the loss of the unique person but of the church’s call: “God does not want a community that absorbs the individual into itself, but a community of human beings. In God’s eyes, community and individual exists in the same moment and rest in one another. On these basic-relations rest the concepts of the religious community and the church (S. C., 80).” Without this distinction, the church would be absorbed into itself and be rendered utterly ineffective, even as it so often is. The church must remain a community of individuals who are lonely for Christ or she will no longer act. If she were just a community of entirely reconciled individuals, she would turn in on herself and slough off the call into the world. The ministry of Christ in the world depends finally on his disciples not making a salvific covering of the Christian community but pressing on daily to find and love and serve Jesus in the world.

A Theology of Loneliness (p.4)

2008-09-16T16:32:00.001-07:00

The Lonely Disciple

In the upper room discourse in John 16, Jesus tells the disciples who are lamenting his departure that it is actually better that he leave them, for if he didn’t he wouldn’t send the Helper. And yet Jesus says the Helper will not speak of himself but rather will speak of Jesus and will glorify Jesus: “He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine.” What is being prepared here for the disciples seems conspicuously similar to Christ’s ministry of loneliness. The Christ whom they love, whom they yearn to be with is leaving them, but not to replace their longing with a new longing for the Holy Spirit, rather the Spirit who will come upon them will teach them more about Christ, will magnify Christ to them. He will actually feed their longing for him even as he satisfies it. And this is said to be “better” than if Jesus were to stay with them. Surely in one obvious sense by leaving Christ leaves the located confinements of human being and can indwell any and all who believe in him by the Spirit. He can be a million places at once rather than just on this road at this time talking to these people and no one else. But it seems that Jesus’ leaving itself carries great significance, particularly (or exclusively) because of whom he leaves and where he leaves them.

He is leaving disciples, those who are joined to him, those who are in him and whom he is in, those whom he has called, whom he has encountered both with their estrangement and a foretaste of their accomplished unification. These are those whom he has fixed in right relation to himself. They long for him. They receive anything that is not him only through him, as from him and for him. Why delay consummation of their reconciliation? What could presume over this consummation? Only the will of God. For in the second part they are disciples in the world. Heaven and earth did not pass away at the resurrection. The Lord is not finished with the work on earth. He will do this work with and through his disciples. Having given them revelation of the Ultimate they are asked now to live well and obedient during the Penultimate. Knowing, as Bonhoeffer would say, that they are Justified they are asked now to live Sanctified.

This principle of Ultimate and Penultimate governs the call of loneliness—to be in the world but only of Christ—and is what lies beneath Jesus’ declaration that it is ‘better’ that he go. In other words, if they are to remain, it is better that Christ go and allow the Spirit to lead them into a loneliness for Christ so that in pursuit of and longing for him they will chase daily after unity with him by obeying him and, in his apparent absence, serve his spiritual presence in the other.

This works to not only unify the disciple with his God but also the disciple and his neighbor. The disciple is freed by Christ from the neighbor for the neighbor and thus reconciled to the neighbor. When this reconciliation flows fully in both directions, the neighbor has become a disciple of Christ. The temporal life of penultimate unity gathers the lost to Christ as it serves the lost for Christ and serves Christ in the lost. Thus, Christ draws all men to himself and to each other.

A Theology of Loneliness (p.3)

2008-09-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

Incarnational Loneliness

If we are after an incarnational model of the way of loneliness, we must return to the passage in Ethics, where Bonhoeffer describes the primary reason conflict and animosity dogged Jesus during his earthly ministry and eventually led to his execution: “Jesus replies evasively to all the clear questions which are intended to determine His position once and for all (Ethics, 33).” The confident evasiveness which informs Jesus’ language challenges both dismissal and categorization. Bonhoeffer explains, referring to John 4:34, that Jesus’ freedom from every category of men is the result of Jesus’ simple submission to the will of God: “[Jesus] says that to do this will is His meat. This will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but by the will of God.” So the knowledge of good and evil is also the desire to determine positions once and for all. Positions, laws (even mosaic laws) are left “beneath” Jesus because they are the result of man’s alone-ness from God, while Jesus as the Son of God is not estranged from God and thus does not live by the knowledge of Good and Evil but by the unifying will of God.

And yet because his incarnation required him to leave the glory he shared with the Father before the world was (John 17:4), while not estranged, his unity with the Father was temporarily unconsummated. The unity within the tri-une God being one of perfect equality, perfect eternality and perfect devotion, the condescension of incarnation (or the transcendence of imminence!) is impossible for us to comprehend. It is perhaps only fitting to say, given what we’ve said before, that Jesus of Nazareth was the loneliest man who ever lived.

