Bunga uber alles

For a writer, the curse of living in interesting times is that so much happens, and on a daily, sometimes hourly, schedule that by the time you've given the event or statement any thought, something else has happened or been said, rending moot the previous consideration. This might be the contemporary condition: Too much happening all at once. Time condensed into only the "now," but not the now of zen, the NOW! of hype.

This is prelude to the observation that the current (February, although as a subscriber, I saw it and could have read it in late December) issue of Sojourners magazine offers the pertinent question, "Is This a [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer Moment?" The titular article, by Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie L. Williams, identifies such a moment as "living in a time and place in which 'the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion' and in which evil appears in the 'form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, [and] social justice.' [Bonhoeffer lived] in a time that required a radical form of ethical discernment, attuned to concrete reality, historical urgency, and the desperate cries of help from victims of the state." [Quotes are from Bonhoeffer's writings.]

This is a question that is uniquely church-related, its context coming from the experience of German Christianity identifying itself with and pledging fealty to the National Socialists, and especially to the person of Adolf Hitler. Taking a page from David Gushee's Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, they identify perpetrators (in context, the Nazis), bystanders (Christian churches, especially the Catholic hierarchy), and resisters (Bonhoeffer's Confessing Church). In our contemporary state, the corollary would be Donald Trump and his supporters, the Christian churches who provide a home to much of his base, and those of us who take to the streets, write warnings, argue with the others (and I would even include the Black Bloc and Antifa).

Wisely, the authors leave it to individual readers to come to their own conclusions, although the two followup essays, by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson and Victoria J. Barnett, suggest the most common answer will be a resounding "Yes!" And I agree, in the sense that this moment asks of us to take on the question of why God became human (not so humans would become divine but so we would become more truly human; this is similar to Abraham Heschel's God who is in search of humanity, itself similar to the old rabbinic suggestion God created people so God could experience what it means to live and die. I also agree that we live at a time when it's incumbent on us to identify and label evil as it rises in the world, to point to racism or abuse of the poor and say, That isn't just. That isn't how we're meant to treat one another

But in the first analysis, the suggestion that Trump and his fellows are like the Nazis, I disagree (and to their credit I think the authors do also). Trump is less Adolf Hitler and more Silvio Berlusconi, less "Deutschland uber alles" and more "Bunga bunga." For one, there are much fewer supporters of Trump than are often credited (only 30% of the US electorate supports him at any given time, a number smaller than the number who believe in ghosts, and they aren't given a say in governance). There is also the sheer absurdity of his misbehavior; more often than not we're left to ask one another, Did he just say that? Let's be honest, while many of his policies hurt others, even I would have a hard time connecting a strong line between what he says and anyone's death. Perhaps most importantly, we live in a time when information is readily available and there is no paucity of real news reporting on his hypocrisies, lies, misdirection, blatant cronyism and self-promotion. While Fox News might want it otherwise, the Truth is Out There for anyone who wants to read it.

While the election of the cult of personality that is Trumpery is a stain on our nation we should neither be allowed to forget or to whitewash, it has a finite shelf-life, one which its adherents, in their display of panic, are recognizing and trying like mad to pretend they were never really a part of. In that, it is exactly like Nazism.

the chapel of the Holy Wheel

I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and I suppose it's a sop to my Puritan ancestors that the church I've been attending lately runs to six hour services. As I've mentioned in the past, we are in the process of moving from the rim to a hub on the other side of Wisconsin, and my wife and animals are already living there. As a result, my Sundays are spent driving back to the hub to minister to the kids I work with. I think of it as attending at The Chapel of The Holy Wheel.

I have my elements. My liturgy is made up of the BBC news and political shows I listen to, my hymns the music, some sacred some profane, mostly blues, I scroll through. I attend mass, partaking of the Eucharist with the crackers and grape juice I keep in the car for communion at the girls' facility (the boys are much less interested in any kind of religious services, while some of the girls want me to do almost nothing else). There is a calm that comes over me in my rolling tabernacle. I have always loved to drive, and combining the acts of reverence and of moving strikes me as a kind of mega variation on moving meditation. As if my body, ensconced in the safety of my vehicle while it hurtles down the road, mimics my body hurtling through space on the larger vehicle that I don't, can't drive. My prayers, such as they are, are for the people surrounding me. That they arrive relaxedly, like me, wherever they're going. If I succumb to grandiosity t's in seeing in myself some of the Holy Fool Neal Cassidy exhibited in his best moments.

we would experience god in the everyday

I have been reading this book for a few days, and while some of it strikes me as very weak (both in writing and in theology), some, like the following, gives me hope. As someone who is, by virtue of working as a pastor to a community of teens who are both desperate for spirit and wary of it, trying actively to achieve a new type of worship service, this is good reading whose real life application is difficult to determine.

During the last few decades, there has been no small amount of controversy in Christian churches over worship style. As those who advocated for maintaining "traditional" worship and those preferring "contemporary" forms struggled against one another, many started referring to the conflict as the "worship wars." Churches within the emerging Christian faith, however, appear to be moving beyond the worship wars. They are discovering a "third way" in worship, one that cannot easily be categorized as either traditional or contemporary...The third way very much appears to be a dismantling of the Tradition for the purpose not of abandonment but of reerecting it in a new place...[They] refer to what they do as "ancient-future worship" or "emerged worship" or "experiential worship" or "incarnational worship...

