I note this week the phrases 'exerise restraint,' and 'not to authorize public rites,' in the House of Bishops post-New Orleans statement.
I'm loathe to agree with Akinola on anything yet his description of this language as 'not a whole-hearted embrace,' and 'merely a temporary adjustment,' is spot on. Just as it was a simple matter to drive holes through Mark Lawrence's language on whether he'd stay loyal to TEC if elected Bishop of South Carolina, this old bureaucrat could cruise a Buick through the gaps on the HoB highway. Akinola and his henchmen may be wicked; they're not stupid.
Appeasement is a rascally charge for those who quite rightly and nobly advocate negotiations and are otherwise partial to peaceful means under the vast majority of circumstances. It can certainly be employed to justify pre-emptive reckless behavior. Here, though, it plays to form: "In international relations, the Lesson of Munich asserts that adversaries will interpret restraint as indicating a lack of capability or politcal will or both; appeasement discredits the defenders' willingness to fight, and encourages the agressor to escalate his demands.'
The HoB statement, decidedly rejected by Akinolista's everywhere, also didn't play well with those it was its round-about intention to defend. Reactions of some here-to-fore faithful gay and lesbian Episcopalians, as reported on the Inch at a Time website, include resignation of ordination, departures to the UCC, and conversions to Judaism. I've always told Connie that after a last stand at an Episcopal Dunkirk, it's the Unitarians that beckon an escape to a theological England. When I was but a lad growing up in pre-Disney Orlando, it was exposure to that idealistic sect which formulated the progressive religious and political ethics I uncompromisingly carry fifty years later.
Friends, like Mark, temper caution, and I'm not ready to depart the beloved parish to which we've returned as it rebuilds after the majority voted to join the Akinola-Minns-Duncan axis of evil. So it's time to step back from the emotional precipice - my way, as always, is to seek solace in the timeless stepstones that calm and deliver. As revealed last week, the study of John Henry Newman's, 'The Development of Christian Doctrine,' lays out a path which demonstrates time is on our side if we but have the patience to wait, even though our patience is wearing thin.
First, though, a provisio: Newman would likewise have been disdainful not only of the HoB statement but the process. He wrote, "Sometimes discordant ideas are for a time connected and concealed by a common profession or name. Such is the case of coalitions in politics and comprehensions in religion, of which commonly no good is to be expected. Such is an ordinary function of committees and boards, and the sole aim of conciliations and concessions, to make contraries look the same, and to secure an outward agreement where there is no other unity."
The aforementioned Mark once gravely warned against an acceptance of a vestry nomination to serve. How right he was: after enduring an unending series of 9 to 1 votes on whether to move the parish from a low-income immigrant-friendly neighborhood to an affluent suburb so we could 'more effectively minister to the wealthy who were more like us,' I resigned in disgust one and a half years into a three year term. Did you know that despite being described as magnificantly healthy, Robert E. Lee mysteriously took ill and mysteriously died immediately after a two-hour vestry meeting? (This comes as no suprise to any current/past vestry member...)
Anyhow, John Henry projects ideas as corporeal - they grow or die, following an organic eleven-step process:
1) after birth, they are initially expressed inadequately;
2) agitation ensues a -
3) period of confusion;
4) new lights emerge;
5) judgments emerge/aspects accumulate;
6) a teaching arises -
7) that's contrasted against existing teachings -
8) the new is interrogated, criticized, defended;
9) opinions are collectd, sifted, selected, rejected;
10) the idea interjects itself into our lives, changing public opinion, strengthening or undermining the established order;
11) to become a theology - "a being in substance - what the idea meant from the first, with the corrections of many minds, and the illustrations of many experiences."
Who can deny that the idea of the societal justice of full inclusion has reached step 10 and is gaining fast on step 11 - the Akinolistic last remaining redoubt of reactionary opinion? This final barricade won't fall through appeasement; it must be stormed.
Newman is one of those iconic figures, like Bonhoeffer, like Lewis, who are revered and claimed by progressive and reactionary partisans. Perhaps that's the sign of true greatness. When John Henry writes, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often," it naturally appeals to those who aspire towards justice; yet, there are those who read Newman and would emphasize a life that appears on the surface to resist all change in practice, and that would characterize most change as corruption rather than right development.
During a recent parish hall meeting this month, voices were raised as to whether stronger local action is desirable in terms of action to regain the church property illegally seized by those who voted to leave TEC. Although I agree with those that said no action should be unoppposed that conveys itself to public opinion and the courts that the squatters possess property rights, I agree also that our primary job as foot soliders is to dedicate our energies to rebuilding the parish which in itself stands as a rebuke to all those who discount our existence.
Ideas, like evolution, don't evolve in a straight line. From a single point of introduction, branches emerge and grow in all directions depending on the circumstances that create them. Newman writes, "Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical, all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love and it is fear." All of that has been, and is, on display in this struggle.
Newman also wrote, "Growth is the only evidence of life." The conflaglatory schism we are struggling through is growth. It is the evidence of an active Church life. When do we boldly stride beyond appeasement to justice? How many of us will be left? How long, how long?
Friday, September 28, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Moral Physics
I note this week two new Heroes of the Book.
Damien Cave of the NY Times reports on Baghdad booksellers Mukdad Ismail and Naim-al-Shatry who own shops on Mutanabi Street. A curfew and bombing that took 26 lives shut them down - for a while. Now that the curfew's lifted, they've both reopened. Mr. Shatry said, "Today I am a king."
Even though there are few customers brave enough to venture out (though if I'd been forced to stay away from my beloved bookshops for a year, I reckon I'd be desperate enough to try), Mr. Ismail says, "I believe in the gradual theory. Everything can't come together at once." Cave observes Mukdad "picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, "We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books."
Heroes kiss books in hell.
I note in contrast to all would-be theocratists, also according to the Times, Reform Judaism is poised to introduce a new Prayer Book "intended to offer something for everyone - traditionalists, progressives and everyone else - even those who do not believe in God."
When you open the book, reading right to left, there's a prayer in Hebrew, the phonetic version, and a literal translation. On the left, a poetic ode and meditation. It's traditional, gender-neutral, evangelical; there aren't even any rise, stand, sit instructions lest they hinder personal preference. It's as eager to please as a new puppy.
If you're altogether fed up debating whether God's the Father, He and/or She: invent your own language (at college, after we argued what's meant when we say 'it' is raining, i dropped the class), Amber Dance of the Post writes about the "weirdly Babelesque boom of new languages." J.R. Tolkein stared things off: as a hobby, he invented an amalgam of Latin, French and Welsh; then he conceived people to speak it and places for them to live; thus Middle Earth was born.
In the early 20th century, linguists Sapir and Whorf, "proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts: That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." Today, when a pseudo-need is manufactured daily to create a market niche, it's not surprising "the Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem," (even as native languages die out at a pace of one every two weeks.)
It's when we can barely cope with anything more new, that many turn to the ancient language of Scripture for comfort and stability. Even that refuge, however, can be problematical. Peter Steinfels writes, in reviewing James Kugel's, "How to Read the Bible," the author "propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable - and fundamentally incompatible."
Why? The original translators of the Hebrew, people like Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scroll scribes, the patristic Christians "effectively recast the Bible's meaning in terms that came to dominate the way it was read by both Jews and Christians right up to recent times." Kugel contends "they all converged on four assumptions: that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts; that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world; that it was somehow seamless and harmonious despite surface conflicts; and, finally, that it was of divine origin."
The historical criticism scholars of the 19th century, through the Jesus Seminar participants today, seek to discard those translations to unearth source materials derived from pre-translated fragments; in the process, Kugel declares they've "let the real Bible elude them." Steinfels adds "modern minds will still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the anicent worry about seamlessness, modern minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones." Even if you accept the Bible is a compendium of orally transmitted Godly-inspired accounts of various persons, then the issue of seamlessness recedes anyway just as if you and I were present at a concert and conveyed varied impressions.
Yet I confess I'm of two minds: what archeologists and "historical Jesus," specialists brilliantly uncover provide a bedrock foundation for faith; the knowledge that King David or Jesus actually walked the roads of an excavated town conveys familarity and immanence. On the other hand, I find it's through reading reflections and commentaries, solo and in community, that more personally meaningful revelations surface; those that have been filtered through lives of the interpreters.
In preparation to teach Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination," in adult Sunday school, I've been adjunctly reading Podhoretz's "The Prophets." Podhoretz, more known as the political father of contemporary neo-con's, is an amateur Biblical scholar, but one superbly accomplished in bringing a multiplicity of citations to bear. In the section on Hosea, he introduces conflicting views on whether the first three chapters were written by a Hosea I and the last eleven by Hosea II. Issues of authorship are inevitably defined through detailed scientic analysis' of linguistics and grammar.
