Cake? Or Death?

Because this is a little too bitter to leave standing alone for long:

I'm driving in this morning, and get this information on the radio as a "teaser" for a show I don't normally listen to, and I don't have the information at my fingertips for a link, which means you'll have to take my word for it; but it makes sense to me. It seems the greatest worry of the people of Afghanistan (remember them?) is not violence or the Taliban: it's poverty. Good ol' grinding, wearing, "Third World" poverty. In Afghanistan the strength of the central government, if this teaser can be trusted, doesn't matter nearly as much as the inability to feed themselves, or provide for their families.

Gee, maybe they're like us after all, huh?

Somewhere alone the line we decided, as a people, that poverty matters far less than security. We came to the conclusion that prosperity literally flows from the end of a gun, because without security nobody can own anything or rely on the future to provide more than today's daily bread. Security is what society must provide first, and then prosperity will flow from all the freedom all those guns and guards and walls provide freedom for.

Or something like that.

And yet, just off the top of my head, I think of the USSR, and how secure it was, across Russia and into Eastern Europe. Stalin especially made everyone secure, except, of course, his enemies. And that security continued up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. That Stasi of East Germany was notorious for making sure everyone was secure; and yet who was more prosperous: East Germany, or West Germany? Who was more prosperous? Europe, or Russia? Anarchy and chaos are hardly conducive to prosperity, except for the criminals, but do law and order command prosperity, bring it along in their wake? Even a quick glance at recent history belies the notion.

But we worship "the market" as if it were a great, green god, and an inscrutable one: a god completely oblivious to our prayers for intercession, to our pleas for benison. "God helps those who help themselves," we say; but we don't mean the God of Abraham, we mean the market when we say that, and we mean the market is a god, but one of the old gods: one of the gods who rains blessing and curses apparently indiscriminately, apparently without regard, building up and tearing down on a whim or a plan we can never discern. Law and order is a plan we can discern. Law and order is something we can use to impose control. Law and order makes things, well...orderly. Or at least we think it will, if we just have enough of it. And if there is no order yet well, then, just a little more, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

Or shall it?

Prosperity flows, not from our control, but from mystery. Prosperity is recognized in faith. We have a long history of humanity that teaches us this, a history that stretches back to the very roots of our Western civilization, a history that teaches social justice leads to prosperity, not force of arms or military power:

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain, set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

And as I've noted before, citing Walter Brueggemann, Solomon's reputation for wisdom was purchased, not earned, and his interests were in being a military power, not in being just:

Jump ahead about 400 years, to the impending Babylonian Exile. Now comes Jeremiah, descended from a long line of priests, from that very village where Solomon exiled the priest who had supported his brother. And now Jeremiah tells the reigning king:

Let not the wise boast of their wisdom,
nor the valiant of their valour;
let not the wealthy boast of their wealth;
but if anyone must boast, let him boast of this:
that he understands and acknowledges me.
For I am the LORD, I show unfailing love,
I do justice and right on the earth;
for in these I take pleasure.
This is the word of the LORD.

There is a direct rebuke of the descendants of Solomon there. Solomon who purchased his wisdom and his palace and his power and even the Temple, with his central concern for Solomon, and what Solomon could obtain, and own, and control. Solomon who used his control of horses and chariots to exact tribute (read: taxes) from others; who used the location of Israel along the trade routes to exact a toll for what passed through the land, and made sure the money went to Solomon, not to the community. Solomon cared about Solomon, not about:

How good and pleasant it is to live together as brothers in unity!
It is like fragrant oil poured on the head
and falling over the beard,
Aaron's beard, when the oil runs down
over the collar of his vestments.
Is is as if the dew of Hermon were falling
on the mountains of Zion.
There the LORD bestows his blessing,
life for evermore (Psalm 133)

The LORD bestows the blessing freely. Solomon makes sure the blessing is recovered and rewarded to Solomon. Solomon, like the Pharoah, says there isn't enough to go around: not enough money, not enough power, not enough wisdom, and I, Solomon, must control it all, must deal in it, must buy and sell in all the marketplaces, of arms, of ideas, of palaces, even of religion. Because of this, says Jeremiah, comes the Exile.

And, just because I've said it before, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel:

It can't be said too often: the Exile that shattered Israeli history like a brick through a window, that set Western civilization on the course to expect an apocalypse and an eschaton and a Messiah (from Christianity to Star Wars to the Matrix), did not come about because of the apostasy of Israel, but because of the injustice of Israel. Solomon wanted to preserve Israel by military force, too. That way, however, is always the path to injustice and failure. Ezekiel gives us the picture of God's spirit leaving the Temple because of the abominations performed there, because it is no longer holy.

We needn't consider ourselves a holy country, the chosen of the God of Abraham, to take the lesson to heart. Security is never achieved first, and prosperity second, and social justice a dismal third or fourth. And we should note that, not only did the Exile become the defining feature of Israelite history; it became one of the defining events of Western civilization. The prophets promised the people of Israel that one day all nations would stream to Zion, drawn by their justice and righteousness as the true children of Abraham, as a people blessed by God the Creator. The yin to that yang, if you will, is that the nations are just as affected by the unrighteousness of Israel, which caused God to leave them to their own plans and schemes and their own dreams of prosperity achieved through military power, not faith and trust in justice.

When will we ever learn?

"This is an outrage, it's an abomination; and there is a moral duty here."

1000 people in New Orleans at a free healthcare clinic. 90% have two or more diagnosed problems; 82% diagnosed with life threatening conditions. 4 taken directly to hospital: do not pass "Go," do not collect $200. Not all of them "poor," but none of them with insurance.