Although incarnational worship takes a very wide variety of forms, several common threads hold it together. First, it is centered on experiencing God incarnate in everyday life more than learning about God...Rather, worship leaders start with the question, "How do people experience God as Creator in everyday life" The whole world then becomes a palate from which leaders work to open people up to experiencing God as Creator in worship. The idea is not to manufacture an experience but rather to open participants to the possibility of an experience. Incarnational worship operates on the assumption that God's Spirit really is alive and well in this world and will not hesitate to stir the soul if people's hearts are open and attentive...

Second, incarnational worship tends to be mediated through a wide variety of multisensory elements, which may range from quite ancient to postmodern. Participants are as likely to experience worship through smell, taste, and physical touch as they are through sight and sound...[Prayer] and contemplative forms of Scripture reading, such as lectio divina...may be interwoven with film clips, jazz or rock music, and hands-on artistic creation.

Emphasis on the arts and artistic expression, in fact, is a third unifying element... Practitioners...feel that worship should be as artistic as it is scripturally based...[Churches] of the emerging Christian faith [may] eventually [reclaim] the church's more ancient role of supporting the arts and artistic expression...in a new way.

Finally, incarnational worship is frequently created by clusters of people rather than by single individuals or pairs. Pastors work with a worship team made up of both clergy and laity for generating ideas, creating the service, and carrying it off. In this we may be seeing the Reformation principle of the Priesthood of All Believers practiced on a larger and deeper scale than it ever has been before.

--From The Phoenix Affirmations: A New Vision for the Future of Christianity by Eric Elnes

rethinking church

This past Sunday, for my solstice service, I had the largest audience at both boys' and girls' facilities that I've had at either before--seven at each--but I'm troubled. Two of the boys were--well, staff called them disrespectful, but I think it was more like I wasn't giving them what they expected or wanted. I'm not sure they could have articulated what either was, although both made references to "real church" and said things that smacked of traditional black worship: "Can the congregation give me an amen?" "I feel the spirit coming into me. I gotta preach." I don't think either wanted a more traditional worship service, although one asked me point-blank, "Why aren't you standing up and yelling?" becuase neither was a churchgoer in their lives outside, but that they were reacting to uncertainty by reaching for elements they had experienced.

The girls were more respectful, by which I mean more polite, but they were coloring or scribbling and occasionally chatting quietly to one another throughout the service, which wasn't distracting but did get me wondering what they were getting from those activities they were not getting from the service. (Possible answer for both: participation?) What this experience has led me to is a realization that my services need a major restructuring.

I've already reduced my order to one that is as listener-friendly and participatory as I thought necessary, but one that remains recognizable as a contemporary Christian or UU service: welcome, candle lighting, hymn, reading, message, silence for prayer or meditation, benediction (with the replacement of conversation for other prayers or hymns). On its own without dialogue the service lasts about twenty minutes, which is probably as long as I can expect any of them to sit as possible. But my point is it remains recognizable, which may be both a strength and a failure.

I've often advocated for a radical restructuring of service elements, and even with all my study and contemplation I still have a hard time imagining what that would look like without those basic elements. I've thought about replacing the message or the hymn or both with a mashup like I've done in the past, but I'm not entirely convinced it's worth the effort (although I already spend a couple hours writing my message and searching for an appropriate song and reading, so I don't think I'd be losing anything). But I'm also loathe to make another element that's just like watching TV. True, I can still have dialogue, and there would be more time for it if I reduced both the reading and message to a single three to four minute song. And true, my reading of Steven Johnson would suggest that my reaction against it being "just like watching TV" is heavily influenced by the culture and the generation I grew up in, and may not take their experiences with learning into account. After all, when I teach I use visuals to make a point or an idea better understood. Why should I assume that spiritual ideas can only be understood through words?

what if I gave a sermon and nobody came?

A self-important minister got up one Sunday morning to discover that about six feet of snow had been dumped overnight on the town. He didn't have much trouble getting to church, of course, living in the attached parsonage, so he hurried over to prepare for the morning service. It was about fifteen minutes before service began and he looked out at the pews. There was only one person sitting there: Fred, one of those bachelor farmers of the area, and still bundled up from milking his herd.

The minister dawdled around in the back rooms until it was five minutes to service and then looked out again. Fred was still the only one sitting in the pews. No one else being there to do it, at ten o'clock the minister himself pressed the button that rang the bells in the steeple. They rang a little muffled but enough to be heard. A minute after ten he looked out. Still just Fred. At quarter past ten he looked out again. Just Fred.

Finally, at ten-thirty the minister stepped out from the back rooms and walked to the pulpit and said, "Listen, Fred, as you're the only one here, I suppose we ought to just cancel today's service."

Fred pulled down his muffler. He said, "Parson, when I call in my cows and only one shows up, I still milk her."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dreaded the empty church on a Sunday. A couple Sundays ago just such a thing happened which, if I was doing a sermon on it, I'd title "What if I gave a service and nobody came?"

For the past month I've been working at a pair of facilities for at-risk and troubled teenagers, one for boys and the other for girls. The boys' facility, with four units, is on the far end of the rim to the northwest of us; it takes me an hour and a half to drive there. The girls' facility, with two units, is a half hour drive to the southeast. I do the boys' service at four and the girls' at six.

As it turned out, the reason no one showed at the boys' facility was a miscommunication in the daily calendar for the units. But the lack of attendants got me thinking. I give a pared-down service, one heavy on participation and conversation, since each service is likely to trigger some response on their part. This below, for example, is the order of service for that day's chapel.