That God’s will is Jesus’ very life reveals what our life is to be—an utter loneliness for nothing but God which propels us into the world, unconcerned with reflection and fixing positions, which are trappings of our estrangement, to fulfill God’s will, which is our unity with him, at all costs to ourselves. “There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all action (34).” The way of loneliness drove Jesus through every temptation and every trap and every distraction to serve and love and heal and to die, that he might accomplish unity-with-God for us. Positions and laws and reflections, concrete alignments with groups, movements, agendas, or philosophies as such are exposed by Jesus as false coverings to be evaded at whatever cost so a man is free to follow God’s will alone. This is the freedom of Christ’s loneliness for God. He is free to minister to and save men truly because he is not beholden to their wills and categories actually.

The way of loneliness is always ministerial. “Only in doing can there be submission to the will of God. In doing God’s will man renounces every right and every justification of his own (46).” There is no internal renunciation of any other loyalty and false covering separate from the doing of God’s will: “Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe (63).” Just as there is no Calvary without Gethsemane, there is no discipleship without serving Christ in the other, for “when the bible calls for action it does not refer a man to his own powers but to Jesus Christ Himself . . . there is no action without Jesus Christ.” Christ is both subject and object of our obedience, and his call to obedience is love of God and love of neighbor, which are the same: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me (Mathew 25:40).” And the neighbor to whom Christ calls us is any other, every other. As Bonhoeffer clarifies in Discipleship, “Being a neighbor is not a qualification of someone else, it is there claim on me, nothing else.”

A Theology of Loneliness (p.2)

2008-09-10T00:17:00.001-07:00

So the Lord’s call reveals our alone-ness, encounters our alone-ness, and leads us from it to a place of powerless longing for himself. I would like to call this powerless longing, coming as it does after the Lord’s encounter with us, our loneliness for him. Indeed, the recognition of alone-ness is a continual pre-requisite to right and unobstructed loneliness for God. Born into alone-ness and its ineffaceable shame we spend our lives finding different ways to cover ourselves. If our ineffaceable shame is the inherited situation of sin (what sin is), these self-made coverings are the activity of our sin (what sinning is)—attempts to find coverings for our alone-ness in anything that isn’t God—and they cement our estrangement from God by obscuring its truth.

God’s call breaks through the layers of self-made coverings we have built up and encounters us with the raw, pink truth of our alone-ness. Having encountered the beautiful being from whom we were first estranged, and unable to yet enjoy full, unobstructed unity with him, we are led to a place of powerless longing for him—our true and final covering—desperate to return to him fully. We are led into loneliness for him. We desire only him.

This of course is a figure of the ontic relation between God and men. The Lord’s revelation comes by his call and encounters us with the limit of ourselves (powerless alone-ness). This encounter fixes us in relationship to him (powerless longing/loneliness for) even as it simultaneously calls us vocationally to loneliness as a way of living. The call to the way of loneliness is the call to discipleship.

Bonhoeffer illustrates this in the second chapter of Discipleship by considering the situation of Abraham. God makes two main calls on Abraham’s life, but they are after the same thing—revealing Abraham’s alone-ness and his dependency on God alone for his covering. In the first call, Abraham is called to leave his friends and family: “Christ came between him and his relatives. In that case the break had to become visible.” Notably Bonhoeffer identifies Christ as the person of God’s call. Christ comes between (or breaks away) the possible obstructions (false coverings) of a homeland and relatives in order to get Abraham alone. Abraham has to actually physically leave those things that were not God and which could have been false coverings for his alone-ness. Bonhoeffer says in this case “the break had to become visible (Discipleship, 97).”

Then Bonhoeffer turns the lens on the second call, the call to sacrifice his son Isaac: “Christ steps between the father of faith and the son of the promise . . . Abraham had to learn that the promise did not depend on Isaac, but only on God.” This is the invisible breaking away of layers that falsely cover the heart. Christ is encountering Abraham in the deepest place and calling him to leave not only what is possibly his deepest human relationship, but leave as well Abraham’s own notions of how God should fulfill his promises. This call, which confronts him with his alone-ness, comes to Abraham completely alone, as “the single individual,” as it did the first time when he left his homeland, and it is ultimately the same call: that Abraham depend on God for his covering and nothing else. Bonhoeffer writes: “Against every natural immediacy, against every ethical immediacy, against every religious immediacy, he obeys God’s word . . . He is prepared to make the secret break visible, for the sake of the mediator.” In this moment when Abraham is isolated from everything except God, he understands he always has been, and his salvific covering—and his son’s—will only be found through God’s mediation.

The result is that God restores Isaac to him, but with a new understanding: “He has him through the mediator and for the sake of the mediator . . . he is permitted to have Isaac as though he did not have him; he is permitted to have him through Jesus Christ (97).” Everything has changed. God has taken all false coverings from Abraham and given them all back to him through the one true covering, Jesus Christ. So that in Isaac Abraham sees not his son but Christ who gives him his son. Through this shattering of all false coverings, this confrontation of Abraham with his alone-ness, Abraham has shown by his obedience his powerless longing for God alone, his loneliness for God, and God has shown Abraham that now Christ is always in the other. Everything has changed. Abraham is not merely a convert now, he is a disciple.