And tonight Keith adds that only 1000 were treated because New Orleans, 4 years after Katrina, still doesn't have the medical equipment necessary to treat people who are ill or injured. The equipment the clinic needed was simply not available to borrow, not even for one day, not even for 1000 people. As Gene Robinson said to Keith, this is an outrage and an abomination. And there is a moral duty here.

And we should be ashamed, but we don't even notice. We should be appalled, but we don't even care. Personally, socially, perhaps as Christians or Jews or Mustlims or atheists or simply human beings, we care. In small groups, perhaps we care. But politically, as a nation? We don't give a shit. The pictures of New Orleans drowning, those horrific pictures of 4 years ago, aren't on TV anymore; and we don't care. We never did. The poor of New Orleans existed because we didn't care. The drowning and abandonment of New Orleans happened because we didn't care. Four years later, we still don't care. New Orleans lacks medical facilities, medical equipment? Who knew? Who cared? Who cares now?

Individually, perhaps we do. As a people? We don't care enough to not even give a shit. We're obsessed with Sarah Palin, or whether Obama bowed to a foreign leader, or even over what he's doing or not doing about health insurance reform (it isn't health care reform now, everyone has admitted that). We don't care. We don't care. We don't care.

Thanksgiving is coming, and we will once again congratulate ourselves on how much we care. It's a lie. We don't care. Men and women are dieing and suffering and being injured and broken in Afghanistan, ruined for life; and we don't care. New Orleans is still recovering, New Orleans has been abandoned, the poor in this country have been abandoned: and we don't care.

Give thanks for what you have this year. Give thanks because it is yours, and you have it. Give thanks you aren't poor, in New Orleans, or anywhere else in America, or in the world. Give thanks, and don't consider for a moment that while we might be compassionate, as a nation: we just don't care.

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, is only for the people we care about. Give thanks you are among them. That's all it means, anymore.

Soup's Still Hot!

I could blame Wounded Bird, and give this immediate relevance, but I should rather confess the limitations of my education, and admit I just found this poem today, though its application seemed immediately obvious.

Show me dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear.
What! is it she which on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or which, robb'd and tore,
Laments and mourns in Germany and here?
Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year?
Is she self-truth, and errs? now new, now outwore?
Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore
On one, on seven, or on no hill appear?
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travel we to seek, and then make love?
Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights,
And let mine amorous soul court thy mild Dove,
Who is most true and pleasing to thee then
When she'is embrac'd and open to most men.

--John Donne

There's more than one interpretation of that closing couplet, and Donne certainly loved paradox and contradiction. But I can't read it at least as a reference to that Protestant shibboleth, the "Whore of Babylon," which puts quite a twist on Dr. Donne's sentiment that the church must be a place of true hospitality, open to all*

*Yes, it is my hobbyhorse. And hooray for Dr. Donne!

November 11, 2009

I like this picture. It reminds us that in the midst of life, we are in death. It reminds us that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and what we know of those witnesses are their bones. Their bones, and our memories. Hamlet in the graveyard would say that's all that's left:

There's another: why may not that be the skull of a
lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets,
his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he
suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the
sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of
his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be
in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes,
his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers,
his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and
the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine
pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him
no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than
the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The
very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in
this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
...
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell
me one thing.

HORATIO

What's that, my lord?

HAMLET

Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i'
the earth?

HORATIO

E'en so.

HAMLET

And smelt so? pah!

[Puts down the skull]

HORATIO

E'en so, my lord.

HAMLET

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

HORATIO

'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

HAMLET

No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as
thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

But the fact that we are here to remember it proves him wrong. One cannot blame Hamlet; he is a young man just facing the prospect of mortality, struggling with whether or not to give death (donner le mort, "the gift of death") to Claudius, whether to accept death himself. That we are dust and bones cannot be denied; that that is all we are, can.

This picture reminds us that it is through this material world that we know what we know, and it is through this material world that we know who we know. The absolute dichotomy of dualism is false, especially when it leads to what Dom Crossan labels "sarcophobia." This image reminds us of that, too. The bones that once saw and spoke and mocked and grinned, also bore witness to the incarnation represented by the Madonna and Child that sit before them. And they still bear witness to it. They bear witness to it's reality in time as well as in space as well as in flesh and blood. Reality, which is not to be confused with existence. The bones bear witness to existence, but where is that? Present only in memory, present only as a memory. And if there is no memory, was there no existence? Was their existence insignificant, unimportant, pointless? Did they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to no purposeful end except to avoid what might come after? Did conscience indeed make cowards of them all?

Or did they bear witness to what they bear witness to now? Being dead, is their communication "tongued with fire beyond the language of the living"? And how do we know they are dead, or were ever alive, except as they were, and are, still a part of this world?

PEACE

O Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy upon us.
Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us.
Arise, O Christ, and help us,
And deliver us for thy Name's sake.

AMEN.

O Christ, when thou didst open thine eyes on this fair earth, the angels greeted thee as the Prince of Peace and besought us to be of good will one toward another; but thy triumph is delayed and we are weary of war.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the very earth groans with pain as the feet of armed men march across her mangled form.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, may the Church, whom thou didst love into life, not fail thee in her witness for the things for which thou didst live and die.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the people who are called by thy Name are separated from each other in thought and life; still our tumults, take away our vain imaginings, and grant to thy people at this time the courage to pro-claim the gospel of forgiveness, and faithfully to maintain the ministry of reconciliation.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, come to us in our sore need and save us; 0 God, plead thine own cause and give us help, for vain is the help of man.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ of God, by thy birth in the stable, save us and help us;
By thy toil at the carpenter's bench, save us and help us;
By thy sinless life, save us and help us;
By thy cross and passion, save us and help us.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

Then all shall join in the Lord's Prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

--The E&R Hymnal

What Happened near Killeen

First, the story itself is horrific: a man armed with automatic weapons does the maximum amount of carnage/damage one can do, in the amount of time between the first shot and the "first responder" who brought him down. There is a reason military bases maintain very tight control over weapons on base: they know what those firearms are capable of.