Sunday June 8, 2014

Welcome

Joys and Concerns

Reading: A Fable by Rumi

Song: “What’s Going On”, Marvin Gaye

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby

Message

Minute of Reflection or Prayer (Music by Henry Saimo)

Congregation Dialogue

Benediction: Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. Deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.

Our altar is a simple affair. I cut some flowers growing around my house or on the nearby trail and put them in a glass vase, then set a small, flickering LED candle behind it. This is the message I wrote that was undelivered. It's about five minutes to deliver.

For people my age—for many of you I’m talking about your grandparents and for some of you I’m talking about your parents—1971, the year this album came out, is an important period in American history. All sorts of things were happening that no one had experienced before, much of it pretty bad. You hear some of it reported in the song. “Too many of you dying.” “Picket lines and picket signs.” In 1971, the US was years-deep into an unpopular war in Vietnam that would last another four years before the US declared itself spent and got out. The year before members of the Ohio National Guard at a college called Kent State opened fire on students protesting that war, killing four students. This wasn’t the first time American authorities had killed otherwise peacefully protesting civilians—the previous decade had seen many, many violent responses to demonstrations against the war or in favor of civil rights for blacks or better conditions for people in poverty. And the year after a burglary at a hotel called the Watergate in Washington, DC, would lead to the embarrassing resignation of President Richard Nixon and a cynical, distrusting view of government and politicians that, if anything, has only gotten worse in the following decades.

Everywhere kids like me turned, it seemed there was little point to growing up because society was shredding. Families were breaking apart, drug use was skyrocketing, cancer rates were spreading, as were crime rates and unemployment rates. Outside, the way we’d learned the country was a place of eternal beauty and resources was having the lie put to it. Our rivers and oceans were being polluted by industries that found it easier to dump poisons into the water than to pay for proper disposal, killing off fish by the millions. The fish not killed made it onto peoples’ plates, poisoning us. The pesticides intended to help farmers win the battle against harmful insects and agricultural diseases were also killing the birds that ate infected worms and pets that ate the birds or rolled on their carcasses, and the herbicides we relied on to keep corn and wheat and apples healthy were killing our lawns and fields and burning trees from the inside out.

Something we hope for as humans is that things that are bad will eventually get better. Have things improved in forty-one years? It’s hard to tell, sometimes. Late last month a young troubled man not much older than you posted a very angry document on the Internet blaming women for his problems and then went out to shoot several people, eventually killing nearly 10, including himself. America is still fighting two wars, one of which has lasted longer than all other wars we’ve ever fought. Last week was the 25^th anniversary of events in China’s Tiananmen Square where the military suppressed a student-led demonstration so forcefully that at least hundreds, and maybe thousands, of people died. We argue whether the world’s climate is changing for the worse and whether people are responsible for it. Our reserves of coal and oil are rapidly depleting and some scientists say will disappear in the next 20 or 30 years and the companies that make money from coal and oil discourage development of other resources. Little is being done to change these circumstances, and the next generation, which is you, is being left to either come up with a solution or learn to live with the consequences.

This is an important weekend celebrated by two faiths, called Shavuot by Jews and Pentecost by Christians. Both celebrate the same thing: a time when god gave them the means by which they could live in the world they found themselves in. Jews celebrate the day Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the holy laws that explain in short form how by not killing or stealing you can live a righteous life, and Christians celebrate the emergence of the Holy Spirit among them, helping them see through the minor differences between them like language or the way they look to see each person’s inner Christ.

How do we live rightfully in a world where people are killed indiscriminately by wars or new diseases or angry people with guns, where because of greed the world changes before our eyes while the people responsible for the changes deny it, where jobs and careers are disappearing and the ones that remain pay so much less than the ones they replace that it’s hard to live at all on what they pay? Jews say the answer is to do justice, to be merciful, and walk humbly with God. Christians say it is to love God with your heart and soul and love other people as much as you love yourself. Those are both very good answers. It’s hard, though, to understand how to do that on a daily basis.

But make no mistake, there are very good things happening in the world too.  People are being born and falling in love and taking care of one another all the time, and just to make it personal and specific, between Bar None and Avanti there were four successful discharges just this last week. People in treatment are getting better and you know some of them. Good things happen all the time all around us, often in very small, very personal ways. In the midst of the painful stuff happening in the world, how do we keep from forgetting the good stuff?

It is, I hope, a teen-friendly and especially fidgety teen-friendly type of service. While they're very curious about traditional religion and ask questions about it all the time, they're also distrustful of traditional answers, traditional ceremonies, church, or anything sounding like piety.

But here is what I got to thinking about. After about twenty minutes, when I realized no one was coming, I started cleaning up around the old chapel where I hold services. I looked out at the late spring afternoon and saw boys canoeing, fishing, playing frisbee, and just walking around. If I were them I wouldn't want to spend a beautiful day in Minnesota indoors, either. I started toying with the idea of holding chapel on a weekday evening, at least during the summer and fall months, when there's more to do on the weekend. Another idea playing around my brain is taking chapel to them. One of the arguments for holding services in the chapel, besides the rather nice rustic charm of the old spare building, is that it gets the boys off the unit for an hour. But when I go to the units to hold groups I have much better attendance that I suspect is both from nearness and from interest in what those who don't start out with us hear from their rooms. It may be, too, that my service format, already scaled-down to take from twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on their interest in talking, needs even further paring. I'm open to doing that if it means greater participation.