To use the term the way of loneliness perhaps conjures images of a lone samurai wandering through a mountain pass or a Buddhist monk meditating in isolation, but I intend it in an entirely inward sense and wish to show that it in fact will always drive one to the other and to community-building. The way of loneliness is the call of the Christian disciple to perpetual, ongoing, inward exclusivity. It is living with no other god but Yahweh, no other savior but Christ. And this perpetual exclusivity necessarily avoids ontological categories because it bends the more ontological distinction of a vertical concept of alone-ness from God into an active, ontic, and horizontal loneliness for God. The way of loneliness can be described as ontic-relational because it is Christ-activated and Christ-directed. It is Christ-instigated living that perpetually pursues and ministers to Christ in the other. So it is incarnational and ministerial, which things are the same.

A Theology of Loneliness (p.1)

2008-09-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

The Condition of Alone-ness

We are all born alone. We are all born into disunity—from ourselves, from others, from God. But that designation itself implies a previous unity and suggests, at least, the possibility of future union, not independently or it would be intrinsic and limited, but dependently, extrinsic, and limitless, since both the means of that unity and the end of it is located in the tri-unified God.

The situation of disunity might also be called alone-ness. We are born alone from ourselves, from others, from God. Distance is implied. Bonhoeffer says the space between a man and himself, his fellow man, and his God is a space created and filled by the knowledge of good and evil (Ethics, 34). But the knowledge of good and evil also awakens man to the knowledge’s effect: “Man perceives himself in his disunion with God and with men. He perceives that he is naked (24).” Man’s alone-ness is perceptible, then—sensible, discernible. It is as obvious to him as his physical nakedness. His alone-ness is discernible through his sense of shame, Bonhoeffer states, explaining Genesis 3. “Shame is man’s ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement from his origin; it is grief for this estrangement, and the powerless longing to return to unity with the origin (24).”

The shame Adam and Eve experience in the garden is immediate and sharp. Their recollection of estrangement is immediate because the event of disunity has just occurred. There is no obstruction to their experience of it. They understand their former unity only in sharp relief to the sudden and overwhelming pang of this new alone-ness. They see that they are naked.

The Lord’s response in covering their nakedness is two-fold. The covering is simultaneously a reminder of their estrangement (they have a nakedness that needs covered) and a declaration of his desire for reunion (he is willing to cover their nakedness himself). This is the Gospel.

But as time passes the recollection of estrangement weakens and the symbols get confused. As the family of man grows and extends and social systems complicate, sin and rebellion find new forms, the number of external obstructions and distractions increase, and the memory of disunity becomes more and more indistinct or disorganized. While shame is ineffaceable, as Bonhoeffer insists, wrong responses to it obscure the right understanding of it and the Gospel story is lost. Man seeks instead to cover his own shame, and his recollection of estrangement becomes confused. The world, the flesh, and the devil all readily provide man with counterfeit coverings for his nakedness, and each false covering distorts or hides from the man the reality of his condition of alone-ness—the cause of it and its effects. This stems from the second tragedy that occurs in the garden. Observing their nakedness and overcome with grief and shame at their estrangement, Adam and Eve attempt to cover themselves and their shame from God. But in attempting to hide their nakedness from God they hide themselves from God and calcify their estrangement. Rather than allowing grief over their alone-ness to drive them to God to seek reunion, they allow it to drive them further from him.

Embedded in this reaction is an inability or unwillingness to recognize their powerlessness to cover themselves. The man is powerless to overcome his alone-ness. Fig leaves and the branches of trees cannot cover his shame. All attempts at self-covering are insufficient. The attempt itself is a claim to power the man does not possess—the power of re-union, which is forgiveness. Only God can cover, or forgive, the man’s estrangement, his sin. But unless man recognizes his powerlessness the Lord’s covering goes un-longed-for.

In the Genesis account we see that it is only after the Lord encounters Adam that he understands his powerlessness. The Lord’s call, “Where are you, Adam?” confronts the man both with his estrangement and his powerlessness to change it. His defective attempt at covering his estrangement must be admitted to precisely because of the question the Lord asks. The question shows Adam that his covering has failed because he is still estranged. In other words, “Where are you?” means “Why aren’t you here with me?” or simply “You aren’t here with me.” This reveals Adam’s powerlessness and refines his longing for unity. With his own covering shown to be not just insufficient but even damaging, his need for the effective, healing covering of the Lord is clarified. Only a true understanding of estrangement produces a true understanding of the powerlessness to overcome it. Only a true understanding of such powerlessness produces a true “longing to return to unity with the origin.” Longing must be powerless or it is not true longing, it is quenchable. God’s call alone renders the man powerless and powerlessly longing for God’s covering alone...