The non-technical theories are equally if not more fascinating. As Podhoretz writes, Hosea I's "focus on idolatry as against morality places him in the ethos and era of pre-classical prophecy," while "the primacy of the ethical law over the ritual or cultic only becomes a feature of the book [some scholars] say, in Chapters 4 through 11." In other words, could Hosea I be an earlier writer emphasizing ritual obedience when the people were newer to monotheism versus a later writer, in more prosperous Solomonic times, who sought to connect what transpired in worship to the needs of the poor? Would fundamentalism today naturally tilt towards the former while progressives instinctively turn to the latter, in the same way some geneticists argue blue or red-state political leanings are primarily biological?
Brueggemann, according to Wikipedia, is an advocate of a rhetorical criticism that "studies the use of words and phrases to explicate how arguments have been built to drive home a certain point the author or speaker intended to make." Reflecting a greater plurality within contemporary congregations, he wrote in 1995, "An honest facing of pluralism can only be pastorally and usefully engaged by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answerng objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together."
Had Brueggemann's comments on respectful conversation been taken to heart by our entire parish, especially that "texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," it is more likely than not that a small number of partisans wouldn't have taken the actions that destroyed the church, in their view, in order to save it.
How does their secessionist rallying cry 'Spritual Authority,' affect discernment? Are they advocating obedience to ancient texts that only scholars can authenticate and decipher; to stories orally transmitted and compiled by pre or post-exilic Hebrew editors reflecting different periods and concerns in the progressing history of Israel; or do they more traditionally only rely on the Septuagint Greek or the King James?
At the former Episcopal, now Ugandan, church I once attended, the preferred translation was the New International which draws primarily from the Greek as directed by a committee "united in their committment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form." That literalist approach would not likely predispose a completed version "open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," as much conform to cultural norms of the intended demographic. If the subsequent Bible did not, the final product would not be marketable to the audience for which it was created.
Brueggemann writes, "the collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude." The profound need for certitude is a compelling force as contrasted against the an ever growing plurality in once homogenous churches. The resulting backlast enables and enacts a defense mechanism justified as a faithful reaction against a perceived coercion that reflects the new reality as an intrusion.
An announcment advertising a lecture by Brueggemann at the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Edinburgh, Scotland, stated "for present-day Christians who find themselves in a bewildering atmosphere of materialism and scientific secularism that puts enormous pressure on their inherited faith." Typical reactions are "to adopt an unquestioning attitude to Scripture which Brueggemann associates with fundamentalism, or to accept the objective, analytical approach, discarding in the text anything that does not yield to a rational understanding of faith and theology. He seems the main object of faith that is grounded in Scripture as the transformation of human life, and this, he thinks, is not achieved by expounding doctrine or ethics or by historical criticism. These do not change people. It is in the telling of stories, in vivid images and analogies, that human imagination is stirred to receive the Word of God in Scripture."
The ad concludes, "at the heart of this is a question about the nature of God - the domesticated God of conventional religion, or the free, unpredictable God who works wonders in the human soul. Faith that is reliant upon the freedom of God against the assumptions of human reason makes things possible that the world defines as impossible, and brings about transformation in the human spirit that strengthens and renews a person's life, moving him on to a deeper, more creative faith."
In the book of Hosea, God equates sin in a personal way with lewdness; in a corporate way with national idolatry; like a Father who looks murderously upon a child when he's disobedient, and lovingly, when she's true; He condemns; He adores - He even argues with Himself and changes His mind repeatedly. This free Creator demonstrates while choices have consequences, they aren't predictable, or dependent on human reason, just as an untamble passion more often than not, rules over logic, in our self-destructive impulsive moods that are later much regretted (as God might have after the Flood when He declared He would never again destroy every living creature).
Eamon Duffy's written a new book, "Marking the Hours," that begins with an exposition on the standard Medieval English prayer book yet hinges on the everyday lives of its readers. While horrified art dealers wail against the desecration of these ancient illuminated tomes through scribblings in the margins (which I admit also makes me cringe), Duffy re-animates the lives of the doodlers. In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reports, "One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet."
Duffy, a Cambridge historian, is a grand writer with a marked perspective. He's an advoate of a Tudor top-down Reformation despite the legacy of John Wycliffe and the anti-Rome Lollards, a century before, and evidence the the great majority of the English grassroots laity wholly embraced Protestantism within twenty years of its introduction. Duffy nevertheless claims the Reformation wasn't natural, but aristocratically forced, against an organic Catholicism. It's not surprising, but any less poignant, that the most dramatic marginalia in the book belong to Thomas More in the Tower, who wrote "Gyve me thy grace good lord/To set the world at nought." A prayer book is what it is; it gains vitality through the traces of its owner's life.
I've discovered how to become a guest patron at our local university library (there's an annual fee but it's less than what I would've spent at Borders in a month). On the third floor, where I've yet to observe more than a handful of students, there are stacks of theology, glittering like buried treasure, to tempt willing hearts and minds. I'll be mining the trove for years, hoping to share sparkling trinkets that personally resonate in ripples outward over time as Duffy's marginalia speaks to him and his readers over the centuries (and some of these books haven't been checked out for a hundred years).
My first: the elusive Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal Newman. When he wrote it, he said, "I had no sleep for a week, and was fainting away or something like it day after day," no doubt in anticipation of the reaction of disciples like William George Ward who said of his hunger for dogma, "I would like to find a Papal Bull each morning on my breakfast table." Who could resist this?
Newman may be the greatest all-time artiste of rhetorical criticism. This book, unlike books that seek to please everyone, was attacked as too Catholic for the Anglicans and too Anglican for the Catholics. If something is detested by adversaries on either side, it's probably just right. Newman egged them both on by writing, "growth is the only evidence of life," and that the Bible contains, "the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain to be fully developed."
I can hardly wait to unearth how Newman distinguishes legitimate development from corruption. In Colin McGinn's review of Stewart Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." McGinn reports Pinker concludes words like 'going, having, preventing,' are genetic and necessary as survival skills. Pinker relates this to verbs where 'pour,' and 'fill' fulfill the same physics function but imply different meanings from the perspective of the actor, the pourer, and the filled, the container.
McGinn writes, "it just doesn't seem true that everthing nonphysical that we think about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as 'rights' are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics." I think they are as well. My driving compulsion is to unveil explicit connections between covert or overt language and its derivative destructive consequences, the abridgement of human rights, so that actors appreciate and acknowledge the moral physics of action.
The prophet Hosea II, Podhoretz (rather ironically), and Brueggemann, write of the primacy of morality over ritual. Newman originally railed against the dogmatic corruption of Roman Catholicism, then backtracked to justify his conversion. In the end, it's the Baghdad booksellers, though, that are the steadfast containers, bravely facing death, at the hands of malevolent pourers. Of this, I am always mindful.
Damien Cave of the NY Times reports on Baghdad booksellers Mukdad Ismail and Naim-al-Shatry who own shops on Mutanabi Street. A curfew and bombing that took 26 lives shut them down - for a while. Now that the curfew's lifted, they've both reopened. Mr. Shatry said, "Today I am a king."
Even though there are few customers brave enough to venture out (though if I'd been forced to stay away from my beloved bookshops for a year, I reckon I'd be desperate enough to try), Mr. Ismail says, "I believe in the gradual theory. Everything can't come together at once." Cave observes Mukdad "picked up a black hardcover history of the Kurds, with an attractive photo on the front. Tapping it twice with his right hand, sending dust flying, he kissed the cover and said, "We are happy to be here again with these beautiful books."
Heroes kiss books in hell.
I note in contrast to all would-be theocratists, also according to the Times, Reform Judaism is poised to introduce a new Prayer Book "intended to offer something for everyone - traditionalists, progressives and everyone else - even those who do not believe in God."
When you open the book, reading right to left, there's a prayer in Hebrew, the phonetic version, and a literal translation. On the left, a poetic ode and meditation. It's traditional, gender-neutral, evangelical; there aren't even any rise, stand, sit instructions lest they hinder personal preference. It's as eager to please as a new puppy.
If you're altogether fed up debating whether God's the Father, He and/or She: invent your own language (at college, after we argued what's meant when we say 'it' is raining, i dropped the class), Amber Dance of the Post writes about the "weirdly Babelesque boom of new languages." J.R. Tolkein stared things off: as a hobby, he invented an amalgam of Latin, French and Welsh; then he conceived people to speak it and places for them to live; thus Middle Earth was born.
In the early 20th century, linguists Sapir and Whorf, "proposed a theory that language had the power to broaden or constrain a speaker's thoughts: That is, it is hard to think about concepts without the specific words to express them." Today, when a pseudo-need is manufactured daily to create a market niche, it's not surprising "the Web site Langmaker.com now lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from Ayvarith to Zyem," (even as native languages die out at a pace of one every two weeks.)