And it may be, too, that the idea of chapel is so foreign and even repellent to these kids, who may have been forced to attend their parents' churches in the past, that there is no amount of change in how it's done or on what it focuses that can get them past that resistance. From a purely mercenary perspective that's not an issue for me: I'm paid for having been there whether anyone attends or not. But I'd rather think I am accomplishing something.

 

 

god is fred phelps

"No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..."

This quote, from John Donne's Meditation 27, has become so ubiquitous to have lost much of its impact. But like many phrases and concepts of the Christian Bible, it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

 

I mourn Fred Phelps as I mourned Adam and Nancy Lanza and Lou Reed and my friends and children I've never met and my mother and my pets and animals that were only with me a short time. I mourn equally the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps and the others differently than those because they are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known them.

 

In my theology, god (small "g" for the same reason we don't capitalize "People") is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, and I'm comfortable being called a pantheist.

 

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) I have looked in vain for a cartoon memorializing his death by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him. But as Adam Weinstein points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible (and I ought to mention my unique thrill at seeing the theological Calvinist acronym TULIP used on the Gawker website). Christians, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists might not like to claim him, but the truth is the Westboro Church has as much right to claim themselves part of the fold as anyone else.

 

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

johnny thunders died for your sins!

I'll be upfront and say that I'm jealous of this essay from the Orange County Weekly, both in its writing and its subject. I would prefer to be known as the punk pastor.

Having said that, I will admit the writing, by Nate Jackson, is done well. He allows enough of Joe Furey's (great name, that, for a punk) conflicted nature and the conflicts of interest between who he preaches to and the theology he preaches from to speak for itself. Furey is another in that line of preachers who have found a personal savior and want to make others aware that this same salvation can be theirs too. I can't fault anyone for wanting to spread the good news, as it were.

The story I would like to hear, however, is that of his wife, Therese. She has stayed with him nearly full-time from his early days as a catastrophically bad drug runner to his new days in the collar, raising three kids, often without help from him, and losing the eldest, her son, to an overdose. Her trust in life giving her what she needed and her ability to rise each morning is worth listening to and it's unfortunate that this isn't her story.

Which isn't to say Furey's story isn't interesting or worth telling. But it's another in a long spate, reaching back to Augustine, of libertines tamed by the Word and who make their life's work the spreading of that Word to the people they used to be. I can't complain about that, either, in that it's exactly what I want and hope to accomplish. As he comes across in the essay and in the single video I could find, he sounds like an amiable, avuncular, kind presence, and there's a lot to commend about that.

But what I'm uncomfortable with is the theology behind Furey's sermons. It's one that accepts what the Bible says as the end to all things, that there is a good and a bad and that if you would be one of God's People, you must change from one to the other. I don't credit that. It strikes me the Jesus of the Bible didn't seek out the homeless and addicts of his time because he wanted them to change in order to hear his teaching but because they were the ones most willing to hear and credit it. You were encouraged to change--"Go and sin no more"--but actual change didn't come from no longer drinking or hooking. Actual change was harder to accomplish (Matthew 19:22-4). Some people, of course, want to stop drinking or come off the road and they should be encouraged. But others don't. And they shouldn't be discouraged.

If there is a Good News to the messages of Jesus and Buddha and other teachers, it's that people  already have dignity, are of "God's People," through the virtue of being alive. They should be accepted as they are, unconditionally. End of message.

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.

resistible revolution?

This book has been a challenge to read. Not because I disagree with its theology, although sometimes I do, or because it is written amateurishly, although sometimes it is, or because sometimes I want to hurl it against the wall, although sometimes I would. It's a challenge for all those reasons, plus Shane Claiborne's occasional lapses into the unbelievable--a page after he tells us he was a student at Wheaton while "they still had that pesky no-dancing rule" he describes himself as having "multicolored hair and...ripped jeans and a Rage Against the Machine shirt sporting a black American flag with the words 'Evil Empire'"--after which he manages to pull out something as honest as this:

We hang out with kids and help them with homework in our living room, and jump in open fire hydrants on hot summer days. We share food with folks who need it...Folks drop in all day to say hi, have a safe place to cry, or get some water or a blanket. Sometimes we turn people away, or play Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who answers the door on tired days. We run a community store out of our house. We call it the Gathering, and neighbors can come in and fill a grocery bag with clothes for a dollar or find a couch, a bed, or a refrigerator. Sometimes people donate beautiful things for us to share with our neighbors; other times they donate their used toothbrushes.

We reclaim abandoned lots and make gardens amid the concrete wreckage around us. We plant flowers inside old TV screens and computer monitors on our roof. We see our friends waste away from drug addiction, and on a good day, someone is set free. We see police scare people, and on a good day, we find an officer who will play wiffleball with his billy club...[We] mourn the two people who died in this property...We try to make ugly things beautiful and to make murals. Instead of violence, we learn imagination and sharing. We share life with our neighbors and try to take care of each other. We hang out in the streets. We get fined for distributing food. We go to jail for sleeping under the stars. [My emphases]

This is part of Claiborne's recitation of "an average day" at Simple Way, the community house he's a part of in Philadelphia. The book is full of passages like this. He describes miracles to which he's been witness and then he recounts spending the summer in Calcutta working in Khalighat. He recounts one night when he and some friends sent a demon in the form of a little old grandmotherly type skittering from them in shrieking horror by humming "an old worship tune." Then he describes the patient, gentle, "careful" way he dresses a leper's wounds in Khalighat, and is rewarded with  "Namaste." Of course he has to add that he whispers back, "Jesus."

