conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

"For its part, a complete surrender bears both these other moments in itself: self-surrender displays an inherent, irreplaceable beauty, and equally it possesses a unique expressive power."

"Reality gives to every entity its 'to-be-what-it-is" [in-sich-Sein], and, in the case of a pirtual being, it's 'to-be-for-itself' [fur-sich-Sein]. But at the same time it also gives to every entity its 'to-be-with' [Mit-Sein] (because every being existing in reality is real through that one reality), and in the case of a spirtual being it also gives it its 'to-be-for-another' [Fur-ein-ander(es)-Sein]. For that reason every being has the gift of being able to 'express' itself to another, which capacity presupposes an 'innerness', an ability to communicate, that is, to impart itself."

"It might well astonish us that the human mind is inadequate to understand Jesus and his interpretation of God. Is our spirit not large enough to understand the greatest thing when it reveals itself to us, namely the mystery out of which we come and to which we go? Yet Jesus' disciples only understood in a full sense when he breathed his own Spirit into them after the Resurrection (Jn. 20:22), and the assembled Church when it received this Spirit on high at Pentecost (Acts 2:1 ff)....God is not only the lofty majesty high above creatures; as such he is also the absolutely free life of love which, if it is to be known, must of itself reveal, communicate itself."

- Hans Urs von Balthasar

Yesterday Seabury posted this on their blog. I'm honored to be included in such company. 

What people have shared in their permission slips is inspiring and heartbreaking. We should not doubt for a moment the depth of love leaders feel for God’s Church and God’s World. Leaders want to respond to their vocations. We want to respond to God’s leading, too. Many of us, however, feel like we’re in the dark somehow. And maybe we’re afraid. One permission slip spoke directly to this reality asking permission “to be fearless about stepping into the unknown.”

We are stepping into the unknown. Fearful or not we are doing just that. Another permission slip spoke to the spirit of such stepping: “to be motivated by hope and not by fear.” So, I return to improvisation.

You can read the rest of the post on Seabury's site. 

I guess I should offer a caveat right from the start. I know I'm privileged. 
I know that my white, southern, maleness may make the following invalid to many.
Still, I'm in The Body known as the Church, too.
So, here's some musing on disillusionment, loving the unloving,
and what it means to remain invested in the institutional life of Christianity. 

It was 1992 when I was enrolled at what was then a clandestine Baptist seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond was just getting started. My step-grandfather was involved in the initial planning. The faculty was comprised primarily of folk who had lost tenure at places like Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They were too liberal...whatever that meant in the 1980's. The Fudamentalist Takeover had been successful and these intellectual leaders had been ousted from their seminary positions. BTSR was a place to regroup. It was a place to keep working. It was a place to start over. The students who first attended were also looking for a place to escape the insanity of Baptist life of the 1980's. Of course this would prove impossible. We brought the fights and fears into the classroom with us. We looked around and could only see small churches with entrenched and hurtful attitudes about women, human sexuality, and a myriad of other social issues. Enter E. Glenn Hinson...

Glenn was the professor for Christian Spirituality and taught an amazing class on the History of Christian Spirituality. He was also my advisor and encouraged me to become involved at Richmond Hill. 

Glenn decided to host a book study group. We were to read Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We struggled with the language, both Bonhoeffer's dense thinking and prose, and the gendered language. We were all about the issue of gender in language about God and Christianity. But we worked through it and found ourselves struggling with the passages about disillusionment. 

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world...The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Glenn shared his struggles, his losses. He spoke of how he lost tenure in the most abrupt and cruel of ways. Then he demonstrated again and again how through history the Church has been a place of brokeness...just like the rest of the world. He spoke of humility, the humility it takes to repent and forgive...and to recognize that we are not immune to one another's cruelty. We all shared our frustrations and fears. We each had our utopian vision for the Church. Again and again Glenn knocked them down. He did us a great kindness by doing so. Bonhoeffer wrote, "God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious."

The Church is not a purity cult. We try to turn our institutions into purity cultus of behavior or belief all the time. We're really good at it. We've fought wars over our theologies wrapped in nationalism. We've crusaded from west to east all in the name of the purity of the Church. "Ex filio" was a war cry a thousand years ago.