Torture and Eucharist (p. 3)

2008-08-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

The main practice the church has as an alternative social practice is the Eucharist, not mystically but truly. Cavanaugh argues for the Eucharist as not mystical, intangible nor as mere remembrance of a past event we get further from each day. Rather he sees the Eucharist as the event of Walter Benjamin’s “messianic time” which interrupts temporality with the Christ event continually arriving in but not dictated to by perpetual secular time-without-end. The Eucharist announces the end has come already in Christ and time has changed entirely. The Body of Christ remembered is the body of Christ present in the re-membering of its members through participation in Christ’s suffering in time.

Only the Eucharist as the end of all violent sacrifices in the world can constitute a visible body politic whose goal is the production of martyrs, witnesses to the end of violence. The church’s martyrs visibly enter into the sufferings of Christ against the powers by violence to witness to the Christ in whom all sacrifice has ended and all powers defeated. No other polis can afford martyrs who are signs and not instruments. Cavanaugh notes importantly that the church as Christ’s Body is not to be confused as representing Christ entirely, which only happens with the heavenly church. The Church is Christ’s Body becoming Christ’s Body. This is the function of the Church’s messianic time, already united fully with Christ as Bride in God’s eyes but not yet in history. The confusion of heavenly and earthly time is crucial to the Eucharist and the community it gathers.

Through the Eucharist Cavanaugh illustrates the wholesale re-integration required for the alternate polis that has disappeared itself to again become the visible social body that counters the violence of man’s Kingdom with a better story. The Eucharist re-integrates, blends—properly confuses—bodies and souls, beings and becomings, ideas and practices, heavenly and earthly time, things visible and invisible, things mysterious and certain, fulfillment and promise.

As Cavanaugh tells it through the story of Carlos Rueda from Lawrence Thornton’s Imagining Argentina, it is a competition ultimately of imaginations, not between the imaginary and the real. It is what we imagine that becomes real. Imagination is “the maginificent cause of being,” and torture is a part of the imagination of the nation-state wherein bodies are scripted to dance in the manner the state imagines they should. Alternatively, “participation in the Eucharist is participation in God’s imagination.” This practice of imagination is the real. The Eucharist in the imaginary-cum-real that resists the imagination of the nation-state enacted through torture.

Torture and Eucharist (p. 2)

2008-08-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

Cavanaugh’s discussion of the role of language in torture is fascinating and terrifying. The thing that makes a man dead is the secret destruction of his language. Torture is this secret tearing away of an individual from all articulations—of a person from social bodies, from their past and future, from time, from the ability to communicate or (re-enter society if not killed). Through its ability to instrumentalize (script) everything, the state’s language expands into a heaving and entire reality while its victims’ reality collapses with the collapse of language for pain. Cavanaugh describes the expansion of language as what expands the self, what animates the self’s reality, so that when the self cannot find words for its pain, the self disintegrates. And the state’s imagination is so thorough that such a disintegration of selves is far from incidental to the state’s expansion, it is the language of the state’s expansion.

Cavanaugh shows how the church, by its role as the “keeper of men souls,” has turned the bodies of people over to the state, as though the two were separate—as though the liturgy of the church and the Eucharist particularly did not explicitly claim both. This was the crisis point for the church in Chile during Pinochet where suddenly the bodies of people were being disappeared and brutalized and others were fleeing to the church for protection. The Bishops increasingly found themselves wanting to retain the transcendental role in society but being forced to face an incarnate crisis. Cavanaugh illustrates how by giving over authority of the body to the state the church herself becomes invisible as a social body and loses all means to resist the state. Without even a fight the church found as things grew worse that she had already accepted the state’s imagination of disintegrated social bodies that cannot challenge the state’s power. More than this, Cavanaugh shows how the Chilean churches’ national focus on organic Chilean unity came into line with the interests of the nation-state for order and common strength. In document after document Cavanaugh illustrates how entrenched in the bishops’ language was this nationalist hope, and how this ultimately led them to open the gate for the wolf, either through direct support of common national goals or through withdrawal to the “sector of souls.”

Another way torture specifically attacked the church’s visibility was the disappearing of bodies. Without bodies, Cavanaugh notes, the church has no martyrs. Without martyrs the church is invisible. Without witnesses there is no witness. This was one of the most explicit ways the state through torture sought to disintegrate the visible social body of the church. By disintegrating social bodies such as the church the state usurped the powers and responsibilities of those social bodies for itself.

As the bishops in Chile saw the crisis mount many resorted to one of the last visible acts at the church’s resource—excommunication. This was in many ways to finally re-assert, though in many ways too late, the Church’s claim to authority over body and soul. It was an important act that illustrated the ecclesiological move from a location “above politics” to a presence in it—countering those who would torture with exclusion from the Kingdom of God for intolerable practice in the Kingdom of Man. This breached the decades-long formation of a mystical ecclesiology that trained its people to incarnate best practices in the everyday, secular world the church stood outside of or above.