It's when we can barely cope with anything more new, that many turn to the ancient language of Scripture for comfort and stability. Even that refuge, however, can be problematical. Peter Steinfels writes, in reviewing James Kugel's, "How to Read the Bible," the author "propounds a stark and challenging thesis, namely that contemporary Bible readers are confronted with two radically different ways of approaching scripture and that both approaches are impressive and admirable - and fundamentally incompatible."
Why? The original translators of the Hebrew, people like Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scroll scribes, the patristic Christians "effectively recast the Bible's meaning in terms that came to dominate the way it was read by both Jews and Christians right up to recent times." Kugel contends "they all converged on four assumptions: that deeper meanings lay behind biblical texts; that the Bible was a book of instruction about the world; that it was somehow seamless and harmonious despite surface conflicts; and, finally, that it was of divine origin."
The historical criticism scholars of the 19th century, through the Jesus Seminar participants today, seek to discard those translations to unearth source materials derived from pre-translated fragments; in the process, Kugel declares they've "let the real Bible elude them." Steinfels adds "modern minds will still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the anicent worry about seamlessness, modern minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones." Even if you accept the Bible is a compendium of orally transmitted Godly-inspired accounts of various persons, then the issue of seamlessness recedes anyway just as if you and I were present at a concert and conveyed varied impressions.
Yet I confess I'm of two minds: what archeologists and "historical Jesus," specialists brilliantly uncover provide a bedrock foundation for faith; the knowledge that King David or Jesus actually walked the roads of an excavated town conveys familarity and immanence. On the other hand, I find it's through reading reflections and commentaries, solo and in community, that more personally meaningful revelations surface; those that have been filtered through lives of the interpreters.
In preparation to teach Brueggemann's "Prophetic Imagination," in adult Sunday school, I've been adjunctly reading Podhoretz's "The Prophets." Podhoretz, more known as the political father of contemporary neo-con's, is an amateur Biblical scholar, but one superbly accomplished in bringing a multiplicity of citations to bear. In the section on Hosea, he introduces conflicting views on whether the first three chapters were written by a Hosea I and the last eleven by Hosea II. Issues of authorship are inevitably defined through detailed scientic analysis' of linguistics and grammar.
The non-technical theories are equally if not more fascinating. As Podhoretz writes, Hosea I's "focus on idolatry as against morality places him in the ethos and era of pre-classical prophecy," while "the primacy of the ethical law over the ritual or cultic only becomes a feature of the book [some scholars] say, in Chapters 4 through 11." In other words, could Hosea I be an earlier writer emphasizing ritual obedience when the people were newer to monotheism versus a later writer, in more prosperous Solomonic times, who sought to connect what transpired in worship to the needs of the poor? Would fundamentalism today naturally tilt towards the former while progressives instinctively turn to the latter, in the same way some geneticists argue blue or red-state political leanings are primarily biological?
Brueggemann, according to Wikipedia, is an advocate of a rhetorical criticism that "studies the use of words and phrases to explicate how arguments have been built to drive home a certain point the author or speaker intended to make." Reflecting a greater plurality within contemporary congregations, he wrote in 1995, "An honest facing of pluralism can only be pastorally and usefully engaged by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answerng objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together."
Had Brueggemann's comments on respectful conversation been taken to heart by our entire parish, especially that "texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," it is more likely than not that a small number of partisans wouldn't have taken the actions that destroyed the church, in their view, in order to save it.
How does their secessionist rallying cry 'Spritual Authority,' affect discernment? Are they advocating obedience to ancient texts that only scholars can authenticate and decipher; to stories orally transmitted and compiled by pre or post-exilic Hebrew editors reflecting different periods and concerns in the progressing history of Israel; or do they more traditionally only rely on the Septuagint Greek or the King James?
At the former Episcopal, now Ugandan, church I once attended, the preferred translation was the New International which draws primarily from the Greek as directed by a committee "united in their committment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God's Word in written form." That literalist approach would not likely predispose a completed version "open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time," as much conform to cultural norms of the intended demographic. If the subsequent Bible did not, the final product would not be marketable to the audience for which it was created.
Brueggemann writes, "the collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude." The profound need for certitude is a compelling force as contrasted against the an ever growing plurality in once homogenous churches. The resulting backlast enables and enacts a defense mechanism justified as a faithful reaction against a perceived coercion that reflects the new reality as an intrusion.
An announcment advertising a lecture by Brueggemann at the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Edinburgh, Scotland, stated "for present-day Christians who find themselves in a bewildering atmosphere of materialism and scientific secularism that puts enormous pressure on their inherited faith." Typical reactions are "to adopt an unquestioning attitude to Scripture which Brueggemann associates with fundamentalism, or to accept the objective, analytical approach, discarding in the text anything that does not yield to a rational understanding of faith and theology. He seems the main object of faith that is grounded in Scripture as the transformation of human life, and this, he thinks, is not achieved by expounding doctrine or ethics or by historical criticism. These do not change people. It is in the telling of stories, in vivid images and analogies, that human imagination is stirred to receive the Word of God in Scripture."
The ad concludes, "at the heart of this is a question about the nature of God - the domesticated God of conventional religion, or the free, unpredictable God who works wonders in the human soul. Faith that is reliant upon the freedom of God against the assumptions of human reason makes things possible that the world defines as impossible, and brings about transformation in the human spirit that strengthens and renews a person's life, moving him on to a deeper, more creative faith."
In the book of Hosea, God equates sin in a personal way with lewdness; in a corporate way with national idolatry; like a Father who looks murderously upon a child when he's disobedient, and lovingly, when she's true; He condemns; He adores - He even argues with Himself and changes His mind repeatedly. This free Creator demonstrates while choices have consequences, they aren't predictable, or dependent on human reason, just as an untamble passion more often than not, rules over logic, in our self-destructive impulsive moods that are later much regretted (as God might have after the Flood when He declared He would never again destroy every living creature).
Eamon Duffy's written a new book, "Marking the Hours," that begins with an exposition on the standard Medieval English prayer book yet hinges on the everyday lives of its readers. While horrified art dealers wail against the desecration of these ancient illuminated tomes through scribblings in the margins (which I admit also makes me cringe), Duffy re-animates the lives of the doodlers. In his review in the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz reports, "One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet."
Duffy, a Cambridge historian, is a grand writer with a marked perspective. He's an advoate of a Tudor top-down Reformation despite the legacy of John Wycliffe and the anti-Rome Lollards, a century before, and evidence the the great majority of the English grassroots laity wholly embraced Protestantism within twenty years of its introduction. Duffy nevertheless claims the Reformation wasn't natural, but aristocratically forced, against an organic Catholicism. It's not surprising, but any less poignant, that the most dramatic marginalia in the book belong to Thomas More in the Tower, who wrote "Gyve me thy grace good lord/To set the world at nought." A prayer book is what it is; it gains vitality through the traces of its owner's life.
I've discovered how to become a guest patron at our local university library (there's an annual fee but it's less than what I would've spent at Borders in a month). On the third floor, where I've yet to observe more than a handful of students, there are stacks of theology, glittering like buried treasure, to tempt willing hearts and minds. I'll be mining the trove for years, hoping to share sparkling trinkets that personally resonate in ripples outward over time as Duffy's marginalia speaks to him and his readers over the centuries (and some of these books haven't been checked out for a hundred years).
My first: the elusive Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal Newman. When he wrote it, he said, "I had no sleep for a week, and was fainting away or something like it day after day," no doubt in anticipation of the reaction of disciples like William George Ward who said of his hunger for dogma, "I would like to find a Papal Bull each morning on my breakfast table." Who could resist this?
Newman may be the greatest all-time artiste of rhetorical criticism. This book, unlike books that seek to please everyone, was attacked as too Catholic for the Anglicans and too Anglican for the Catholics. If something is detested by adversaries on either side, it's probably just right. Newman egged them both on by writing, "growth is the only evidence of life," and that the Bible contains, "the main outlines of a great system of dogmas, which remain to be fully developed."
I can hardly wait to unearth how Newman distinguishes legitimate development from corruption. In Colin McGinn's review of Stewart Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature." McGinn reports Pinker concludes words like 'going, having, preventing,' are genetic and necessary as survival skills. Pinker relates this to verbs where 'pour,' and 'fill' fulfill the same physics function but imply different meanings from the perspective of the actor, the pourer, and the filled, the container.
McGinn writes, "it just doesn't seem true that everthing nonphysical that we think about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as 'rights' are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics." I think they are as well. My driving compulsion is to unveil explicit connections between covert or overt language and its derivative destructive consequences, the abridgement of human rights, so that actors appreciate and acknowledge the moral physics of action.
The prophet Hosea II, Podhoretz (rather ironically), and Brueggemann, write of the primacy of morality over ritual. Newman originally railed against the dogmatic corruption of Roman Catholicism, then backtracked to justify his conversion. In the end, it's the Baghdad booksellers, though, that are the steadfast containers, bravely facing death, at the hands of malevolent pourers. Of this, I am always mindful.