But imagine trying to set up metal detectors at a military base covering nearly 160,000 acres, with a population of over 33,000. I've lived in town smaller than that, attended schools smaller than that. Establishing a "gun-free" zone in such an area is literally impossible. Yet the military does everything it can to do so, anyway.

The horrific irony of the location is that Killeen, Texas was almost single-handedly responsible for the concealed weapon law in Texas. In 1991 George Hennard drove his truck into the Luby's in Killeen, got out, and went on a shooting spree. As Wiki notes, Suzanna Hupp, one of the customers in the Luby's who survived, later testified to the Texas Legislature that, had she been allowed to carry her handgun into the restaurant, she could have brought down Mr. Hennard and ended the carnage. Of course, had Ms. Hupp and several other customers been armed, who would the shooter be, and how could anyone be sure there weren't accomplices?

Yesterday, on a military base with people trained in first aid and combat, the scene was total chaos. The alleged assassin was brought down during the shooting, and yet, per news reports this morning on NPR, it was several hours before officials realized the man being operated on with four bullet wounds was the suspect in the crime, not a victim; and that the woman being treated for gunshot wounds was the person who stopped him. There were, for hours, stories of multiple shootings and multiple assailants and suspects. The scene, in other words, was chaos, in a place where people are trained to handle chaos as well as any of us can.

So consider how much worse it might have been had everyone on that base been armed, and able to respond. We are so accustomed to shootings in the movies that we are sure if it happened near us, we'd already know who the shooter was, and so who to shoot. But real life is not a movie, and our eyes are not the camera which tell us who to pay attention to, and who is going to pull out two automatic handguns and begin firing. Underlining my point:

Officials are not ruling out the possibility that some of the casualties may have been victims of "friendly fire," that in the mayhem and confusion at the shooting scene some of the responding military officials may have shot some of the victims.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/fort-hood-shootings-7-dea_n_347366.html&cp

Which, of course, is the kind of thing that never happens in the movies!

The sad irony of Killeen, one noted in news reports yesterday which mentioned the Luby's shooting from 18 years ago, is that once again we find out guns are the problem, not the solution. But we will praise the police officer (rightly) who stopped the crime, and pay little attention to the criminal's ability to commit the crime in the first place.

In the meantime:

1	God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
2	Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
3	though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.
4	There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.
5	God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
6	The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
7	The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.
8	Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth.
9	He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.
10	Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
11	The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge

May the wars indeed cease unto the end of the earth, and the bow be broken, the spear cut asunder. God's peace and mercy to those who died, who were wounded, to their families, and to all the families on Fort Hood.

For all the Ain'ts, Part Deux, or The Anti-Kierkegaard

So I opened an envelope yesterday with this book in it (not for me, for the bookstore where I work). You can't read the subtitle from that picture, but it's particularly pernicious: "Activate Your Faith, Achieve Your Dreams, and Increase in God's Favor."

That last bit is the part that annoys me the most: increasing in God's favor by making yourself better off materially. The "spiritual insight" offered by this tome, according to Mr. Osteen's own words on the back cover, comes down to one sentence: "You are closer than you think."* Closer to achieving wealth, of course, because "A global recession has forced many to postpone their dreams and cancel their plans." The future being all and only about how much better off I'll be than today, apparently, and a global financial collapse being merely a test of my faithfulness. "Your dream may be just around the corner. You may think it will take another two years. But if you stay in faith, who knows? It may just be two months more."

Or not. Who knows?

Faith and God as cosmic slot machines. Does it get any worse than that?

*The most spiritual word on the dust jacket of this book, by the way, is "God." And that's only used as an adjective to describe what you will earn any day now!

Good grief.

All Saint's Day 2009

The fact is that the world does not understand the eternal. Temporal existence has a temporal and to that degree an activist conception of need and also has a materialistic conception of the greatness of a gift and of the ability to do something to meet need. "The poor, the wretched, may die--therefore it is very important that help be given." No, answers the eternal; the most important is the mercifulness be practised or that the help be the help of mercifulness. "Get us money, get us hospitals, these are the most important!" No, says the eternal; the most important is mercifulness. That a man dies is, eternally understood, no misfortune, but that mercifulness has not been practised is....The eternal maintains wiht immovable firmness that mercifulness is the most important. No thinker can be so stiff-necked as the eternal is about its thought; no thinker can be so calm, so undisturbed by the urgency of the moment and the danger of the moment which seem to enforce the view that is is most important of all that help be given in every way; no thinker is so calm, so undisturbed, as the eternal. And no thinker is so certain as the eternal that men must finally, nevertheless, come around and think his thoughts, for it says: just wait; we shall talk about this in eternity, and we shall talk simply and only about mercifulness and simply and only about the distinction--merciful/not-merciful. O, that I could portray the countenance the eternal will assume when the rich man answers the question whether or not he has been merciful: I have given hundreds of thousands to the poor! For the eternal will look at him amazed, as one who cannot get into his head what he is talking about; and then it will again put the question to him: have you been merciful? Imagine that a man went out to confer with a mountain about his affairs or that someone had dealings with the wind about his enterprises--the eternal will not understand any better what the rich man says of hundreds of thousands and what the powerful man says of having done everything.

Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, tr. Howard and Edna Hong, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962, p. 302.

On going off Daylight Savings Time

If space and time are connected, why don't clocks make me look smaller?

For All the Ain'ts!