As Cavanaugh details at length through the language of Pius XI and Jacques Maritain, the theories of church and state existed which allowed these faulty distinctions to calcify in Chile and inform mostly uncritical adherence. The movement from an ecclesiology of “Christendom” to that of “New Christendom” was the move from an autonomous church on the fringe of things to an autonomous church floating above things. It was not a good transition. And Cavanaugh takes Maritain particularly to task for “sprinkling a little holy water” over the modern notions of state, individual liberties and universal human rights, which things Cavanaugh indicates resulted from the rejection of Christianity not from some pleasant invisible influence of the Gospel in history.

What Cavanaugh shows is that the church does not need a “New Christendom built on the ruins of the Old,” but instead a truly Christlike church that understands the state’s claim on the body is a claim on the soul as well and these things cannot be quietly reconciled by a church that is in the business of inspiration but not obedience, that the church has within itself the resources of visible embodiment—Eucharist, penance, discipline, works of mercy, martyrdom—to be the authority of body and soul in the world in Christ’s name as Christ’s Body, a true, alternative Christian social practice...

Torture and Eucharist (pt.1)

2008-08-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

The battle torture wages is not primarily against individuals, William Cavanaugh argues in Torture and Eucharist, but against social bodies through the creation of individuals. Thus the only viable resistance to torture and the state that tortures is not the championing of individual human rights but the gathering of a social body, or bodies, whose collective imagination describes a larger reality than the state can proffer, and which social body is as visible as the state itself.

The larger project of the state drama—propogated through what Cavanaugh calls the state’s imagination—enlists players to participate in predetermined roles that sustain the overall drama of the state’s power. In which case torture is seen both as the production of the revolutionary threat and it’s merciless suppression. The state needs the threat of subversives to justify the kind of authority it has already decided will be its modus operandi. In other words, the state is not looking for converts but enemies, since converts would only undermine the perceived necessity for the state’s widening power structure and its brutality. The times must always seem desperate or the measures will lose legitimacy and areas of the stage will open to other dramas. The goal then is to keep the stage filled with bodies that are not actually subversive but nonetheless represent the state’s imagination of the subversive—bodies that wander like phantoms, unable to articulate themselves to others, unable to rejoin any other social body, but occupying space in the name of the state.

Cavanaugh refers to torture as liturgy because its staging ground is the body. A person is “disappeared” from society—torn from myriad social bodies—and in secret brutalized and humiliated as a single, disconnected body until in blood, agony, and humiliation, the victim admits to the state’s demands for an enemy. The body is crucial first in its isolation from all other bodies—family, friends, society. This tearing away begins to empty the victim of identity. The individual is alone. And alone the torturers begin to strip further by focusing on physical pain. Through physical pain, the victim is left only able to focus on the physical—the next agony, the next scream, the next moment. The past falls away. Identity markers of the psyche grounded in the memory of family, friends, and loyalties are cauterized by the overwhelming attention demanded at each present moment of physical torture. The times between physical agony become only the anticipation of agony, and thus participate in the collapse of all time, space, and thought not located on the physical body.

The death of time is crucial in the torture process, and includes not only the removal of past but also future, as the victim is suspended between moments of agony with no end to focus on as hope. As Cavanaugh notes, without eschaton there can be no hope. There is only ever now—either agony or its anticipation. Torture replaces time itself with the presence of the state’s power over the victim’s body.

Torture’s liturgical enactment does not, however, end in the torture room. If victims’ are not killed they are dumped back into society to continue the drama of disintegration. Cavanaugh details the overwhelming difficulty of torture victims to articulate their pain to any other. This difficulty most often results in silence. And these silences further disintegrate, after the project of the state, social bodies that might have once provided identity, ways of knowing time—a counter-drama. This, according to Cavanaugh, is intentional individualization, where all connections are snapped off and bodies move about rootless, harmless, dead. These deconstructed individuals, coming as they did from families and social groups, carry their silent isolation back to these families and social groups as a disease that cannot be cured because there is literally no language for it...

City of God, City of Man

2008-08-23T13:39:00.001-07:00

After the demise of Christendom in Europe, signaled by the Wars of Religion, sealed by the Enlightenment, secular space began to consume, in stages, what was once considered Christian, and religion became increasingly sequestered along the “private” seams of heart, local parish, and home. Matters of practical, social (political) importance were, to protect the common good, dislocated from the controversy of religious affections. “Church” in Europe became the quaint opiate of older generations and the temporary burden of adolescence, a curious museum far from the madding crowd. The youthful American polis built itself upon an ambitious, modified Lutheran concept of the two kingdoms, where the sphere of public state stood beside the sphere of private church, a determined attempt to protect against both theocracy (the Wars of Religion) and utter secularity (the French Revolution).

But the liberal democratic project was always state-led, and the Christian response was either to accept the utter and increasing privatization of the church or to barter for the power of the state to legislate a new, issues-based Christendom. Both approaches necessarily kneel before the altar of the state, and both lie about the nature and location of the church. The church is the meaning of history in history. The church is a cosmological polis anchored in a people in time—the City of God—which does not stand beside the secular city but encompasses it entirely and speaks to it from a place of transcendence and imminence, cross and resurrection.