Friday, September 14, 2007
If Mickey's a Mouse; Pluto's a Dog; What's Goofy?
I note this week the sale of the century. The CoE Diocese of Truro sold a collection of pre-1800 books to a dealer for 36,000 pounds. They said they needed the room and nobody had checked one out in a long time. (Is there anyone who finds the thought of reading a book from the Henry Phillpotts collection exciting? -sadly, I do) The dealer who bought the collection made 500,000 reselling it - he's closed shop in London and is retiring to the country.
I received an on-line offer last week I fear doesn't have quite the same profit-making potential: spurred on by the Pope's move towards restoring Pre-Vatican II liturgy, a bookseller's offering 1958 Latin missals. Don't think I'm going to take them up on it with an eye towards re-sale.
Twenty thousand English parish churches, some a thousand years old, now lie unattended and locked up. Not everything ancient is as good as Henry Phllpotts library, I'll grant, nor as dubiously useful as Latin missals; what I bemoan most is the passing of the truly goofy: an absent-minded librarian that doesn't realize or ever bothered to know the monetary value of his books; the idealisticaly Book of Acts-communally socialist-leaning vicar who everyone affectionately calls 'red rev;' the Bobby on a bike cycling obliviously and unintimidatingly around the village square -- the lost world of the comfortably eccentric, not a gated nation of the differently suspicious and therefore dangerous and threatening other.
When I visited Cork, about a decade ago, walking down the High, the church bells announced twelve o'clock. Shopkeepers and punters alike headed to Mass. There was nothing forced about it, nothing arrogant; just a naturalness to what people customarily did on their lunch break. I was reading an article by noted skeptic Daniel Dennett where he said "religion is a powerful force in the world. Now more than ever. We need to study it scientifically so that we can anticipate its changes." It didn't feel powerful in Cork; it felt organic, like the description Eamon Duffy paints of pre-Reformation English-Catholic parish life. Yet, of course, in actuality, it's rubbish - there was never any golden age of peaceful villages, then or now. Truth, however, doesn't necessarily diminish the beautiful vision.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about a non-theological unscientific perception of faith in Brideshead when Charles Ryder asked Sebastian Flyte why he believed in Mary and the Virgin Birth. Sebastian replied 'because it's charming.' Sebastian's terrible mother echoed the theme when justifying her place in heaven despite her wealth by saying, 'It's not usual for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but that's all part of the Alice in Wonderland nature of religion.'
It's the same kind of argument I made against Christoper Hitchens last week that I'll renew in opposition to Richard Dawkins now. In a review of Dawkin's God Delusion, in Skeptic magazine, Norman Levitt writes "that Dawkins gives little quarter to liberal theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, difficent, and even diluted faith, that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it."
I plead guilty.
Levitt goes on to write, "What if hypothetically it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents?"
Bingo. That's it - that's what Dennett, Levitt, Hitchens, Hawkins and the other presently notorious atheists don't get. It's not a matter of a lack of scientific proof and evidence. If the physical questions are essentially unknowable, anyway, who cares about evidence? To follow up Levitt, a non-harmful faith is possible, and perhaps more the norm than not, even if it's never fully universally achieved, the belief in the potential hope of it negates their arguments by rendering them irrelevant. It's the same argument I hold against Scriptural literalism - if you don't insist it's all true in the first place, you don't need to defend it, as much as glean it for wisdom and apply it if you can.
The closest I can describe it in theological and historical terms is from the viewpoint of latitudinarianism, a practice that broadly characterized the Anglican Church in Victorian times, as described by A.N. Wilson in "God's Funeral." Many priests of the day prefaced the Nicene Creed by stating, "I'm prepared to live my life as if," -I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty," etc. Highly charged Anglican litmus-test partisans today would immediately initiate schism against any denomination possessing such a non-doctrinal, non-authoritarian mindset.
The pre-split parish I attended was at its best when it was at its goofiest. When our forget priest got frequently lost in the middle of the sermon and laughed heartily. When the acolyte caught the fire retardent sleeve of his vestment on fire after we'd all been put to sleep by the Taize service. When the girls in youth group cooperatively built cardboard condominiums during an all night lock-in to simulate homelessness while the boys confidently built isolated shacks that collasped within an hour. When I donned the most pathetic Easter Bunny costume in the world and couldn't stop the ears from flopping into my eyes. When one of our girls fell out of the relatively safe bleachers at the evening program on a mission trip after working fixing a dangerous roof all day.
By the time the vestry required members to sign a statement attesting to their doctrinal beliefs, they'd succeeding in choking the very life out of it. There was no room for amazement in the presence of an awesome God; no joy; little humanity.
When Jesus asked Peter if He could wash his feet and Peter said no way; When Jesus said if you don't let me, you're fired; when Peter responded, okay boss, wash my feet, my hands, my head -- that's a charming, endearing and goofy story worthy of raucous praise.
I received an on-line offer last week I fear doesn't have quite the same profit-making potential: spurred on by the Pope's move towards restoring Pre-Vatican II liturgy, a bookseller's offering 1958 Latin missals. Don't think I'm going to take them up on it with an eye towards re-sale.
Twenty thousand English parish churches, some a thousand years old, now lie unattended and locked up. Not everything ancient is as good as Henry Phllpotts library, I'll grant, nor as dubiously useful as Latin missals; what I bemoan most is the passing of the truly goofy: an absent-minded librarian that doesn't realize or ever bothered to know the monetary value of his books; the idealisticaly Book of Acts-communally socialist-leaning vicar who everyone affectionately calls 'red rev;' the Bobby on a bike cycling obliviously and unintimidatingly around the village square -- the lost world of the comfortably eccentric, not a gated nation of the differently suspicious and therefore dangerous and threatening other.
When I visited Cork, about a decade ago, walking down the High, the church bells announced twelve o'clock. Shopkeepers and punters alike headed to Mass. There was nothing forced about it, nothing arrogant; just a naturalness to what people customarily did on their lunch break. I was reading an article by noted skeptic Daniel Dennett where he said "religion is a powerful force in the world. Now more than ever. We need to study it scientifically so that we can anticipate its changes." It didn't feel powerful in Cork; it felt organic, like the description Eamon Duffy paints of pre-Reformation English-Catholic parish life. Yet, of course, in actuality, it's rubbish - there was never any golden age of peaceful villages, then or now. Truth, however, doesn't necessarily diminish the beautiful vision.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about a non-theological unscientific perception of faith in Brideshead when Charles Ryder asked Sebastian Flyte why he believed in Mary and the Virgin Birth. Sebastian replied 'because it's charming.' Sebastian's terrible mother echoed the theme when justifying her place in heaven despite her wealth by saying, 'It's not usual for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but that's all part of the Alice in Wonderland nature of religion.'
It's the same kind of argument I made against Christoper Hitchens last week that I'll renew in opposition to Richard Dawkins now. In a review of Dawkin's God Delusion, in Skeptic magazine, Norman Levitt writes "that Dawkins gives little quarter to liberal theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, difficent, and even diluted faith, that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it."
I plead guilty.
Levitt goes on to write, "What if hypothetically it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents?"
Bingo. That's it - that's what Dennett, Levitt, Hitchens, Hawkins and the other presently notorious atheists don't get. It's not a matter of a lack of scientific proof and evidence. If the physical questions are essentially unknowable, anyway, who cares about evidence? To follow up Levitt, a non-harmful faith is possible, and perhaps more the norm than not, even if it's never fully universally achieved, the belief in the potential hope of it negates their arguments by rendering them irrelevant. It's the same argument I hold against Scriptural literalism - if you don't insist it's all true in the first place, you don't need to defend it, as much as glean it for wisdom and apply it if you can.
The closest I can describe it in theological and historical terms is from the viewpoint of latitudinarianism, a practice that broadly characterized the Anglican Church in Victorian times, as described by A.N. Wilson in "God's Funeral." Many priests of the day prefaced the Nicene Creed by stating, "I'm prepared to live my life as if," -I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty," etc. Highly charged Anglican litmus-test partisans today would immediately initiate schism against any denomination possessing such a non-doctrinal, non-authoritarian mindset.
The pre-split parish I attended was at its best when it was at its goofiest. When our forget priest got frequently lost in the middle of the sermon and laughed heartily. When the acolyte caught the fire retardent sleeve of his vestment on fire after we'd all been put to sleep by the Taize service. When the girls in youth group cooperatively built cardboard condominiums during an all night lock-in to simulate homelessness while the boys confidently built isolated shacks that collasped within an hour. When I donned the most pathetic Easter Bunny costume in the world and couldn't stop the ears from flopping into my eyes. When one of our girls fell out of the relatively safe bleachers at the evening program on a mission trip after working fixing a dangerous roof all day.
By the time the vestry required members to sign a statement attesting to their doctrinal beliefs, they'd succeeding in choking the very life out of it. There was no room for amazement in the presence of an awesome God; no joy; little humanity.