On All Hallow's Eve, let me just ask Amanda at Pandagon:

Why do you think people used to go to church?

19th century America saw an explosion in church singing, for a lot of reasons, not least of which was it gave people a chance for public performance when few such opportunities existed. I remember the "karaoke" of my childhood: shaped note singing in my grandparent's Primitive Baptist church. It was beautiful, even if no one sang the hymns any better than drunks in a bar belting out pop songs, even if the music was printed for people who couldn't read music. Church was the chance to do what people have always loved to do: make music. Make music, that is, without learning to play an instrument or having to perform on stage. Maybe that's the line of demarcation, and certainly the dusty hymn tunes of old are just that: dusty. Some are familiar and comforting, but some are just old. But pop music? Honestly; who can really sing that stuff? And isn't it meant to show off the singer?

Which, I understand, is the point of karaoke, and to each his own, of course. But still, if you're gonna say this:

That’s why Halloween is the perfect day for this. The explosion in Halloween’s popularity tells you the whole story. I’d say in Austin, it’s easily the biggest day of the year, barring the time the Longhorns won the national championship. This is because you have a huge population of adults who have thrown the finger to the whole grow up and get boring process, but the trend is nationwide. The question is no longer “are you going to dress up?” but “who are you going to be?” Performing for others has almost completely lost its stigma, and thank god. The performer enjoys it, and the audience enjoys it (even if they’re waiting their turn). It’s a lot like sex---once the taboo comes off for you, you wonder what you were so worried about for so long.

I'm gonna have to say that's the one thing I hated about Austin: the tiny minority who thought the city existed for them, and were always 'too cool for the room,' and who imagined life revolved around 6th Street and SXSW, when most of us who lived there paid no attention to either (or to Eeyore's Birthday, for that matter, though I always liked the idea of that better).

Yeah, I mean rest of the city: the cranky old guys like yours truly. Those of us who actually worked for a living, and grew up, and found the narcissism of youth boring. I was born old. What can I say?

It's the first highlighted passage I refer to, obviously. The second is another matter, and it speaks to the "American Idolization" of American culture. We are all now stars of our own legends in our own minds. Or something. Nothing against belting one out in karaoke bars, mind you (though it's never gonna be my thing), but "Don't quit your day job" has something of value to those of us actually trained in music. Why not do impromptu Shakespeare, while you're at it? Or put together q quick scene from Beckett? A pick-up version of "Our Town," anyone?

I think there's a reason that hasn't caught on.

And maybe that's the distinction between singing in church, and singing karaoke: both are performance, but there is quite a distinction in the space and the purpose. Sure, there are prima donnas in churches, especially in the choirs. Sure, some people love to sing solos, and it ain't always "to the glory of God," though they will demurely say it is (as they accept the congratulations afterwards).

Amanda sez:

Technology has a lot to do with this shift in public attitudes about performance and emulation. Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves. Video games helped, too. They used to be considered something mainly for children, but now it’s completely acceptable for grown adults to sit down and pretend to be someone else doing crazy stuff for long periods of time. If you think about it, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero (and now DJ Hero, which we just got yesterday, apologies for the lack of an evening post) were inevitable, and they landed at just the right time to explode in popularity. Even a few years earlier, I think more people would be wildly ashamed to strap on a plastic guitar and pretend to play it. Nowadays, though? People fight to get the chance. On the negative bent, I think the ubiquitous reality TV shows have also pushed along this further.

Again, my first thought is: "There's a reason for that." And, again, I'm old enough and cranky enough to not exactly celebrate this as a "good thing." Yes, technology has changed our expectations, but it seems blogging and social networking has mostly convinced us of the importance of ME! Which was the other nice thing about singing in church: you didn't have to listen to you. Singing weakly as the organ thunders out, or strongly in a congregation with no other instruments than voices, you madea joyful noise and became a part of something larger, maybe even better, than yourself.

I still remember the Christmas Eve service I sang with a boy's choir. We had practiced Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" for what seemed like an eternity, and when we sang that night, we were part of a program with other choirs and the pipe organ. So, besides our singing, there was a lot of standing and listening (and being grateful I didn't have a solo!) In the final song, one we had practiced but never with the other choirs, everybody sang as the organ roared and thundered, and I felt my voice joining all the other voices, the voices together becoming an instrument equal to the organ, but all just human throats and tongues and teeth and mouths. And I had the closest thing to a mystical experience I've ever had in my life. I rose out of myself, almost lost myself, in that great instrument of song and praise and joy we were all making. We were all one instrument, and for that brief instant any sense of self as almost entirely lost. 40+ years later, almost all the details of that night are gone, but I still have that one.

Try having that experience with Karaoke.

Tomorrow, I need to find church where we can belt out "For All the Saints" together, and nobody has to listen to me. It won't be the day after Hallowe'en without it.

The Shoes of the Cultural Historian

I keep mentioning H. Richard Niebuhr's seminal book, and I keep failing to lay out (or find the post where I laid out) his central analysis on the subject of Christ and Culture. Niebuhr analyzed the question and recognized five "typical partial answers" to the questions: "Christ? Culture? One or the other? Both? Neither?" He explains his method in the first chapter of his book.

Five sorts of answers are distinguished, of which three are closely related to each other as belonging to that median type in which both Christ and culture are distinguished and affirmed: yet strange family resemblances may be found along the whole scale.

Answers of the first type emphasize the opposition between Christ and culture. Whatever may be the customs of the society in which the Christian lives, and whatever the human achievements it conserves, Christ is seen as opposed to them, so that he confronts men [sic] with the challenge of an "either-or" decision....