The City of Man (the state) is mankind’s admission that evil is impossible for man to overcome and so there must be bodies that restrain, broker, and war against it—but always on evil's own terms. Thus all who bow the knee to the state, religious and pagan alike, bow to a body that confesses the supremacy of evil over good, the supremacy of war over peace. The state has no hope of peace because its existence and practice confess war. The church, descending as it does from heaven in the shared body of Christ, is a polis that transcends the post-fall and necessarily tragic condition all states are born in and exist for, while at the same time being imminent in the City of Man. The City of God alone has the resources of peace (cross and resurrection) and the ability to offer them to the City of Man as its alternative. All space is public and Christ’s. The church confesses this and witnesses to this by not being private and not being the state.

Gift

2008-08-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

“Gift” names how and why existence exists. Creation ex nihilo means all that is not God was not necessary to God and so was chosen to exist by God (gift). Creation by “divine fiat” means all existence is also response to divine call, or reception of gift: i.e. existence exists by receiving the gift of existence. Creation as gift-giving and gift-receiving thus means all existence is made not only for but by relationship-with-God.

Beginning as creation does with an autonomous Giver of Life, this exchange can never be contractual because an “equal” response cannot be quantified or returned by a dependent responder. The most the receiver can give is never equal to the giver’s decision to give the receiver. The exchange is unsatisfiable, interminable. And this interminability is security against the inclination of humankind to change the terms of gift to the terms of contract, the attempt to approach God as gods (what sin is). All humanity is thus born into an unquenchable gift-relationship they did not choose and cannot deny because their existence is its proof.

Christians are those people who acknowledge their existence is the result of unchosen gift received, who live as the active friends of God because the cross of Christ has crucified their attempts to approach God as gods. The Body of Christ is the community of God’s given-life received in grateful response, and Christians are people formed by responding to the gift of friendship with God through the sacraments of friendship—self-giving and other-receiving, baptism and Eucharist.

The Christian notion of gift, opposed as it is to the language of contract and transaction, also means there is nothing God cannot ask of us. Since the gift of life through Christ’s divine fiat of cross and resurrection (“Let there be disciples”) cannot be quantified, neither can our response. We are overwhelmed not by how much we owe, but by the impossibility of knowing how much we owe. We find ourselves powerless, fully human, asked only to return our selves through grateful agreement not to quantify the gifts we receive (what friendship is).

Prayer, finally, is when Christians acknowledge they do not actually want to approach God, life, and others on God’s terms of gift and gratitude. In prayer Christians ask God to crucify anew their desire to be gods, brokers, autonomous, free. And prayer sacramentally enacts what it requests, for prayer is our confession that God is God and we are not, that life is gift and we are grateful.

From Christ for Christ.

Christian Morality: A Thing So Strange

2008-07-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

If Christians are a people who claim to have come into existence because God became a homeless 1st Century Jew who allowed himself to be murdered in order to re-create the world, then it stands—even to reason!—that the way Christians live should be a thing no less strange than the enigma of cross and resurrection.

But as Protestantism became enmeshed with the rise of modernity, it capitulated to a shifted starting point and adopted—perhaps intending toward apologetic—man as the measure of all things. Christians began to offer Christian morality as a highly evolved standard of universal common good, a sort of intrinsic natural moral law that everything was desiring toward but had finally been articulated in the admirable life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

Yet Christian morality must offend the powers and principalities that Christ crucified, the same powers and principalities that describe for the non-Christian world the universal principles on which they attempt to agree, by which they draw up their conceptions of the good. These powers inevitably seek the good of the self, which Christians call idolatry. Christians seek God’s good, not their own. Christian morality must then in many cases move against or depart entirely from what mankind deems “moral,” so that Christian morality will, as John Milbank indicates, seem “immoral” or “amoral.”

The economy of the Christian polis is grounded in charity, as its genesis as the Christian polis arises from the charity (gift)—not necessity—of the cross. But the secular polis conceives of morality as natural and necessary to the universal good of humanity. Yet arising from humanity and tending toward humanity, it cannot be charitable because it is always necessary—or, it cannot be other-centered because it is necessarily self-centered. Morality that originates with the self and is necessary to achieve certain results is always quantifiable—by its presence or absence—and can never be charitable. Transaction morality is thus never free to be abundant because it can never supercede what its filled absence means. Its highest good can never be more than the absence of evil, which is not in fact good.

The Christian polis, grounded as it is on the cross and resurrection as charity and abundance, means Christian morality is antithetical to transaction morality, and in fact endangers transaction morality by refusing to adopt its system and its scope from self for self. From God for God deliberately destroys the good of the self—seeks even to kill the self in the name of God and for the good God alone names.