When Jesus asked Peter if He could wash his feet and Peter said no way; When Jesus said if you don't let me, you're fired; when Peter responded, okay boss, wash my feet, my hands, my head -- that's a charming, endearing and goofy story worthy of raucous praise.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Place
I note this week two news stories from my hometown: one where a crackhead father killed his daughter; the other where a brother raped and killed his sister.
The similarity lies in the places they lived. The first victim was a 13-year old girl from a trailer park who reeked of cat urine, wrote she'd die by age 15, and slept on a mattress in a room littered with ice cream cartons and cigarettes. The second lived in a hovel with doors falling off the hinges, broken windows and trash piled high in the yard.
They lived and died in the same rural county in the same Virginia rolling hills and woods where I live and find a beauty that nourishes and sustains me.
I also note this week the comments of Bishop Orama of Nigeria who said gay people are insane, satanic and not fit to live.
Last week I wondered what Christopher Hitchens thought of revelations found in the letters of Mother Teresa; that for most of her life, she'd doubted, if not, lost her faith. I'd wondered whether the information she didn't consistently believe in the religion upon which her service was grounded would get her off the hook with the atheist Hitchens or multiply his criticisms all the worse.
I serendepitously happened upon a three-hour live interview on C-span's Book TV the following Sunday to hear his reaction. The publication of the letters didn't negate his condemnation on practical considerations, for example, rather than using donations for poor relief, she used them for convent construction. He said on spiritual grounds that "her attempted cure, more and more professions of faith, could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself," presumably by believing the lie of religion in the first place.
Hitchens didn't address, or he discounted, the realization of Teresa at the end of the story, prompted by a spiritual advisor, that her doubts coincided with the doubt of Jesus on the Cross when in Mark 15:34 He cries out My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" That revelation alleviated her doubt.
The Church, as Hitchens would be right in his criticisms, can be an agent of the very culture of death it decries out against. The daughter, the sister, and the people Bishop Orama labels as not fit to live, are abandoned - where is their Church?
Hitchens sees the Church as a participant in their abandonment or destruction. Yet the core experience of Scripture is that grief and destruction always precede something better, and that these are the actions of a free and capricious God not owned by any earthly power which has Him under control. That would also be true of any meaning to be derived from tragedy if there was no God.
There are those of us in the Church that do not consciously allow ourselves to become participants in the destruction of other lives while the world plays itself out. We work as if we're past a current point of destruction and are part of the reconstruction process. If that is self-delusionment, fine, since we don't know of any other way to carry on.
The NY Times carried a story last Saturday on 'committed window-gazers,' those at "the exact juncture of the public and private realms." Like "Ms. Figueroa, 71, who treats her ground-floor roost at the corner of East 117th Street and Park Avenue like a combination take-out counter and dispensary. Anyone who looks hungry or thirsty gets a glass of ice water, a coffee, a sandwich, a plate of her pernil and rice and beans. To the wounded, she hands out Band-Aids, Tylenol, peroxide."
Ms. Figueroa straddles a private and public divide to dispense hope. We believe in a public God that dispenses personal hope through people like Ms. Figueroa. Whether all the stories in the Bible are true or not is not the point I'd address to either Hitchens, in his intellectual disbelief, or Orama, wallowing in his dangerous hate. We, like Teresa discovered at the end of her life, look to a powerless and abandoned Jesus suffering on the Cross in solidarity with the tragic and the hopeless as our example - not as the powerful Kingly judge of death as envisioned and carried out in this world by descipable self-annoited saviors like Orama.
What matters is the application of belief or disbelief; the example of the Cross-in relation to self and others-in the Spirit of sacrifice - Trinity as an alternative beginning. If your working assumption is that everybody else is saved, or righteous, in the context of whatever they believe, or don't believe, except for you, and that you are the one with the catching up to do, then by undertaking an attempt, it is possible to be an agent of hope for teenagers who write death poetry; their crack-addicted fathers; for slain sisters; the demented brothers who slay them; to stand in solidarity with all persecuted persons by the way you live.
I can't offer more than that to Hitchens other than that his criticism becomes irrlevant at the point where faith and religion do no harm and may even do some good - that must be the goal if the critics of Christianity are to be honestly addressed.
This is the place where I live; the place that nourishes my soul and sustains my life.
The similarity lies in the places they lived. The first victim was a 13-year old girl from a trailer park who reeked of cat urine, wrote she'd die by age 15, and slept on a mattress in a room littered with ice cream cartons and cigarettes. The second lived in a hovel with doors falling off the hinges, broken windows and trash piled high in the yard.
They lived and died in the same rural county in the same Virginia rolling hills and woods where I live and find a beauty that nourishes and sustains me.
I also note this week the comments of Bishop Orama of Nigeria who said gay people are insane, satanic and not fit to live.
Last week I wondered what Christopher Hitchens thought of revelations found in the letters of Mother Teresa; that for most of her life, she'd doubted, if not, lost her faith. I'd wondered whether the information she didn't consistently believe in the religion upon which her service was grounded would get her off the hook with the atheist Hitchens or multiply his criticisms all the worse.
I serendepitously happened upon a three-hour live interview on C-span's Book TV the following Sunday to hear his reaction. The publication of the letters didn't negate his condemnation on practical considerations, for example, rather than using donations for poor relief, she used them for convent construction. He said on spiritual grounds that "her attempted cure, more and more professions of faith, could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself," presumably by believing the lie of religion in the first place.
Hitchens didn't address, or he discounted, the realization of Teresa at the end of the story, prompted by a spiritual advisor, that her doubts coincided with the doubt of Jesus on the Cross when in Mark 15:34 He cries out My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" That revelation alleviated her doubt.
The Church, as Hitchens would be right in his criticisms, can be an agent of the very culture of death it decries out against. The daughter, the sister, and the people Bishop Orama labels as not fit to live, are abandoned - where is their Church?
Hitchens sees the Church as a participant in their abandonment or destruction. Yet the core experience of Scripture is that grief and destruction always precede something better, and that these are the actions of a free and capricious God not owned by any earthly power which has Him under control. That would also be true of any meaning to be derived from tragedy if there was no God.
There are those of us in the Church that do not consciously allow ourselves to become participants in the destruction of other lives while the world plays itself out. We work as if we're past a current point of destruction and are part of the reconstruction process. If that is self-delusionment, fine, since we don't know of any other way to carry on.
The NY Times carried a story last Saturday on 'committed window-gazers,' those at "the exact juncture of the public and private realms." Like "Ms. Figueroa, 71, who treats her ground-floor roost at the corner of East 117th Street and Park Avenue like a combination take-out counter and dispensary. Anyone who looks hungry or thirsty gets a glass of ice water, a coffee, a sandwich, a plate of her pernil and rice and beans. To the wounded, she hands out Band-Aids, Tylenol, peroxide."
Ms. Figueroa straddles a private and public divide to dispense hope. We believe in a public God that dispenses personal hope through people like Ms. Figueroa. Whether all the stories in the Bible are true or not is not the point I'd address to either Hitchens, in his intellectual disbelief, or Orama, wallowing in his dangerous hate. We, like Teresa discovered at the end of her life, look to a powerless and abandoned Jesus suffering on the Cross in solidarity with the tragic and the hopeless as our example - not as the powerful Kingly judge of death as envisioned and carried out in this world by descipable self-annoited saviors like Orama.
What matters is the application of belief or disbelief; the example of the Cross-in relation to self and others-in the Spirit of sacrifice - Trinity as an alternative beginning. If your working assumption is that everybody else is saved, or righteous, in the context of whatever they believe, or don't believe, except for you, and that you are the one with the catching up to do, then by undertaking an attempt, it is possible to be an agent of hope for teenagers who write death poetry; their crack-addicted fathers; for slain sisters; the demented brothers who slay them; to stand in solidarity with all persecuted persons by the way you live.
I can't offer more than that to Hitchens other than that his criticism becomes irrlevant at the point where faith and religion do no harm and may even do some good - that must be the goal if the critics of Christianity are to be honestly addressed.
This is the place where I live; the place that nourishes my soul and sustains my life.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Common Good? - More Good Than Harm Anyway
I note this week a most pleasant trip to the library. I found the tattered out-of-date tomes (Kesey, Twain, a New Yorker collection, Lewis (CS) and Vonnegut) I so love that haven't likely been checked out in decades (I miss seeing the proof of date stamps, the historical records in the life of a book, that have vanished in this too electronic age). A Friends of the Library lady offered lemonade to us thirsty patrons on the hot summer day. A congenial stranger made a gentle crack about how it looked I'd be busy over the weekend as I exited clumisly with all my stack, and there it was: pure happiness.
There's another fella in Denver, though, who appparently doesn't see things the same way. He used seven different names to obtain seven library cards, checked out 300 books, tapes and DVD's, per card, and tried to sell them for $35,000.