Recognition of a fundamental agreement between Christ and culture is typical of the answers offered by a second group. In them Jesus often appears as a great hero of human culture history; his life and teachings are regarded as the greatest human achievement; in him, it is believed, the aspirations of men toward their values are brought to a point of culmination; he confirms what is best in the past, and guides the process of civilization to its proper goal. Moreover, heis a part of culture in the sense that he himself is part of the social heritage that must be transmitted and conserved....

Three other typical answers agree with each other in seeking to maintain the great differences between the two principles and in undertaking to hold them together in some unity. They are distinquised from each other by the manner in which they attempt to combine the two authorities. One of them, our third type, understand's Christ's relation to culture somewhat as the men of the second group do: he is the fulfillment of cultural aspirations and the restorer of the institutions of true society. Yet there is something in him that neither arises out of culture nor contributes directly to it. He is discontinuous as well as continuous with social life and its culture....Christ enters into life from above with gifts which human aspiration has not envisioned and which human effort cannot attain unless he relates men to a supernatural society and a new value-center. Christ is, indeed, a Christ of culture, but he is also a Christ above culture....

Another group of median answers constitutes our fourth type. In these the duality and inescapable authority of both Christ and culture are recognized, but the opposition between them is also accepted. To those who answer the question in this way it appears that Christians throughout life are subject to the tension that accompanies obedience to two authorities who do not agree yet must both be obeyed....So they are like the "Christ-against-culture" believers, yet differ from them in the conviction that obedience to God requires obedience to the institutions of society and loyalty to it members as well as obedience to a Christ who sits in judgment of that soceity....In the polarity and tension of Christ and culture life must be lived precariously and sinfully in the hope of a justification which lies beyond history....

Finally, as the fifth type in the general seris and the third of the mediating answers, there is the conversionist solution. Those who offer it understand with the members of the first and the fourth groups that human nature is fallen or perverted, and that this perversion not only appears in culture but is transmitted by it. Hence the opposition between Christ and all human institutions and customs is to be recognized. Yet the antithesis does not lead either to Christian separation from the world as with the first group, or to mere endurance in the expectation of a transhistorical salvation, as with the fourth. Christ is seen as the converter of man [sic] in his culture and society, not apart from these, for there is no nature without culture and no turning of men [sic] from self and idols to God save in society.

Neibuhr devotes a chapter each of his book to carefully examining these five types. The chapter titles provide helpful handles. In order, the five types are labeled:

1) Christ Against Culture
2) The Christ of Culture
3) Christ Above Culture
4) Christ and Culture in Paradox
5) Christ the Transformer of Culture

As I say, the fuller explanations and explorations make up the book itself. But this is enough to start with. Now, what to do with it? Well, as pointed out in comments a bit earlier:

"The issue is who is in charge." I find it interesting that for all the talk about homosexuality, the catalytic factor in both the Pope's invitation and in the recent breakaways in TEC was not about gays. They complained a lot about a gay bishop, but nobody left. They left when a woman was elected Presiding Bishop, and the Pope's invitation comes now that it's clear that it's inevitable that women will be ordained bishops in the CofE.

Gays may be an abomination, but at least they're still men...
Sherri

Quite so, sez I. And that introduces the game of "Which Category is that one in?" You can play at home. Just decide which category that sentiment falls in, and why. Niebuhr gave examples of notable figures, which I excluded, for each of his introductions, above. Be your own H, Richard Niebuhr! Decide where Pope Benedict fits, and ++Williams, for bonus points! Make it a family game night! Put on a pot of soup while you're at it!

The Shoes of the Fisherman are some Jive Ass Slippers!*

James Carroll and Ross Douthat discusses the Anglican Communion/Roman Catholic issue in terms (without mentioning them) of Richard Niebuhr's analysis of Christ and Culture, which is a very interesting way to go. Carroll says:

The invitation to “disgruntled’’ members of the Church of England’s extended family to abandon the Thames for the Tiber is a rejection of contemporary human experience, a resounding response of “No!’’ The church against the modern world, after all. Not only a cruel assault on a fellow Christian communion that is valiantly struggling to strike a balance between liberal and conservative impulses; not only an insult to loyal Catholic liberals who will be denied what converted Anglicans are offered (notably a married clergy); not only a slap at women and homosexuals whose progress toward equality is a global measure of justice; not only a stark contrast with the common Anglican practice of fully welcoming alienated Roman Catholics, while eschewing any pressure on them to convert - there is more.

Equally damaging, the Vatican’s preemptive exploitation of Anglican distress explicitly ducks the large and urgent challenge facing every religion and every religious person, which is how to positively reconcile tradition with the massive changes in awareness, knowledge, and communication that come with the scientific and technological breakthroughs that daily alter the meaning of existence.

Douthat agrees "there is more," but the "more" is not modernity nor the reaction to it, at least by Christians. The "more" is Islam:

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

What's interesting is that even Douthat can't accept that modernity is the enemy. That is, after all, a primarily "fundamentalist" point of view, and while there are Opus Dei and other arch-conservative Catholic movements, there is no real equivalent of fundamentalism in Roman Catholicism. This is because fundamentalism defends Protestant orthodoxy, among which is the principal of direct access by the believer to God, without the intermediary of an institution. Islam has taken to fundamentalism because, like Protestant Christianity, it does not depend upon an intermediary to be a necessary component of Islamic faith.

Carroll sets the dichotomy between Christ (or church) and culture this way:

While the Vatican and its recruits just say no, the rest of us attempt to apply tested modes of ethical reasoning to revolutions, for example, in genetic science that separate reproduction from sexuality. While the Vatican just says no, the rest of us reckon with the ways in which the woon of poverty. While the Vatican just says no, the rest of us see the link between triumphalist rejection of pluralism and the intolerance that undergirds most of the world’s violence.