Human Rights

2008-07-17T15:43:00.001-07:00

The modern paradigm of the autonomous self that has certain universal—self-evident!—rights that must be guarded by others is so intrinsically antithetical and internally confounded it presents one of the most significant challenges to Christian ethics.

First, how can an autonomous self have rights that any other must recognize, not to mention defend? By definition autonomy is intentional or intrinsic disconnectedness from the other, which goal is the sheer exertion of brute will. But no other autonomous self can grant this right of brute will, since their autonomy deliberately refuses the need for granting. Also it cannot be granted by another as a right because there is no guarantee that the other’s brute will will not directly conflict with the former’s brute will. Finally, there is no such thing as an autonomous self since no self is self-made—all selves are derived and thus autonomy itself is an illusion.

Christian ethics offers at least two responses to the confusion of the glorified, pseudo-autonomous self: incarnation and crucifixion—the body of Christ and the Body of Christ. The incarnation of God is Christ divesting himself of all rights, as God, to remain the only glorified autonomous self. The body of Christ signaled movement toward the other as God’s way of being God. The Author of Life—thus the only bearer of rights over life—exercised his right of autonomy not to create space for it but to collapse space for it by sharing himself into his created world.
Secondly, by not exploiting even his right to maintain an autonomous incarnation, he submitted to crucifixion, giving his life into the very selves that would not defend him, and gathering by this voluntary emptying the community of his shared Body. This Body of Christ is a community that no longer claims its (imaginary) rights to be autonomous individuals, but gives itself for the benefit of others.

“Citizenship” is the name Americans give to the apparatus that creates space to exercise and defend their individual rights. Scripture’s language of “heavenly citizenship” thus lays claim to interpreting the same categories in different ways, which, at the very least, means Christians and non-Christians are given the tools to not talk past one other. From a common linguistic foothold Christians declare themselves a people whose citizenship has been transferred from earth to heaven and whose approach to rights is thus defined by that country and by the Lord of that country, who gave up his rights to serve and save others.

From Christ for Christ.

To Pray

2008-07-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

Having a brief break from my weekly preaching duties, I have decided to start over again with God on many things. I have asked him, particularly, to teach me to pray. I admit that I don't really know how to pray. That prayer does not come naturally to me, not good prayer, anyway. I want to know beyond giving the right words. I want to figure out how to actually listen in prayer. This seems particularly difficult since it is paradoxical. But at root I think it has something to do with getting under the meaning and the true nature of the things I am praying and the reasons I pray them.

As a recent example: If I am praying about needing a job that meets my needs, listening a moment to what I am praying and why should lead me to realize what I am really saying to God, or should be...something like--"Lord, to this point I have felt secure because I had a good job that met my needs, or gave me enough money to get by okay...now that I am feeling anxiety and stress about not having a job that meets my needs, I realize that I trusted in those things for my peace, or my value, my rest, or identity, and not in you, the risen Christ. So, Lord, teach me to depend upon you in a way that admits who you are and who I am, that sees things rightly, that glories in you and is thankful for a season of such need. For only in such need do I see the truth of who you are, the abundant God who loves and will sustain his children day by day (but will not ruin them by spoiling), and who I am, a small, inconstant child who would rather not depend on you for everything." This, I think, is more like where I should go when I want to pray for a job that meets my needs. If I pray something like this first, then perhaps I will be ready to receive a good job from God's hand, because I will be less likely to see the job as a savior and giver of comfort, which is of course idolatry. We must learn things and admit things before we are ready to receive things thankfully and rightly as the gifts from God they are.

Imagine what we should pray when someone is sick...how do we get beneath that and hear what the Lord would say about sickness and suffering? What do our prayers for the sick mean and how should they be shaped in light of Jesus' life, cross, resurrection, and reign? What claims do the sick place upon us, if we are Christians? How do our prayers for the sick make demands on us? Maybe here God says to us something about the importance of being present to the sick or hurting person, maybe something about listening to them the way He listens to us in prayer, maybe something about the gift of friendship, which Jesus has shown us is so much more important than happiness or health.

What does God say to you? Who is the person you must learn how to pray for? Think about them. What is their name? My friend's name is Amber.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Oral History Night

2008-06-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

This Summer is off to a sweet start for our ongoing oral history night series with pastor john and cathy both taking a turn in the hot seat with grace, poise, good humor, and wisdom. These were priceless tales. No one should miss these nights. It is the rarest opportunity for people to actually share their lives with each other in the context of the community gathered as the Body of Christ. Oral history night is a practice of revelation, of listening, of vulnerability, of grace, of accountability, of encouragement, of reconciliation and friendship, of true koinonia in the name of Christ and for the sake of Christ. Few places i know of participate in such a practice...few people are willing to be so vulnerable and so honest and so attended to. This in some way is an important part of what church must be if church describes a group of people gathered by Jesus by the hearing of his gospel and called to live together as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven and not citizens of the Kingdom of Man. Following Jesus encompasses more space than we have ever explored. More thought space, more political space, more friend space, more writing space, more music space, more ordinary and mundane-seeming space--more, more, more. Oral history night stretches some of that more and reveals a new depth of life and Jesus' work in the stories of people we see every week.