Yet I still marvel at the concept of a library; all those tempting books that you're trusted to take away and bring back. I've read about a library for tools, like rakes and chain saws, in Berkeley, and a bike library in Seattle where they're left unlocked on racks, available for everyone, to ride from Point A to Point B. I'm not convinced these programs would work everywhere. Perhaps in deference to Oregon-dweller Kesey's quote, "we never claimed to know precisely when the birth of the New Consciousness would take place...but as to the birthplace, we had always taken it for granted that the shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of American labor," the new consciousness grew to full maturity, as always has been the dream of this manifestly destined country, out West (except for Denver).
We have a controversy down here in the Eastern Mid-Atlantic sticks where I live; about 800 of us take a commuter train to the big city. Other counties farther north up the line impose a two-cent gas tax to subsidize rail costs keeping any excess of their share to improve local roads. Even though the line terminates in our southernmost county, our politico's refuse to join the system; the letters to our local rag run highly against since 'why should taxpayers who don't commute help those that do.' These folks probably don't use the library either.
Common-good definitions aren't easy. I note an article in the Sun this week where a fella described as a "prominent defense attorney used to representing Baltimore thugs," has decided to moved to the suburbs after his 18-year old son was robbed at gunpoint near his Northwest Baltimore home, and a man who'd been shot, drove his SUV into his back-yard pool. He's quoted as saying even though "things are out of control, it doesn't deter me from my task, which is to make sure everybody, good and bad, reprehensible and sympathetic, are all protected by the Constitution. I got to represent some bad people sometimes who really are getting a windfall benefit from my zeal as it relates to people's constitutional rights."
He's saying he can just as passionately represent the hardest-to-defend from the 'burbs where his family is safe from his clientele. I had a similar ephiphany when I moved from a crime-ridden neighborhood to one of the safest communities whilst managing a shelter for folks too dangerous to be admitted to other shelters. Like our lawyer, I moved, but felt guilty enough to need to justify it. It always helped the guests to relate, if in their minds, they thought I had once, or presently lived in a bad neighborhood. I didn't disabuse them of the false notion, since it aided the work, and continued to lead them through their wilderness from a suspect position of false prophet. Why was this story in the Baltimore paper? Why is it news? Does it carry universal interest; a solidarity behind which liberals can feel better about themselves despite the hypocrisy?
I note other news this week, according to CBS, that Mother Teresa "was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite. Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God -- please forgive me. If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." There's that nagging notion of hypocrisy again.
I'm dying to see Christopher Hitchen's reaction. If you're not aware, he's criticized Mother Teresa in several ways. First, for fronting an institution, the Catholic Church, that prohibits birth control, meaning she was comforting dying babies whose tragedy need not have happened. If she did not really believe in God, I wonder if that takes her off Hitchen's hook, in a weird sort of way, or make it worse, as if she too was a false prophet?
Hitchens also criticized her for taking money from tinpot Third World dictators. I can relate. After the 2003 General Convention in the Episcopal Church, and the consecration of Bishop Robinson, one of the early 'Anglican' tactics was to admonish by withholding Diocesan contributions; their leader offered to divert parish funds to my shelter. At the time, devoted as I was to the welfare of my guests, I said yes. I'm not totally sure I would today after fully absorbing their tactics over the past four years, but is the greater good served by taking desperatly needed funds for the poor from a less than desirable source? (This is not a new dilemma; Pat O'Brien refused such funds from gangster Jimmy Cagney in the classic '30's movie morality tale, 'Angels with Dirty Faces.')
One of the greatest lessons from shelter world is it's hard to pin down absolutes. If a man freezes to death in the woods while he has a family of six brothers and sisters living in the area, it is not they who are the cause, if he rejected them, as much as the other way around. Should we have accepted the donation of a refrigerator from one of the sisters after his death? I have no qualms about saying yes.
In questions of the common good, there's no sure way to tell if it is, or if it isn't; no absolutes. Whether you're commuter, a taxpayer, a lawyer, Mother Teresa, or just a fella who takes great pleasure in losing himself in the stacks of the library, the most I can do to assure a common good, is to endeavor to do more good than harm, and leave it at that.
There's another fella in Denver, though, who appparently doesn't see things the same way. He used seven different names to obtain seven library cards, checked out 300 books, tapes and DVD's, per card, and tried to sell them for $35,000.
Yet I still marvel at the concept of a library; all those tempting books that you're trusted to take away and bring back. I've read about a library for tools, like rakes and chain saws, in Berkeley, and a bike library in Seattle where they're left unlocked on racks, available for everyone, to ride from Point A to Point B. I'm not convinced these programs would work everywhere. Perhaps in deference to Oregon-dweller Kesey's quote, "we never claimed to know precisely when the birth of the New Consciousness would take place...but as to the birthplace, we had always taken it for granted that the shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of American labor," the new consciousness grew to full maturity, as always has been the dream of this manifestly destined country, out West (except for Denver).
We have a controversy down here in the Eastern Mid-Atlantic sticks where I live; about 800 of us take a commuter train to the big city. Other counties farther north up the line impose a two-cent gas tax to subsidize rail costs keeping any excess of their share to improve local roads. Even though the line terminates in our southernmost county, our politico's refuse to join the system; the letters to our local rag run highly against since 'why should taxpayers who don't commute help those that do.' These folks probably don't use the library either.
Common-good definitions aren't easy. I note an article in the Sun this week where a fella described as a "prominent defense attorney used to representing Baltimore thugs," has decided to moved to the suburbs after his 18-year old son was robbed at gunpoint near his Northwest Baltimore home, and a man who'd been shot, drove his SUV into his back-yard pool. He's quoted as saying even though "things are out of control, it doesn't deter me from my task, which is to make sure everybody, good and bad, reprehensible and sympathetic, are all protected by the Constitution. I got to represent some bad people sometimes who really are getting a windfall benefit from my zeal as it relates to people's constitutional rights."
He's saying he can just as passionately represent the hardest-to-defend from the 'burbs where his family is safe from his clientele. I had a similar ephiphany when I moved from a crime-ridden neighborhood to one of the safest communities whilst managing a shelter for folks too dangerous to be admitted to other shelters. Like our lawyer, I moved, but felt guilty enough to need to justify it. It always helped the guests to relate, if in their minds, they thought I had once, or presently lived in a bad neighborhood. I didn't disabuse them of the false notion, since it aided the work, and continued to lead them through their wilderness from a suspect position of false prophet. Why was this story in the Baltimore paper? Why is it news? Does it carry universal interest; a solidarity behind which liberals can feel better about themselves despite the hypocrisy?
I note other news this week, according to CBS, that Mother Teresa "was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite. Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God -- please forgive me. If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." There's that nagging notion of hypocrisy again.
I'm dying to see Christopher Hitchen's reaction. If you're not aware, he's criticized Mother Teresa in several ways. First, for fronting an institution, the Catholic Church, that prohibits birth control, meaning she was comforting dying babies whose tragedy need not have happened. If she did not really believe in God, I wonder if that takes her off Hitchen's hook, in a weird sort of way, or make it worse, as if she too was a false prophet?
Hitchens also criticized her for taking money from tinpot Third World dictators. I can relate. After the 2003 General Convention in the Episcopal Church, and the consecration of Bishop Robinson, one of the early 'Anglican' tactics was to admonish by withholding Diocesan contributions; their leader offered to divert parish funds to my shelter. At the time, devoted as I was to the welfare of my guests, I said yes. I'm not totally sure I would today after fully absorbing their tactics over the past four years, but is the greater good served by taking desperatly needed funds for the poor from a less than desirable source? (This is not a new dilemma; Pat O'Brien refused such funds from gangster Jimmy Cagney in the classic '30's movie morality tale, 'Angels with Dirty Faces.')
One of the greatest lessons from shelter world is it's hard to pin down absolutes. If a man freezes to death in the woods while he has a family of six brothers and sisters living in the area, it is not they who are the cause, if he rejected them, as much as the other way around. Should we have accepted the donation of a refrigerator from one of the sisters after his death? I have no qualms about saying yes.
In questions of the common good, there's no sure way to tell if it is, or if it isn't; no absolutes. Whether you're commuter, a taxpayer, a lawyer, Mother Teresa, or just a fella who takes great pleasure in losing himself in the stacks of the library, the most I can do to assure a common good, is to endeavor to do more good than harm, and leave it at that.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Voices
I note this week when I write I hear voices. When I'm feeling common sensical American, I hear Garrison Keilor or Jimmy Stewart; if I'm out of sorts and nostalgic, I hear the voices of the Beats: roll them bones, the Tao of Pooh, the greatest minds howl, etc. It might even be that voice you'd hear on the old Walt Disney show - the one that told about the time Old Yeller stumbled upon a skunk.