Douthat sets it this way:

This is not the way well-mannered modern churches are supposed to behave. Spurred by the optimism of the early 1960s, the major denominations of Western Christendom have spent half a century being exquisitely polite to one another, setting aside a history of strife in the name of greater Christian unity.

This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.

At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.

Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.

It's an interesting argument because it is essentially a cultural argument: he who has the most numbers, wins! It's not even the quasi-theological argument that more members is a sign of God's approval. It's simply the argument that numbers equals success, and success equals power, and power equals victory, so "the more ecumenically minded denominations" are dull and losers (I have to agree with him, by the way, on those "interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel." But that agreement doesn't negate what I see as the justice of Carroll's assertion about what is going on in spite of church hierarchies.) Then there's the view of Hans Kung (everybody into the pool!), who says, more or less, what I've been saying:

After Pope Benedict XVI's offences against the Jews and the Muslims, Protestants and reform-oriented Catholics, it is now the turn of the Anglican communion, which encompasses some 77 million members and is the third largest Christian confession after the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Having brought back the extreme anti-reformist faction of the Pius X fraternity into the fold, Pope Benedict now hopes to fill up the dwindling ranks of the Catholic church with Anglicans sympathetic to Rome. Their conversion to the Catholic church is supposed to be made easier: Anglican priests and bishops shall be allowed to retain their standing, even when married. Traditionalists of the churches, unite! Under the cupola of St Peter's! The Fisher of Men is angling in waters of the extreme religious right.

Extreme religious right, of course, is a matter of perspective:

[The Anglican Church] is already suffering from the consequences of the heedless and unnecessary election of an avowed gay priest as bishop in the US, an event that split his own diocese and the whole Anglican communion. This friction has been enhanced by the ambivalent attitude of the church's leadership with respect to homosexual partnerships. Many Anglicans would accept a civil registration of such couples with wide-ranging legal consequences, for instance in inheritance law, and would even accept an ecclesiastical blessing for them, but they would not accept a "marriage" in the traditional sense reserved for partnerships between a man and a woman, nor would they accept a right to adoption for such couples.

One wants to point out it is a communion, not a "church," and the Archbishop of Canterbury is not a kind of ersatz Pope. But one really wants to say: "Really, Fr. Kung? Really?" And then one re-reads his recap of reconciliation between Rome and Canterbury, and one realizes one has encountered yet another strand of Christ and Culture, because Kung's argument ends here:

As I wrote in 1967, "a resumption of ecclesial community between the Catholic church and the Anglican church" would be possible, when "the Church of England, on the one side, shall be given the guarantee that its current autochthonous and autonomous church order under the Primate of Canterbury will be preserved fully" and when, "on the other side, the Church of England shall recognise the existence of a pastoral primacy of Petrine ministry as the supreme authority for mediation and arbitration between the churches." "In this way," I expressed my hopes then, "out of the Roman imperium might emerge a Catholic commonwealth."

With, again, Rome in control. Mitey Rome. Gee, I wonder why reconciliation hasn't happened earlier in the past 500 years?

Kung's argument is not about numbers, but about history. Who wears the Shoes of the Fisherman, and who doesn't? Except that isn't a bedrock concern of Protestants, be they Anglicans or evangelicals, fundamentalists or members of the United Church of Christ. The issue of authority is itself a cultural issue: but if there can be only one, whose culture will it be? Far from approaching the question of whose rules rule, we can't even agree on where the playing field is. Between these three, we can't even tell what we're fighting for, or who we're fighting. And maybe that's still the problem: the issue is not who has power, but who is in charge. That's still the fundamental divide between Rome and those not with Rome. I do not condemn Rome, or Canterbury, for that matter. But I do hold to what I consider the central teaching of the gospel: the power of powerlessness. And that teaching gives no power to hierarchies, or judicatories, or anyone. Yet it puts us at the obligation of everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord. And everyone who doesn't. If we would be first of all, we must be last and servant of all.

Which raises a whole new set of interesting cultural and theological questions.

*A song by Charles Mingus, not an invention of yr. humble host

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts --Bertolt Brecht

Take a moment to connect this:

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

With this:

For more than two hours on a dark Saturday night, as many as 20 people watched or took part as a 15-year-old California girl was allegedly gang raped and beaten outside a high school homecoming dance, authorities said.

As hundreds of students gathered in the school gym, outside in a dimly lit alley where the victim was allegedly raped, police say witnesses took photos. Others laughed.

"As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated," Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department told CNN.

Is it merely coincidence that this horrific crime occurred in California? Is there no possible causal relationship at all?

It is, of course, too easy to say there is one, and run screaming away denouncing materialism or classism, or pronouncing class warfare or creating any other shibboleth from this comparison. But does that make the comparison entirely invalid? Can we only compare general trends (as the argument from The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Betterby Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, obviously does)? Can we not draw any particular lessons from a general analysis of this kind of horror? Criminologlists do:

Criminology and psychology experts say there could be a variety of reasons why the crime wasn't reported. Several pointed to a problematic social phenomenon known as the bystander effect. It's a theory that has played out in lynchings, college riots and white-collar crimes.

Under the bystander effect, experts say that the larger the number of people involved in a situation, the less will get done.

"If you are in a crowd and you look and see that everyone is doing nothing, then doing nothing becomes the norm." explains Drew Carberry, a director at the National Council on Crime Prevention.

Carberry said witnesses can be less likely to report a crime because they reinforce each other with the notion that reporting the crime isn't necessary. Or, he says, witnesses may think another person in the crowd already reported the incident. The responsibility among the group becomes diffused.

"Kids learn at a young age when they observe bullying that they would rather not get involved because there is a power structure," Carberry adds.