Perhaps you see why this book troubles me. It's the mix of the true--the tired days when they turn people away, the friends dying, the used toothbrushes--with the stuff in there because the book is published by Zondervan--the miracles, the shrieking demons, whispering Jesus' name. I am having a great deal of difficulty from page to page determining whether to toss the book far away from me or to keep reading.

What is probably most troubling to me is that I suspect this is Claiborne being true to himself, this mix of the worst stereotypes and heartfelt experience. It is a self-image mirrored by both the photos inside the back covers where he is presented as a willowy, do-ragged, barefoot, geeky white boy and on the Simple Way's website where the simple community is composed of Boards of Directors and Chairs and Controllers and Claiborne even has an assistant. It leads me to uncharitably point out that Jesus didn't have an Executive Director. But to be fair Jesus wasn't operating a 501(c)3 either.

st. juggalo

I don't like the music of Insane Clown Posse but I'm not the audience for it either.  I do, however, like the fact that the Gathering of the Juggalos exists, and further that Juggalos and Juggalettes exist.  As with most distaff communities, it is meant to provide a family into which nearly anyone can fit. 

I don't know if I would attend a Juggalo Gathering myself, although judging from photo essays (most of them provided by Nate "Igor" Smith of the Village Voice) they are not unlike most Rainbow Gatherings, except with Faygo and more cigarettes.  There have been really well-done essays about the Juggalos as well as some trashy, sensationalistic ones.  There is even a backlash against writing so much about them (can a TLC reality series be far behind?). I haven't seen it written about but I've noticed in various photo essays the increase in the number of people of color, both Juggalos and Juggalettes, in attendance.  That pleases me.

But what I am most pleased by is the sense that anyone, of any body type and any ability, can be accepted as a Juggalo (so long as that person is not Tia Tequila, apparently, although to be fair I suspect her shit-tossing critics were responding to their being used for her publicity rather than their tribe's).  This is the impetus behind religions of the Book, that one can be a member of the hospitable desert tribe if one abides by certain rituals and accepts certain beliefs, no matter how one is born or the condition one finds himself in. Where you go I will go, and your people will be my people. There is no Jew or Greek, no male or female. When you pledge allegience to another person you pledge allegience to God.  Will we see in some far-off future a Juggalo-influenced adjunct to Abrahamic religious?  Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope came out a few years ago as Christians, so why not? Why not a Saint Juggalo, a Mother Juggalette? 

intercourse this book

I spent part of my afternoon at a bookstore, a passion I have, and was excited when I discovered that a book I'd heard of, Under the Overpass:  A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski, was there.  I found the copy and settled into one of the overstuffed chairs that seem to have become rare in many of the chains, expecting to read through at least a chapter, maybe two.

But I barely had opened it when I growled "bullshit" and slammed it shut and replaced it on the shelf.  On the third page ran this exchange:

That's when the chaos hit.

"Who you think you are? You piece of...!" Marco, the undisputed leader of the gang at the mouth of the park, was screaming at a guy in front of him.

I frowned.  I don't know anyone who has spent any time on the street who would stop himself from saying "shit," assuming that's the word Marco was about to use.  Then I flipped through the pages:  not a single "shit," "piss," "fuck," "bastard," "asshole," or "damn." Not even a "hell" in the whole intercoursing book. 

That's when I saw this "Note to the Reader" nestled between the forward and the story proper:

Before you take the first step on this journey, I need to tell you something. Common street lingo isn't pretty.  People can pack more explitives and profanities into one sentence than you'd think possible. Vulgarities and crude insults become part of everyday conversation, even between friends.  But out of respect of our readers and the standards of this publisher [!], this element of street life is not present in the pages you're about to read.

Well, fuck that shit.  He presents a solid image on the cover above, looking for all the world like a real traveling kid straight out of LATFO.  But Such neutering goes beyond mere toning down:  for the past century writers fought a hard battle to present the language of the people as they speak it.  Even in the 30s and 40s we had authors using "sh_t" and "d_mn" in order to fulfill their contractual agreement not to sear the eyeballs of virgin readers.  No one in contemporary America is more subject to the whims of authors who are not members of their tribe than the homeless, hustlers, buskers, travelers and assorted street denizens.  To misrepresent their voices in order to save the wilting flowers of Multnomah Books embarrassment is not is not on a par with, say, causing them bodily injury, but it is like spitting in their eyes.

Mike Yankoski, you are not worth my time.

Update:  Would it suprise anyone that Multnomah, publisher of Under the Overpass, also published this book within our lifetimes?

alternatives to church: dying in wisconsin

My dad who lives in The Thick has been visiting us here on The Rim for the past two weeks and this morning he and I attended a local church service. It was a Lutheran service, ELCA, and while he enjoyed it or at least didn't find it offensive, I was disappointed by it. 

It wasn't that it was offensive in some way--to the contrary, my impression was that the visiting pastor was taking pains not to be offensive to anyone Christian--and even someone like me, who my wife calls "a good Christian if it weren't for all that divinity stuff," found nothing offsetting.  And that may have been the problem:  it was so desperately inoffensive no one could object.

The message was "we should pray," and during it he made note of recent scientific suggestions that there is a piece of the human genome that seeks something greater than ourselves.  There is nothing wrong with that, but that was the only contemporary information he used.  Otherwise the sermon might have been given ten, fifty, or a hundred years ago.