I've been reading two books the last few weeks; each carries a mood-influencing voice. The first is a John Mortimer, non-Rumpole, novel; the second, a book of blended fiction/reminiscences by Kesey.
When I read Mortimer, on the surface, there's the harried suburbanite; it doesn't matter if it's London or DC. In the face of ass-hat bosses, he always pricks the hot air of their pomposity -- where they are consumed by ambition, his only desire is to secure justice for those uponn whom the ass-hats assume the worst and won't grant the time of day. Mortimer's heroes find their niche through a competence and honesty that can't be bought or diverted for long by promises of advancement to an easier life. At best, the establishment thumbs their noses and dimisses them as non-entities; at worst, he's seen as a threat, because he can't be controlled -- in the end, things are made right -- mostly, in a twisted sort of way.
In Kesey's 'Demon Box,' he tells stories from the perspective of a person falsely seen as the hippie king, to whom all the poseurs gravitate, to either mooch, or shine in reflected faded glory. Like Mortimer, the stories are a process of distinguishing the real from the phony, the gentle from the violent. Kesey sets a tone, like James Herriott, where issues of life and death are processed through the birth and demise of animals within their relationship to humans. Kesey's farmer, like Mortimer's suburbanite, also has to be competent in his niche to retain a relative self-sufficientcy, and represent in the real world, the guise of the one we've striven to create in the forty years since the summer of love.
I know about niche-honesty from my days at the shelter. Where else in the world is it permissable to tell someone, "you stink - take a bath," without giving it a second thought? No malice intended, none taken. Where else can you witness a very dedicated volunteer comb lice from a guest's hair with humor rather than disgust? Where else do you work side by side with cops, er nurses and probation officers, where all vestiges of cover and camouflage have been swept away? Worker and guest are the same, except, for now, the worker hasn't given up on life.
The Mortimer novel, 'Quite Honesty,' unveils a recognition you come to at the shelter after time. The plot concerns 'do-gooders' who volunteer to associate with ex-con's to prevent recidivism. The book asks the simple question: why? That is, why do the same crime over and over and end up where you started? At shelter, if after much labor, working with a fella possessing a rap sheet 7 pages long, we succeeded in convincing someone to hire him, and the job starts on Monday, and in celebration, he gets wasted Saturday and Sunday, but then still wakes up on Monday morning with every intention of showing up - but doesn't after someone offers him a joint - why? Mortimer knows: excitement.
I add: impulse. The guests I knew rarely woke up intending to commit a crime - it was just when they were faced with the stark choice of going to work or something more exciting, they chose excitement. You can't call it evil - I know when there was a glorious Spring day, the temperature at 70, not a cloud in the blue sky - a real Ferris Bueller day - and I'd come trudging into the shelter after commuting the 40 miles to the office of supreme drudgery, and the fella's would come in from the woods, after a day fishing at the swimming hole, I'd think how nice it would be to live a Peter Pan life if you could get away with it. The problem for them is that they could get away with it while they were relatively young and strong - but if they were wounded, a clipped infected leg, a bad ticker, they were doomed, if there was no family left willing to take them in or they were unwilling to go.
Even if in many ways it was their choice, the economics of suburban life didn't grant much leeway to any of them who truly wanted to escape. That job, the fella, didn't show up for, rather than do drugs, was minimum wage in a discount mall. Sure, there's a dignity in working and making an effort, but even for those former guests who are doing exactly that, every day is a struggle to move beyond bare susentance, and it's 50-50 whether they sink or swim. In Mortimer's world, you survive as an honest petty criminal, where those who are their supposeded betters, the lawyers, judges, parole officers, are suspect. Their motive is not excitement - it's ego. Which is worse?
I note also an intriguing article in last month's First Things magazine called 'Groovin' on Jesus,' by Sally Thomas It's the author's contention that the counter-culture of the 60's led to a religious counter-culture today - that of the religious Right. The article, "purports to establish a direct causal effect between the Jesus Movement's impulse to re-invent culture and the activist energy of the religious right in the service of school-prayer, pro-life, and religious-liberty causes."
Hhhhmmm - there's a grain of truth here. Off the top, a cause like the home-school movement might, indeed, be a growth from the ACTS-like communes, the 60's ideals of family life. Yet, where the author see's a problem, in that an ethos "wherein citizens of the world will observe a common ethics based upon a common value system," as being imminical to a specific doctrinal application of Church authority, that is, the tried and true 'anything goes,' smear, I have no problem if committed religious observance leads to such a world. In fact, I think that's the point; what we do on earth counts, it's the real part of which we have some control, versus the promise of salvation in the next, the part that's out of reach, here and now. Mortimer and Kesey paint worlds where truth bursts pride. It occurs to me that this is the Jesuitical essence - at least that's what the voice that sounds like Charlton Heston keeps saying in my mind (the original Biblical Books-on-Tape voice, mind you, not the scary cold-dead-hands NRA voice).
Keilor, Stewart, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Disney, Heston, Mortimer, Kesey - the voices in my head. They're not the only ones - there's a mob milling around up there, each one, waiting for a chance to spill the beans. That's okay, I keep telling myself.
I've been reading two books the last few weeks; each carries a mood-influencing voice. The first is a John Mortimer, non-Rumpole, novel; the second, a book of blended fiction/reminiscences by Kesey.
When I read Mortimer, on the surface, there's the harried suburbanite; it doesn't matter if it's London or DC. In the face of ass-hat bosses, he always pricks the hot air of their pomposity -- where they are consumed by ambition, his only desire is to secure justice for those uponn whom the ass-hats assume the worst and won't grant the time of day. Mortimer's heroes find their niche through a competence and honesty that can't be bought or diverted for long by promises of advancement to an easier life. At best, the establishment thumbs their noses and dimisses them as non-entities; at worst, he's seen as a threat, because he can't be controlled -- in the end, things are made right -- mostly, in a twisted sort of way.
In Kesey's 'Demon Box,' he tells stories from the perspective of a person falsely seen as the hippie king, to whom all the poseurs gravitate, to either mooch, or shine in reflected faded glory. Like Mortimer, the stories are a process of distinguishing the real from the phony, the gentle from the violent. Kesey sets a tone, like James Herriott, where issues of life and death are processed through the birth and demise of animals within their relationship to humans. Kesey's farmer, like Mortimer's suburbanite, also has to be competent in his niche to retain a relative self-sufficientcy, and represent in the real world, the guise of the one we've striven to create in the forty years since the summer of love.
I know about niche-honesty from my days at the shelter. Where else in the world is it permissable to tell someone, "you stink - take a bath," without giving it a second thought? No malice intended, none taken. Where else can you witness a very dedicated volunteer comb lice from a guest's hair with humor rather than disgust? Where else do you work side by side with cops, er nurses and probation officers, where all vestiges of cover and camouflage have been swept away? Worker and guest are the same, except, for now, the worker hasn't given up on life.
The Mortimer novel, 'Quite Honesty,' unveils a recognition you come to at the shelter after time. The plot concerns 'do-gooders' who volunteer to associate with ex-con's to prevent recidivism. The book asks the simple question: why? That is, why do the same crime over and over and end up where you started? At shelter, if after much labor, working with a fella possessing a rap sheet 7 pages long, we succeeded in convincing someone to hire him, and the job starts on Monday, and in celebration, he gets wasted Saturday and Sunday, but then still wakes up on Monday morning with every intention of showing up - but doesn't after someone offers him a joint - why? Mortimer knows: excitement.
I add: impulse. The guests I knew rarely woke up intending to commit a crime - it was just when they were faced with the stark choice of going to work or something more exciting, they chose excitement. You can't call it evil - I know when there was a glorious Spring day, the temperature at 70, not a cloud in the blue sky - a real Ferris Bueller day - and I'd come trudging into the shelter after commuting the 40 miles to the office of supreme drudgery, and the fella's would come in from the woods, after a day fishing at the swimming hole, I'd think how nice it would be to live a Peter Pan life if you could get away with it. The problem for them is that they could get away with it while they were relatively young and strong - but if they were wounded, a clipped infected leg, a bad ticker, they were doomed, if there was no family left willing to take them in or they were unwilling to go.
Even if in many ways it was their choice, the economics of suburban life didn't grant much leeway to any of them who truly wanted to escape. That job, the fella, didn't show up for, rather than do drugs, was minimum wage in a discount mall. Sure, there's a dignity in working and making an effort, but even for those former guests who are doing exactly that, every day is a struggle to move beyond bare susentance, and it's 50-50 whether they sink or swim. In Mortimer's world, you survive as an honest petty criminal, where those who are their supposeded betters, the lawyers, judges, parole officers, are suspect. Their motive is not excitement - it's ego. Which is worse?
I note also an intriguing article in last month's First Things magazine called 'Groovin' on Jesus,' by Sally Thomas It's the author's contention that the counter-culture of the 60's led to a religious counter-culture today - that of the religious Right. The article, "purports to establish a direct causal effect between the Jesus Movement's impulse to re-invent culture and the activist energy of the religious right in the service of school-prayer, pro-life, and religious-liberty causes."