So there's that. There's also the almost existential problem of the "other:"

This detached mentality can be especially pervasive among youth, who are too young to comprehend what victimization means, said Salvatore Didato, an organizational psychologist in New York. When a teenager -- or anyone -- -doesn't have a personal bond to the victim, they are less likely to help out.

Experts say sometimes bystanders see the victim as less important than the person committing the crime, who appears to wield power. "The victim to them is a non-person," Didato said.

We could invoke Levinas and Derrida to examine that issue. But do the abstractions of French phenomenology really give us any purchase on a story like this?

Moving from generalities to specifics is always a problem, especially since generalities themselves tend to be vague and glittering. As the reviewer of the books notes:

Is the basic claim here that in more equal societies almost everyone does better, or is it simply that everyone does better on average? Most of the time, Wilkinson and Pickett want to insist that it’s the first.

But statistics point to averages, not to specifics. They posit trends, they don't read the tea leaves of ordinary lives in all their peculiarity and particularity. So it's unfair to even imply that people in California particpated in a gang-rape because California is as shockingly unequal in its distribution of wealth among its citizens, as a group of those citizens were towards the welfare of one individual.

Or is it? It seems obvious this group thought as a group; that the victim was "other," a non-person with whom no sympathy was needed, or perhaps merely allowed. Some came to watch the spectacle when they heard of it, some came to participate; no one so much as went back inside and activated their cell phone. Why? Were they each, individually, that evil? They each had an individual motivation, but that motivation was driven as much by the group as by their conscience, or apparent lack of conscience. Sartre famously said of his existentialist ethics that it made the individual responsible for all of humanity, that when the individual chose, he/she chose for all humankind. This case could practically be a textbook example of Sartre's argument.

But why would people make a choice like this? Could it have nothing to do with the larger society? It's a dangerous parallel but an apt one: we accept the argument that "ordinary Germans" accepted, even participated, in the atrocities of Nazi Germany in part because of the state of Germany after World War I, and the broken economy and hyperinflation that made Hitler's rise to power, again at least in part, possible. It was the reason we rebuilt Germany and imposed the Marshall Plan after the war was over, so we did more than devote our attention to the state of the nation to historical analysis. Is it impossible to apply that analysis to ourselves, to say that the evil men and women do is not in part due to inequalities that society could correct if it chose to? Can we really say that these two things, happening together (the report of the analysis, the report of the crime) are merely happenstance? Is the ability to see the victim as a non-person, as someone without power in the situation and therefore irrelevant, even non-human, not at some level tied to social and economic inequalities which teach the very same lesson on a community-wide scale?

In theological circles, we discuss this in terms of the covenantal and imperial economies. Of course, when we discuss such things in public, we get slapped around for it. Maybe we should discuss them anyway.

More Soup!

Nothing new under the sun:

That's because, while he regards the Pope as the boss, and has welcomed the Pope's visit to these shores next year in the usual grovelling terms (the "joy" of "all" Anglicans), the Pope obviously regards him as insignificant - not worthy of advance notice of an action that basically and potentially takes traditionalist Catholic priests en masse out of his Church and short circuits the female bishops decision making and the whole matter of the Covenant and Anglican identity.

Nothing at all:

The first step towards unity is that our brother the patriarch of Constantinople should recognize the primacy and dignity of the apostolic see...and correct his former obstinancy. The causes of diversity of faith and custom between Greeks and Latins cannot be removed unless the members are first united at the head. For how can questions be discussed between dissenting and antagonistic bodies when one refuses to obey or agree with the other?

Pope Paschal II to the Emperor Alexius, 1112. Quoted in Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Southern follows this quote with an explanation:

In other words debate is futile unless we first agree who is right; and then of course it is unnecessary.

Something like that.

In The Soup

I have been following the latest contretemps in the Anglican Communion at a respectful distance, and mostly through Wounded Bird, from whom I take most of this (including the picture of Grandpere's soup!). The issue, of course, is the sudden invitation of Rome to disaffected Anglican congregations and clergy:

Thousands of Anglicans could defect to the Roman Catholic church after the pope today approved a new global institution to receive them.

It will be the first time since the Reformation in the 16th century that entire Protestant communities have reunited with Rome. The first group likely to take advantage of the new rules is the Traditional Anglican Community (TAC), which broke off from the rest of the community in 1991 and claims to have more than 500,000 members worldwide.

Other groups unhappy with developments in the Anglican Communion are also expected to accept the invitation from the Vatican. Traditionalists, including thousands in the Church of England, have long threatened to defect to Rome over issues such as the ordination of women and gay people.

It sounds a lot like the old dream of re-uniting the Christian church, a dream that goes back to the Great Schism between Rome and Greece. That's a topic in itself, of course, but I've been reading about it in reference to church and European history, in R.W. Southern's Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Penguin, 1970). He provides an excellent context for this discussion, especially as we imagine the Church in Medieval Europe as to be power incarnate:

The ecclesiastical organization elaborated between 1050 and 1300 was the most splendid system, both theoretically and practically, that the church has ever known. It was provided with the most formidable array of teeth to be used against offenders, but they could seldom be used effectively against the current of any widespread secular interest. This was the inescapable dilemma. The rules of law could be immensely elaborated, and within the limits imposed by human craft and frailty they could be made effective within the clerical body. But outside this body they were truly effective when they coincided with the general run of secular interests.

Southern notes that even excommunication was not the "death penalty" we all imagine it to be, because once you were thrown out of the church, the church no longer had any control over you, and at least one ruler lived under this "sentence" for three years, before reconciling with the church and returning to the fold. Such a return reflected a compromise on both sides, not necessarily a one-sided capitulation. Excommunication was the church's greatest power, but it never matched the coercive power of the state; and the Church was never able to lead the people to places the people didn't want to go.