Rachel Held Evans is right. Evangelicalism may very well be losing a generation and by extension, we all are. But then some of us have been losing parts of generations for a long time. Some of the Boomers walked never to return. More of Gen X did the same. Now the enormous generation of Millennials is having its say. Many are voting with their feet. They are tired of the culture wars. They are tired of the purity fights. Many people from various generations are. They are all voting with their feet. The same thing is happening in Catholicism though some are choosing to stay. If it weren't for the influx of Catholic immigrants to the US, we'd see the same statistical free fall in Catholicism that the mainline is experiencing.

Maybe those who leave the Church actually understand Bonhoeffer. I don't know. Maybe they are looking for what I like to call the "impurity cult" of Christianity. I don't know. All I know is disillusionment, in the end, is good for us. We need to learn that the Church is no different from any other community. We hurt one another. We even kill one another. It can be as terrible as any other place. And it actually becomes more so when we fall for the lie that we're better than anyone or anywhere else...that we are somehow morally pure. 

I understand that I'm in a privileged position in many ways. My life and my rights are not threatened in any way. I understand that. I'm not suggesting that people not leave the institutional life of the Body of Christ. If you are being abused, get out. And if you need to stand in solidarity with the abused by leaving with them, then do so. What I do ask you to consider is this: it is one thing to love the "unloveable" or the lepers of this world. It is another thing all together to love the "unloving," the Pharisees of this world. God loves them both and the unloving will always be part of our life together. We are the unlovable and the unloving and we're all in this thing together. 

Glenn echoed Bonhoeffer who echoed Christ: life in the Body, in the community of Christ, is not a safe place, a pure place with shiny happy people holding hands. It's not "up with people." It's a place with real people who will intentionally or not find ways to hurt one another. We will always need repentance and forgiveness in our life together. No matter how fluid (or post-modern) the institution, we will need these practices because we will always find some way to oppress one another. 

In the end, disillusionment is good for us. We need to rid ourselves of the illusion that there is such a thing as a perfect Church. It doesn't exist. Our imperfections come with us, our impurities come with us when we enter into the life of the Church. So we repent. We forgive. And, sometimes we leave. 

Thanks to Sojourner's for picking this up for God's Politics. 
Thanks to the Theological Snob for this reposte.

Some days I wake up and I'm pleased. The sun is coming over the hill. The traffic is starting to pick up. It's all good stuff. I make some coffee and feed the cats then I crack open the old laptop and check the news. Maurice Sendak passed away. That's the news that's on my mind this morning. Yes, there are all kinds of important political events and shenanigans. Great fun there. Very important, too. Oh, and this retired bishop was arrested. That's pretty interesting. Some are calling him The People's Bishop. That will set some teeth on edge, but I found his rhetoric interesting.

''Arrests are not arrests anymore," Packard said as we talked Friday in a restaurant overlooking Zuccotti Park in New York. ''They are badges of honor. They are, as you are taken away with your comrades, exhilarating. The spirit is calling us now into the streets, calling us to reject the old institutional orders. There is no going back. You can't sit anymore in churches listening to stodgy liturgies. They put you to sleep. Most of these churches are museums with floorshows. They are a caricature of what Jesus intended. Jesus would be turning over the money-changing tables in their vestibules. Those in the church may be good-hearted and even well-meaning, but they are ignoring the urgent, beckoning call to engage with the world. It is only outside the church that you will find the spirit of God and Christ. And with the rise of the Occupy movement it has become clear that the institutional church has failed. It mouths hollow statements. It publishes pale Lenten study tracts. It observes from a distance without getting its hands dirty. It makes itself feel good by doing marginal charitable works, like making cocoa for Occupy protesters or providing bathrooms from 9 to 5 at Trinity Church's Charlotte's Place. We don't need these little acts of charity. We need the church to have a real presence on the Jericho Road. We need people in the church to leave their comfort zones, to turn away from the hierarchy, and this is still terrifying to a lot of people in the church and especially the church leadership."

I find this language more interesting having read AKMA's homily on "institutionalism contra catholicism" and the church. He critiques the "hipper-than-thou" attitudes that are out in the ether. 

Catholicity also entails our committing to some degree of cooperation. While some of us might like to suppose that we could do the church’s work on our own, without regard to what others are up to, that’s not the way that we undertake any other important venture. In the operating theatre; in bringing up children; in military manoeuvres; in orchestral music; even sometimes in government, the great things we attempt involve our working with others and attending to what they’re getting up to. Catholicity doesn’t require that we make ourselves identical to one another, but it entails our understanding that we share discipleship with sisters and brothers from Orkney to Gretna Green, and indeed to Penzance, Provence, Puerto Rico, Patagonia, and Perth (Australia). We are Philip, baptising; and we are Abdimalkah, receiving blessings from far away, and we and Abdimalkah and Philip and St Andrew and St Frumentius of Aksum (the apostle of Ethiopia), all share in the one Body of Christ.

Again, good stuff. And this leads me on to this post on the Ekklesia Project page, Believe It or Not. This is a response to some of the NPR coverage on pastors who are losing their religion. It's a heartbreaking series. I say that not because people are losing their faith, changing their minds about religion. I'm heartbroken because I'm not hearing about any Christian tradition other than American Fundamentalism. That's Christianity according to mass media and, apparently, according to the men and women who have stepped away from the Church. They believe so strongly in the arguments of Fundamentalism that they cannot imagine another form of Christianity. They cannot imagine another God. They believe that Fundamentalism is the only theology out there. They believe in One God, the Fundamentalist God. So, in breaking with that rhetoric, they have to break with the whole Church.

We who believe something other than American Fundamentalism have failed these people. We have failed again and again to successfully offer the alternatives to Fundamentalism. Instead, we sit in our beautiful neo-gothic buildings or in our hip-coffee shops or under the dome of the Pantokrator and wonder why people do not know us. It's simply crap. If all there were in Christianity was American Fundamentalism, I would be an atheist, too. Perhaps the Fundamentalists have won after all.

But I rant...Rather, read this from the Ekklesia Project: 

Perhaps the saddest part of Teresa MacBain’s story was the loneliness of her journey. She wrestled with unbelief on her own, in secrecy, away from her church. She found refuge and community online, the place where so many secrets thrive away from the grounded, complex communities where we can truly struggle and love together. What if she had told her congregation, I’m having trouble believing in God? How they responded would be a reflection of their own belief, their own knowledge.

Belief isn’t the most important thing. What we need, we are told in John 15:1-8, is not to believe but to abide. It is in abiding that we discover truth, it is in abiding that we come to know. Knowledge and belief work on so many levels beyond our conscious and rational minds, it is through practice, through context, through community and imitation that we come to truth. We find all of this in abiding, staying close, not letting go.

We abide. We abide with one another in doubt and loss, in un-belief and in fervent conviction. We abide. There's nothing Christian about a theological litumus test. There is embodiment, certainly, in good works and in liturgy, but there's no "test." But we keep creating tests nonetheless. We've gotten very good at it and in the process made Fundamentalists of us all, left, right, center, green, blue, you name it. We insist that people never change the way they think, grow, mature, degress, become embittered...we insist on changeless minds. It's incredibly cruel. 

We are called to abide. As the good folk of Taize sing, "Stay with me. Remain here with me. Watch and pray. Watch and pray." 

This morning I'm prepping for a class session I'm teaching this afternoon on Emergent Worship. Yesterday included completing my Music and Cognition project, Becoming Familiar With Time, and presenting my Ritual Theory project on "sonic objects." It's been a full week already. I'm hoping to do some more writing tomorrow. I'm blogging with Seabury Next and I owe something to the good people at Sojourners...oh, and I'm preaching on Sunday at First Baptist. It's another full week! 

This piece was picked up by Sojourners' God's Politics blog on 5/8/12. 

Just working some stuff out...

Sound is material. Music, for example, is an activity that engages through production or reception organized sonic material. Music is not the only ritualized sound. Some sounds we organize through reception as music, some sounds in other ways. The following is a list to get the imagination flowing. This is by no means an exhaustive list: water flowing, pews creaking, wind blowing, a baby crying, someone coughing, gum wrappers at the movies, P.A. system feedback/tapping the microphone, speech (announcements, a public address, spoken word poetry, a sermon).

It is important to recognize that speech holds a particular place as it posses the same qualities of music (rhythm, pitch, timbre...) though in a formalist sense, it is not the same. Again questions arise of the development of speech and music as simultaneous forms of human expression or one emerging from the other1. Ronald Grimes, in a 1986 essay (Ronald L. Grimes, “Of Words the Speaker, of Deeds the Doer,” The Journal of Religion 66, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 1–17.), will go so far as to explore the ritual qualities of narrative from a "narrative identity" and speaking as doing. Such an explicit analysis is too extensive to undertake in this essay, but it also too important to Grimes' work not to mention. Some sounds are part of ritual action because they support the action, some are a part of our expectations because they oppose the ritualization. In either case, our sonic behavior is a way of “being” ourselves.