Hhhhmmm - there's a grain of truth here. Off the top, a cause like the home-school movement might, indeed, be a growth from the ACTS-like communes, the 60's ideals of family life. Yet, where the author see's a problem, in that an ethos "wherein citizens of the world will observe a common ethics based upon a common value system," as being imminical to a specific doctrinal application of Church authority, that is, the tried and true 'anything goes,' smear, I have no problem if committed religious observance leads to such a world. In fact, I think that's the point; what we do on earth counts, it's the real part of which we have some control, versus the promise of salvation in the next, the part that's out of reach, here and now. Mortimer and Kesey paint worlds where truth bursts pride. It occurs to me that this is the Jesuitical essence - at least that's what the voice that sounds like Charlton Heston keeps saying in my mind (the original Biblical Books-on-Tape voice, mind you, not the scary cold-dead-hands NRA voice).
Keilor, Stewart, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Disney, Heston, Mortimer, Kesey - the voices in my head. They're not the only ones - there's a mob milling around up there, each one, waiting for a chance to spill the beans. That's okay, I keep telling myself.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Authenticity
I note this week my disagreement with sports talk radio hosts I've heard who say they don't care whether Bonds used steroids or not. They say the excitement in baseball is centered around the homerun - that baseball is merely entertainment - if steroids produce more homeruns, it adds to the entertainment value; a greater degree of entertainment fills the seats; and that's good for baseball.
My baseball hero is Mickey Mantle; a person as flawed as I am. He said all the time, "if I knew I was going to live this long, I would've treated my body with much more care." Amen to that, brother. Sure, he was doing things off the field that weren't commendable. These things he did, however, never enhanced his abilities on the field; indeed, they detracted from them, and yet, he was still a great player in spite of the self-abuse.
There's something familiar in that which relates to my ordinary life; that despite my flaws, I do my best when it comes to what really counts - in the end, it's a matter of determining what's real and worth the effort, giving that all you've got, while not paying much attention to what doesn't count for much, or to that which may have unkind consequences.
At the end of his life, after he'd been criticized for allegedly jumping to the head of the line for a liver transplant on account of his fame, (I told my wife I had given him one of mine - she said, "you only have one liver, dummy, he's not asking for your one of your kidneys...), Mickey said to the world in a press conference from the hospital, just days from his death, "if you're looking for a role model, it aint me." Honesty, class, authenticity: can you say the same about Bonds and, for that matter, most of the rest of the sports world today?
Kids today have a hard time distinguishing between what's real and what isn't; they've not been conditioned to know the difference. The AP reports about a study where children were given identical carrots in McDonalds wrappers and plain wrappers. Fifty-four percent, to 23 percent, preferred the McDonalds wrapped carrots -- presumably, the other 23 percent, the normal kids, didn't like carrots at all...
My mom said to me once "only you could move from our small town in Florida to DC for work and still end up in a small town in Virginia." There's a story in our local hometown rag about a drug store down town that's been open for 138 years. There's still a soda fountain "where locals gather for malts, floats, and homemade chicken salad, and a pharmacy in the back where you can literally get your prescriptions made to order."
You could even find a place like that in the heart of DC until about 15 years ago - a small lunch counter in a drug store on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 21st Street. My friend Rob and I walked down to it once a week, for many years, for the best burgers and milk shakes in town - the counter gals were a grouchy lot, but you felt it was the same type of fuss your mother made when she wanted to make sure everything was taken care of around the house.
The sense of what really matters permeates our church struggle - when I read about a mega-church in Texas that cancelled a memorial service for a Navy vet 24 hours before it was to start when they found out he was gay; a 93-year old elder of our Diocese who's now worried she won't have a funeral because a majority of local congregants, with whom she's gone to church for 50 years, decided she isn't in communion with them anymore; or the 18 men in Nigeria, including 5 from the human rights advocacy group, Changing Attitude Nigeria, that have just been arrested on trumped up charges of sodomy, and now face the death penalty, I know what's truly at stake.
When the newly re-elected Bishop designate of South Carolina says, when asked point blank, if he will leave the Episcopal Church, if consecrated, and responds, "I don't intend to leave," I know he's not being authentic.
When one of the 21 deposed priests of the Diocese of Virginia, after having told the search committee of the parish that interviewed him, and the Diocesan office, that if called, he would not leave TEC, then proceeded to leave, and led his church out as well, claiming rights to the property, says, "this [deposition] news does bring great sorrow to my heart," I know he's not being authentic.
This is what it means to be authentic: you honor our veterans; you don't cause a beloved elder of the parish worry, sufferng and undue pain at the end of her life; you speak clearly and keep your word; you recognize and accept that the things you say, and the groups you join, can mean life or death, even for people you don't know, on the other side of the globe.
P.S. In the past few weeks, I've seen references to the yahoo I've been writing about in Garrison Keilor's book on why he's a Democrat with also a passing reference that the originator of the designation is H.L. Mencken. I've read some Mencken, at the local library, finding much of it appalling and dated, but if anyone has a direct citation to the founding of the original yahoo label, I'd be appreciative if you'd pass it on.
My baseball hero is Mickey Mantle; a person as flawed as I am. He said all the time, "if I knew I was going to live this long, I would've treated my body with much more care." Amen to that, brother. Sure, he was doing things off the field that weren't commendable. These things he did, however, never enhanced his abilities on the field; indeed, they detracted from them, and yet, he was still a great player in spite of the self-abuse.
There's something familiar in that which relates to my ordinary life; that despite my flaws, I do my best when it comes to what really counts - in the end, it's a matter of determining what's real and worth the effort, giving that all you've got, while not paying much attention to what doesn't count for much, or to that which may have unkind consequences.
At the end of his life, after he'd been criticized for allegedly jumping to the head of the line for a liver transplant on account of his fame, (I told my wife I had given him one of mine - she said, "you only have one liver, dummy, he's not asking for your one of your kidneys...), Mickey said to the world in a press conference from the hospital, just days from his death, "if you're looking for a role model, it aint me." Honesty, class, authenticity: can you say the same about Bonds and, for that matter, most of the rest of the sports world today?
Kids today have a hard time distinguishing between what's real and what isn't; they've not been conditioned to know the difference. The AP reports about a study where children were given identical carrots in McDonalds wrappers and plain wrappers. Fifty-four percent, to 23 percent, preferred the McDonalds wrapped carrots -- presumably, the other 23 percent, the normal kids, didn't like carrots at all...
My mom said to me once "only you could move from our small town in Florida to DC for work and still end up in a small town in Virginia." There's a story in our local hometown rag about a drug store down town that's been open for 138 years. There's still a soda fountain "where locals gather for malts, floats, and homemade chicken salad, and a pharmacy in the back where you can literally get your prescriptions made to order."
You could even find a place like that in the heart of DC until about 15 years ago - a small lunch counter in a drug store on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 21st Street. My friend Rob and I walked down to it once a week, for many years, for the best burgers and milk shakes in town - the counter gals were a grouchy lot, but you felt it was the same type of fuss your mother made when she wanted to make sure everything was taken care of around the house.
The sense of what really matters permeates our church struggle - when I read about a mega-church in Texas that cancelled a memorial service for a Navy vet 24 hours before it was to start when they found out he was gay; a 93-year old elder of our Diocese who's now worried she won't have a funeral because a majority of local congregants, with whom she's gone to church for 50 years, decided she isn't in communion with them anymore; or the 18 men in Nigeria, including 5 from the human rights advocacy group, Changing Attitude Nigeria, that have just been arrested on trumped up charges of sodomy, and now face the death penalty, I know what's truly at stake.
When the newly re-elected Bishop designate of South Carolina says, when asked point blank, if he will leave the Episcopal Church, if consecrated, and responds, "I don't intend to leave," I know he's not being authentic.
When one of the 21 deposed priests of the Diocese of Virginia, after having told the search committee of the parish that interviewed him, and the Diocesan office, that if called, he would not leave TEC, then proceeded to leave, and led his church out as well, claiming rights to the property, says, "this [deposition] news does bring great sorrow to my heart," I know he's not being authentic.
This is what it means to be authentic: you honor our veterans; you don't cause a beloved elder of the parish worry, sufferng and undue pain at the end of her life; you speak clearly and keep your word; you recognize and accept that the things you say, and the groups you join, can mean life or death, even for people you don't know, on the other side of the globe.
P.S. In the past few weeks, I've seen references to the yahoo I've been writing about in Garrison Keilor's book on why he's a Democrat with also a passing reference that the originator of the designation is H.L. Mencken. I've read some Mencken, at the local library, finding much of it appalling and dated, but if anyone has a direct citation to the founding of the original yahoo label, I'd be appreciative if you'd pass it on.
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