Nothing else suggested anything beyond the early twentieth century either.  The hymns, except for one from the 1600s(!), were all from the 1800s; his children's sermon was talked at rather than with them, and was itself about what "hallowed" in the Lord's Prayer meant (what kid younger than a precocious 16 year old would care? and why not ask them something, anything, instead of telling them? While he did have the rapt attention of the youngest, a baby, she was staring at the movement of his mouth and the redness of his face, not taking in, as he suggested, his message); and while I counted nearly one hundred fifty attendees--and that is a remarkably small number in a town of 1300 with only three churches in a predominantly Lutheran state--fewer than a half dozen were younger than 50. 

My dad, who is going deaf in one ear, was impressed that despite his having left his hearing aid in the car, he could hear the entire service well because we sat near one of the post-mounted speakers, so there's that.  And the stained windows and vaulted arches and wood interior was tolerable eye candy.  The organist was fine and the solo pianist was pretty good, and while the guitar player, who affected a folksy, Hank Williams charm was also competent, the teenager who accompanied him on sax was barely that, and her singing was worse. 

When the collection came around I gave them a dollar.  I want this church, like most churches, to continue but not for long.  After we left my dad complimented the service but said it went on too long.  I pointed to my car clock:  it had lasted only an hour.  His watch was a half hour fast:  "That's all?  It seemed so much longer!"  This service and this congregation make a compelling argument for the swift death of American institutional religion.

"a god who condones greed and injustice"

The Old Testament record of the dramatic struggle between the worshipers of Yahweh and Baal is illustrative of the clash between a democratic people with a democratic idea of God and an aristocratic people with an exploiting God...The Israelites were born to the rugged freedom of the hill country, inheritors of a rich social idealism, worshipers of a God, Yahweh, who stood for justice.  The Amorites were a commercial people, with traditions of a slave class, worshipers, therefore, of Baal, who became the shekel raised to the nth power, a God who condoned greed and injustice...[The] victory of Yahweh worship by the Israelites over Baal worship by the Amorites [is rightly called] the first great victory of the common people, for it meant the establishment of the religious sanctions to democracy, brotherhood and freedom.

So the struggle has gone on through the course of history, a democratic people projecting onto their idea of the deity those social and spiritual qualities which were most highly developed...Each nobler and more just conception of God, therefore, becomes evidence of a new level of political life, and is in turn a magna carta of liberties yet to be won.

In the light of this undoubted law, the  problem of theology in the twentieth century becomes twofold.  First, the problem of imagining attributes of deity which are at least as democratic as the attributes of the most highly socialized [people], and second, creating an idea of God which shall bring [humanity] up to a newer and finer level of social experience.

The old idea of a God who created a spiritual aristocracy, who maintained partiality, whose sympathies were not as wide as the whole of humanity, are patently inadequate to meet the new needs...[The] democratic instinct in the new [people have a passion] after freedom and brotherhood...lays bare [their] heart and mind to the great human current and exult in the tides of feeling which pour upon [them], enriching and enlarging [them].  There is no mistaking the widening of sympathies, the greater sense of inclusiveness, the new solidarity of humanity...A democratic people demand a democratic God, a robust deity who likes his universe, who hungers for fellowship, who is in and of and for the whole of life...

--from The Social Implications of Universalism by Clarence Skinner, quoted in Universalism in America:  A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith, edited by Ernest Cassara (my emphasis)

What Skinner was trying to get at a century ago was the question "What becomes of Christianity when it has become what it triumphed over, when it becomes the religion of empire?"  Obviously, he says, it must change.  And change consistently or at least often to remain "robust."

By this point what had become the various forms of Christianity had been simultaneously hidebound and mutating for nearly two millenia, great attention paid to the words in the Bible but not to the spirit of the best of it, as if its modern world continued to be made up of nomadic people and Romans.  Contemporary peoples required a God who was at least as open to change and empathy as they were.

Skinner's resultant God was almost Whitmanesque as a God who "believes in the flesh and the appetites," who does "not ask the wounded person how he feels," but becomes "the wounded person."  In two years, Skinner's country would join the bloodshed the rest of Europe was already engulfed in, as destructive of life and complacency as Whitman's Civil War had been.  In a presaging of our contemporary dilemma, Skinner was trying to articulate a God who mattered when six year old children are gunned down.

what is a who?

Over the past weekend I was the guest preacher at a mid-size Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Bismarck, North Dakota, where I sermonized on the recent Personhood Bills passed there (and in other states).  I was not only welcomed and given an enthusiastic ear, I was fortunate to happen to have come when students (several of them pictured on the school's website) from the local Seventh Day Adventist academy came to visit.  That's not sarcasm:  I was raised in the church and I took a few moments to introduce myself to the group before the service and offer to talk with them afterward as someone who had left the church at about their age but not out of anger or hurt but because I was looking for something it couldn't offer me.  Half the group took me up on that and we had a wonderful discussion in the hall.  That was probably the highest point for me in a weekend full of high points.

WHAT IS A WHO?

A Sermon Delivered to the

Bismarck-Mandan (ND) 

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and Church

On April 8, 2013

            If we had the technology available to us I’d show it to you, but since we haven’t I’ll have to settle for telling you about this movie I saw a few days ago.  It was called Cargo, and at seven minutes long it was a finalist in Australia’s Tropfest short movie competition. 

            It’s entirely wordless although not silent and signs are written in English.  Our protagonist wakes from a car wreck and in the first minutes we begin to understand he’s in the midst of a zombie infestation.  Now, stay with me here, especially if you don’t like zombie or horror movies, because unlike most of them this film has an upbeat ending. 