In a selfish era of speed and flash, oral history nights slow things down to something more like living well--for others and not for self, for Christ and not the world.

Upcoming nights are posted at emmausoc.org

See you there.

From Christ for Christ.

EAT THESE BOOKS

2008-06-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a starter List for those of you looking for some good summer reading in different areas...

Christianity

1. Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon
2. The Reason for God by Timothy Keller
3. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
4. The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder
5. Anxious for Armageddon by Donald Wagner
6. To Share in the Body by Craig Hovey
7. Torture and Eucharist by William T. Cavanaugh

Literature

1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2. All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
3. So Long, See you Tomorrow by William Maxwell
4. Dubliners by James Joyce
5. Peter Pan by JM Barrie
6. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
7. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Justification

2008-01-28T17:29:00.004-08:00

"Cheap grace means justification of sin and not the sinner." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When the term justification becomes just a term, a technique for Christians to talk about themselves, it has been evacuated not only of meaning but of reality, actuality, truth. The combination of which things lead to the normalizing of the condition (sinful) of those presumed "justified." There is no agony to the justification, no wide-breathed release—there is no Messiah in view who justifies sinners by his passion, only sinners who are justified. Under cheap grace the sinner's "justification" arises from the sinner's desire to feel justified, or, the desire to feel excused. As such there is a clamoring for and recitation of the doctrine of justification or the principal of justification merely as a technique to stave off conviction, rather than as the heart-melting reality that quickens the dead. When justification becomes merely doctrinal and principally enshrined (cheap grace) it makes the sinner's condition normative, or tolerable, rather than grievous. And without grief there can never be relief, both of which are necessary to discipleship, which is obedience.

Martyrdom

2008-01-28T17:29:00.003-08:00

"Discipleship without Jesus Christ is choosing one's own path. It could be an ideal path or a martyr's path, but is without the promise. Jesus will reject it." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Christians, the martyr's path is so much more popular than it should be. It is a bullhorn for the glorified self. We either want ecstasy or martyrdom, but ordinary, grounded, real-life obedience to Christ moment to moment?—not a chance. I see in myself this desire for personal extravagance, for some exaggerated life. I see myself also choosing how I will live sacrificially, which I think Dietrich is after here. I am ready to die to myself in the ways I choose, which is the opposite of self-denial. It's a more complicated type of selfishness hiding behind the sallow face of a disciple--some heavy-headed 'No, no, I'll be okay, this is just the selfless life of the minister I am living over here, don't mind me, I just gave my life to serving the Lord, yeah, it's tough but it's all for Jesus, right?' Sweet blasphemy! I see that 'Ministry,' for myself and for many Christians, is the most insidious golden calf. I am too weak and self-obsessed to be extraordinary. The Lord knows it would kill me. I must learn to ordinarily follow Christ. This is the actual death of me. My whole life I must ordinarily follow Christ to the avenues of sacrifice and love I would not have thought of, discovered, or chosen.

Creation

2008-01-28T17:29:00.001-08:00

"But because Jesus is the Christ, it has to be made clear from the beginning that his word is not a doctrine. Instead, it creates existence anew." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is divine fiat. "Let there be disciples." Christ, the creative agent of the godhead, creates existence with his word—recreates existence anew, renews creative existence through the calling word, calling order out of chaos like at the first with the dark soup, empty and void—all is being recapitulated. The brooding Christ call of Genesis 1 is re-sung over a human life surfaced in darkness. And if we look at Genesis 1 and see primarily a proof-text against an expired 19th century Englishman rather than grass exploding from the earth at the voice of Christ—nothing in us is re-created. We are merely left going over an explanation of God's work and not being gone over by it. We sit, thinking, undiscipled.

Red Wine

2008-01-28T17:28:00.001-08:00

Succour sweet, the womb-fruit
Bittered embattered territories for
Pulled vines and dresses, ever-stalked,
Crumbling for want and light-sun sweetly
Brooding, building, wrapt, terra-formed
Terror deep and trembling shook with
Water and how it catches
Shattering things with accumulation
Down drip downward, fall or plunge--
Spring up, oh, Well.

--Dave Woods

To Seem The Stranger

2008-01-28T17:27:00.001-08:00

Always only understood in the conclave
mirror of the opposable other without
whom
i am never alone.

Never known, always smudging with filler the places
un-knowing goes
and is meant to hold
so that God is never doubted, dubious, convenient, familiar,
fixed.

--Dave Woods

To Seem The Stranger

2007-11-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

TO seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers. Father and mother dear,
Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near
And he my peace my parting, sword and strife.
England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife
To my creating thought, would neither hear
Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear-
y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd
Remove. Not but in all removes I can
Kind love both give and get. Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins