maybe it is about the numbers

I completed reading two books of spirituality today: Walking a Literary Labyrinth and Irresistible Revolution. While I really enjoyed Nancy Malone's writing--it often reminded me of the best work of Karen Armstrong or Thomas Merton--between the two the one that's likelier to stick with me longer is the Shane Claiborne book because it irritated me over and over again like an infection. You tend not to remember why you have a scar fondly but you remember it nonetheless.

But what won me over--although to be fair, the fact I kept reading it despite my repeated annoyance with it confirms I was won over long ago--was the following in its final pages:

Certainly, thousands were added to their number in the early church--the poor, outcasts, people fed up with the world. They were the scum of the earth...Our context is quite different. We live among the wealthiest people in the world (top 2 percent), a tough mission field. We are preaching a gospel that declares that it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. But look on the bright side. After we preach the crowds down, we will not need such expensive buildings...

And yet whether it's the Prayer of Jabez or the war in Iraq, many Christians seem to be hoping that the kingdom of God will come in triumphal greatness, expanding God's territory and taking over the world with glory and power--shock-and-awing the masses, if you will. But that's the very temptation Jesus faced in the desert, the temptation to do spectacular things like fling himself from the temple or tun stones into bread, to shock the masses with his miracles or awe them with his power. And yet he resists. The church has always faced the same temptation, from the time of Constantine's sword to now. We are tempted to do great things like rappel from the rafters in the newest church gym or throw the best pizza party so that kids might bow before the altar.

But amid all the church-growth tacticians and megachurch models, I want to suggest something a little different: God's kingdom grows smaller and smaller as it takes over the world...

Despite the fact that God's Word insists that "God does not dwell in temples built by hands," we insist that God should...God just digs camping. No wonder when I think of my most powerful encounters with God they seem to involve camping of some kind...That is where I have met God. God still dwells there. No doubt there is power in corporate worship, and there are times when I feel God among the masses (and during Masses), but it has had nothing to do with the color of the carpet or the comfort of the chair...

As we build our buildings, human temples are being destroyed by hunger and homelessness. The early prophets would say that a church that spends millions of dollars on buildings while her children are starving is guilty of murder...The more personal property is retained as private space, the more corporate property becomes a necessity. And the cycle continues, for as we enlarge the territory of corporate property, private property remains comfortably sacred...[We] find ourselves less likely to meet in homes and kitchens and around dinner tables. We end up centralizing worship on corporate space or "on campus." Hospitality becomes less of a necessity and more of an optional matter, a convenient privilege...

One of the underlying assumptions is that money from the offerings or tithe belongs to the church. But the Scriptures consistently teach that the offering is God's instrument of redistribution and that it belongs to the poor. Giving to the poor should not make its way into the budget; it is the budget.

Now, as I've pointed out, there is a disingenuousness to an organization with directors and marketing people like Claiborne's Simple Way calling "85 percent of...church offerings is used internally, primarily for staff and buildings and stuff to meet our own needs...border[ing] on embezzlement." But simply because an organization finds itself unable to meet the ideal doesn't mean the ideal isn't worth trying or is inherently worthless. It just means they haven't figured out how to do it yet.  It may be that in smallness and simplicity such ideals are more likely to be realized.

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

merton on what xianity will become

The new Christian consciousness, which tends to reject the Being of God as irrelevant (or even to accept as perfectly obvious the "death of God"), must be seen to...[have] no metaphysical intuition of Being, and hence "being" is reduced to an abstract concept, a cipher to figure with, a purely logical entity, surely nothing to be concretely experienced.  What is experienced as primary is not "being" or "isness" but individual consciousness, reflexsive ego-awareness.

This dimension is very important indeed, because if the primary datum of experience and the ultimate test of all truth is simply the self-awareness of the conscious subject, verifying what is obvious to its own consciousness, then that self-awareness would seem to block off and inhibit any real intuition of being.  By the nature of the case, being, in this new situation, presents itself not as an immediate datum of intuitive consciousness but as an object of empirical observation--which, as a matter of fact, it cannot possibly be.  This has many important consequences.  For such a consciousness, a nonobjective metaphysical or mystical intuition becomes, in practice, incomperhensible.  The very notion of Being is nonviable, irrelevant and even absurd...

The new consciousness naturally turns outward to history, to event, to movement, to progress, and seeks its own identity and fulfillment in action toward historic political or critical goods.  In proportion as it is also Biblical and eschatalogical, it approaches the primitive Christian consciousness.  But we can already see that "Biblical" and "eschatalogical" thinking do not comfortably accord with this particular kind of consciousness, and there are already signs that it will soon have to declare itself completely post-Biblical, as well as post-Christian...

[The] new Christian consciousness would seem to be the product of a kind of phenomenology which more and more questions and repudiates anything that seems to it to be "metaphysical," "Hellenic" and above all "mystical."  It concerns itself less and less with God as present in being (in his creation) and more and more with God's word as summons to action.  God is present not as the experienced transcendent presence which is "wholly other" and reduces everything else to insignificance, but in an inscrutable word summoning to community with [others]...The Church in its traditional authoritarian structures is severely criticized--which is not necessarily a bad thing!  But the rather more fluid idea of community which "happens" when people are brought together by God's word may perhaps remain very vague and subjective itself.  In theory it is excitingly charismatic; in practice it is sometimes strangely capricous.  It may conceivably degenerate into mere conviviality or the temporary agreement of political partisans...

...But this much can be said:  the developing Christian consciousness is one which is activistic, antimystical, antimetaphysical, which eschews well-defined and concrete forms, and which tends to identify itself with active, progressive, even revolutionary, movements that are on the way but that have not yet reached any kind of clear definition.

--from Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton (emphasis added)

well, the best that can be said for merton's prescience is that he probably was right about how public xianity was developing in 1968.  however, that would prove short-lived.  by the late 70s and early 80s the public face of xianity would develop into a religion that would be exactly the opposite of what merton was chiding:  heavily mystical, narrowly focused and defined, and remarkably conservative if not regressive in search of some neverwas golden age.  about the only thing he got right that stayed right is the activism which has led almost like it was on a treadleboard into the fears he voiced about political partisanship (and as for its temporary nature, see what any number of fundamentalists have had to say about mitt romney before and after his ascendency to candidacy).  merton of course wasn't the only one to get late 20th century xianity wrong; but a question I've often wondered is what would he think about what xianity has become in the 4 decades since his death?