            Anyway, he wakes to what we assume is his wife zombified and kept away from him only by the seatbelt she’s wearing.  He flings himself out of the car but returns to do two things:  to kill his zombie-wife and to retrieve the cargo of the title:  their infant daughter in the back seat.  He hoists her onto his back in one of those backpack baby carriers you probably remember from the 80s and 90s and pushes himself to start walking.  There are zombie snuffles and groans and such sounds all around him as he makes his way through a forest.

            Before long, though, as he stops to catch his breath, he sees something that the viewer has already noticed:  There is a nasty gouge out of his left arm; his wife, or someone, has bitten him.    We realize by the look on his face what this bite means, and he begins preparations for his transformation.

            Now if you, like me, are a watcher of zombie movies, this is something we have never seen before.  Someone preparing to become a zombie.  What he does is the following:  he makes notes on the map in his pocket, x-ing out some areas previously labeled “safe” and marking some other places previously unmarked as “safe”; he writes on his left arm the amount of time since he was bitten; he collects from an interrupted child’s birthday party a balloon that he hands back to his daughter to hold; and then he pulls from somewhere below the screen so we don’t see where he’s getting it from some bloody, gory viscera we assume comes from a recent victim.  This last he puts into a regular plastic shopping bag and attaches to one end of a tree branch he carries.

            We follow our pair for a while through the forest, his gait getting slower and slower, his shoulders hunching further up with the weight of his child on his back, until finally he stops as he hears his daughter cry.  He turns and in that moment we discover what has happened.  He has fully changed and in our horror we know he is scenting his daughter on his back. 

            But his attention is drawn instead to the viscera dripping from the plastic bag just out of reach at the other end of the branch he’s shoved between his shoulder and the carrier strap.  It’s this smell that keeps his attention away from her and keeps him moving forward. 

            Finally he reaches a rise and the balloon dislodged from his daughter’s hand catches his eye and he follows it as it ascends.  Suddenly there’s a sharp pop and at first we think the balloon has burst but instead it is a human sniper who has targeted and shot him.  A moment later three armed survivors approach him and determine he is a zombie and fully dead.  For a moment we think they will leave his body there, but they stay back a moment longer than maybe they ought to and hear the hidden child’s whimper.  They find his daughter strapped to his back; across her belly is written “My name is Rosie.” 

            In the final scene we see two of the survivors digging a marked grave for the zombie while the third holds the baby to her like it’s the last salvation anyone has.  What has happened in this seven minutes is that the director and writer, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke, have managed what no horror film has managed before:  they have remade a stock horror trope into a complex, multifaceted, fully realized character.  Reversing the process, they have made a zombie a person.

            It is an odd juxtaposition to what has been done in North Dakota by the governor’s signatures affixed on March 26^th to HouseBills 1305 and 1456 and Senate Bill 2305, the so-called Personhood bills, which effectively ban legal abortion in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detected—most experts agree that is at about six weeks after conception—and denies allowances in the case of rape, incest, or genetic disorders.  In effect, the state of North Dakota has bestowed personhood on fetuses in many cases before the mother has even realized she is pregnant. 

            To his credit, Governor Jack Dalrymple recognizes the probable fate of these bills:  The bills’ requirements “greatly increase the chances that this measure will face a court challenge [while] the likelihood of this measure surviving a court challenge remains in question.”  However, he has also stated that “this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade [and represents a] new question for the courts regarding a precise restriction on doctors who perform abortions.”  That is certainly one way of putting it.  Another might be to suggest this is a shot across the bow by a greatly emboldened, massively financed conservative party whose cries against wasteful government spending and intrusion by big government into the lives of the governed ring hollow when it pushes an agenda like this.

            But in the words of the sainted Arlo Guthrie, that’s not what I came to tell you about.  You know more about that than I do.  You live this and I’m just watching it from the outside.  I came to talk about where the law got its ideas about who rates personhood and how that accords with our Unitarian Universalist principles and beliefs.   

While it is not true we are a Judeo-Christian nation it is true that many of our legislators subscribe to those beliefs. Judaism, Christianity and Islam follow a simple trajectory to determine who becomes a person.  A person is someone who has been born.  While the writers of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Psalm 139 refer to knowing a person in the womb prior to her birth, this refers to an omniscient God who is also aware of the fall of a sparrow, and not to fallible, unobservant people.   The Talmud explicitly states that “you cannot choose between one human life and another.” Only birth confers personhood.  Until the emergence of the child, literally the crowning of the head, a fetus is part of the mother and she, and not the potential human, has personhood.  Conservative Muslimsrecognize a ‘person’ as someone having been alive 120 days, or four months, the point at which a fetus becomes “ensouled,” although as with much Scriptural writing, the number is probably not meant as a literal time period but a poetic method for naming an uncertain amount, like Jesus’ answer that someone should forgive anoffender seventy times seven times. 

PhilipMitchell, professor of English at Dallas Baptist University, has articulated a solid summary of how Biblical peoples recognized personhood:  “Being [in] the image of God,” he explains, includes the following elements:  “dignity, glory, and honor…a specific…purpose and end…[whose]  intermediate goal and purpose in this world [is] the furthering of God's shalom--his reign of perfect peace and justice over all humanity…Humans have certain God-given rights, even if we are also capable of voluntarily giving those rights up …[and] our personhood is developed and renewed by the work of the Holy Spirit upon us.”  The great Biblical scholar Dr. Suess encapsulates this definition as a person’s a person no matter how small. 

The Biblical definition is not exclusionary since there is no suggestion that someone’s disability, say, a man blind since birth, is denied personhood, that is, has sinned.  In fact, the writer of John 9 explicitly rejects that:  “His disciples asked [Jesus], ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” A person’s a person, then, no matter how unabled by disease, injury, or even by choice.  Once conferred on her, a person never gives up his personhood, even in death.

            Historically, Unitarians and Universalists followed the Biblical definition of how a person formed.  There is, of course, a vast difference between belief and practice, and while nearly every nation has submitted its government to one or another theology, probably none actually held fast to the injunction to, as the writer of Matthew put it, “do for the least of these as you would for me.”  Nevertheless, there was a concerted effort in the nineteenth century United States to compel society to live up to its rhetoric.  Unitarian sympathizer Margaret Fuller’s relational Transcendentalism recognized “all persons, regardless of their relative power [or lack of it], as moral agents…often unjustly deprived of the opportunity to exercise self-determination.”  In the bitter pre-Civil War years this included not only women and slaves and natives, but children and prisoners, immigrants and laborers, the ill and the crazy.  The abolition of slavery, a product of Quakerand Universalist principles, both solidly Christian, solidly Biblically based, finally took hold of the popular will and Abraham Lincoln was inspired by it to declare the near-impossible-to-imagine Emancipation Proclamation.  

But it wasn’t until the 1932 drafting of the “Humanist Manifesto” that religious liberals appealed to something other than a Biblical rationale for what makes a person a person.  Curtis Reese, a founder of Religious Humanism, insisted human beings be treated as having inherent worth.  “Whatever purposes…the cosmos is working out, [people] are not to be regarded as a means for their realization.” Our very existence is worthy of celebration, as are our attempts to change our behavior on reflection.  God may or may not have known us in the womb but once out of it our responsibility is to know ourselves.

Religious liberals were confident enough to assert that, rather than its dominator, people “are a part of nature and [have] emerged as the result [of it].”  In so doing, these proto-Unitarian Universalists were convinced that “Nothing human is alien to the religious…the complete realization of human personality [is] the end of a [person’s] life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now.”  Further, “Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life”  and that “humanism will:  affirm life rather than deny it; seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it; and endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for a few.” 

            Big, heavy, heady words.  We read in them the genesis of our principles of inherent worth and dignity for everyone; justice, equity and compassion in our relationships; the rights of conscience and a responsible search for meaning; and respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part. 

            If this, then, is the way a Unitarian Universalist ought to recognize the personhood of an individual—that is, that the being in question has inherent worth and dignity, has the equivalent rights for justice and compassion, a right of conscience and making a meaningful search for truth, and is a part of the interdependent web—how should he or she respond to the so-called Personhood Bills that seeks to claim these rights for the fetus whose claim to personhood is a beating heart?

            Here is where individual conscience and search for meaning comes in.  It is a hard question. It should be, the way anything worth really thinking about is hard.  My own answer, which may not be yours, is, yes, an unborn fetus is a person, not because it has a heartbeat or looks less like a fish than in an earlier stage or because it can hiccup, but because it is a part of nature no less than eggs and spermatozoa and cells.  Like any of us it has the potential for becoming more than the sum of its parts.

            However, its personhood cannot and should not trump its mother’s personhood, which is not a potential or a possibility but is a real, breathing, thinking, yearning being whose decision-making abilities must be held paramount above possibility.  There is no more moral right to insist a mother carry her charge to full term than there is to insist a brooding hen remain on its egg until it hatches. 

            Return to the story I started this sermon with, the short film Cargo.  Keep in mind it’s not meant to be an allegory or something heady.  Yolanda Ramke is not likely to have meant it to be anything more than a good story worth a few minutes’ think.  Consider all the decisions, most of them self-denying and all of them hopeful, that the unnamed father makes.  He marks a map for whoever finds his body; he takes care to avoid attacking his daughter; he arranges to have her familiar name used, giving her an identity.  I like to think that if the roles were reversed and it was the mother who wakens to the car wreck and lurches out of the door, we would have exactly the same film.  In the final shot we are shown that the survivors are giving him a marked grave, presumably so that an adult Rosie can visit it, probably not an activity most people would stop to do in the midst of a zombie infestation.  The father is himself given an identity even after death.

            A zombie carrying a child, a mother carrying a child. The authors of the Personhood Bills have written them so that a doctor who performs an abortion after a detectable heartbeat is punished, not the mother who seeks it out.  Is their assumption that women, subject to those wildly firing hormones, are incapable of making a balanced decision?  Would Governor Dalrymple and Senator Margaret Sitte and the other proponents of these bills come away from this film with the conviction that a pregnant woman has worse decision-making abilities than a man turning into a zombie?

            Unitarian Universalists are proud inheritors and upholders of humanist principles, of liberal religious convictions, of a historical progressive view that our obligation—maybe not out of the womb but once we are aware of injustice—is to make as much positive change as we can.  In the words of Lauralyn Bellamy, to give back love to a bruised and hurting world.

            A sermon ends with a call to action but I’m not going to tell you what that actions ought to be.  Again, this is your fight and I’m watching from the sidelines.  But here is what I want you to do now.  Take the hands of the people on both sides of you.  Feel the warmth, the flutter of their pulses, the throbbing life beside you.  However you act, whatever you choose to do, these are the people affected by it.