In the matter of trade, for instance, canon law in the early twelfth century still spoke of it as an occupation scarcely compatible with Christianity. But as the growing needs of society produced more elaborate forms of commercial organization, the ecclesiastical lawyers began to have other thoughts...and the restrictions that remained were largely ignored or circumvented.

So the situation in the Anglican Communion is neither new, nor unique, and in some parts of the Communion (especially The Episcopal Church) the "ecclesiastical lawyers" have to have other thoughts, if the church is going to remain a church at all.

Politics, too, plays a role in all communal endeavors. It is certainly an issue in any discussion of "reunification."

We have become so accustomed to thinking of Christendom as an ideal body detached from all ties of political loyalty that it is well to be reminded that from the time of Constantine religious unity had stemmed in the first place from political unity. Religious unity could scarcely be thought of apart from political unity, if only because religious unity depended on some ultimate power of coercion. Hence all future medieval plans for the reunification of Christendom are fundamentally plans for political reintegration.

Southern notes that the attempts at reunification between Rome and the Greek church all assumed Roman authority over Greek churches, at least in matters of doctrine. In other words, reunification would only come at the submission of the Greek church to the Latin one. So, today, Anglian priests may find they, too, are required to submit:

"But convert clergy may not find life as good as they had hoped, despite being freed from the terror of meeting woman priests and having to bless civil partners rather than excoriate them, Vatican-style, as “intrinsically disordered”. Despite the modified prayer book they will find their style and even pastoral advice gravely restricted; they may flinch at the uncompromising voice of the Vatican after the gentle bleating of Cantuars.

"Anglicanism was founded on uneasy compromise, and this has, over centuries, made it kindly and even humble: a mixed salad of a faith. Catholicism is older, darker, strong raw meat. It may choke them."

I suppose from the Roman perspective Anglicanism is a "mixed salad of a faith." From my Protestant and congregationalist perspective, it seems quite orderly, indeed. I would hesitate, simply out of respect, to label Catholicism as "darker, strong red meat," but I take the point of the metaphor: "Be careful what you ask for. You might get it."

This certainly fits the tenor of responses from clergy on this issue:

Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

1. people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition: Hip, hip, hooray!

2. people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms.

Catholics and Episcopalians, who are nearly Catholic (but perhaps not nearly enough), and Lutherans (to some degree in the same boat), come closest, from what I know of Christianity in America, anyway, to being "discipled" and disciplined about their religious activities. Protestants, on the other hand, tend more strongly toward "baptized heathens" at one extreme, or simply more interested, at the other, on "living in any tradition on...their own terms." Presbyterians have an order that is not entirely orderly; Baptists are congregationalist, with almost nothing binding them to each other at all. The UCC, in which I am ordained, is an awkward mix of Presbyterianism and congregationalism, and as a result tries to make pronouncements the congregations have no connection to, and on the other hand has no control over its congregations whatsoever. It's a very mixed bag, in other words, and there the troubles begin.

Any group of people is going to conduct its affairs according to familiarity and how "they've always done it this way." Submission to the yoke of Jesus, be it light or heavy on the shoulders, is ever the struggle of the Christian believer. One question, of course, is: "Who's yoke is it, anyway?" Various denominations of Christianity attempt to answer that in various ways. As the good Bishop says:

people should serve within the denomination in which they can best be discipled.

But how can they best be discipled? That's the issue; and the answer is, that second set of converts are the very people who don't want to be discipled. The church cannot refuse them (I don't think the church can refuse anyone, but I'm very open-minded about church "membership"); but should the church, in any form, count it a gain to have them?

Seen from a distance, this looks like a distinct "win" for the Roman church, and it is largely being treated that way. But is it entirely doctrinal, and not at all political? That seems dubious, not to mention contrary to history both ancient and modern:

On the eve of another damning report on clerical abuse and cover-up in Ireland, that seems to be Pope Benedict’s tactic. His sudden invitation to Anglican defectors will certainly take the spotlight off a continuing child abuse scandal fed, for decades, by the masculine and intimidating structures of authority in the Catholic hierarchy.

The Archbishop insists this is not about politics (the "existing relations between our two communions"):

It remains to be seen what use will be made of this provision, since it is now up to those who have made requests to the Holy See to respond to the Apostolic Constitution; but, in the light of recent discussions with senior officials in the Vatican, I can say that this new possibility is in no sense at all intended to undermine existing relations between our two communions or to be an act of proselytism or aggression. It is described as simply a response to specific enquiries from certain Anglican groups and individuals wishing to find their future within the Roman Catholic Church.

But if this isn't about the relations between the two communions, what is it about?

And that's the view from the top. Seen on the ground, where such things actually take place, the picture may be very different. I've had some experience with this, apart from congregations quite unwilling to be "discipled." When I left my congregation (or they told me to leave, to be more precise), I contacted various denominations which had arranged to take me as an ordained pastor, even though I wasn't ordained in their denomination. A sort of agreement of reciprocity, if you will. It turned out the judicatory bodies were, by and large, quite comfortable with the administrative process; but the local congregations, by and large, were not interested at all. It is one thing to make a pronouncement from "above" about how things will be from now on. It is quite another thing to live out the consequences of that decision, in the parish.

And then there is the question of where to put all these people, if they want to come with their traditions and liturgies, but can't bring the physical property with them.

So it goes.

Jesus on a Dinosaur!

I promised myself I wouldn't bother with Hitchen's babblings on religion (and I'm not too keen on the argument from Pastor Wilson, but that's another matter), but this passage alone made me say: "Huh?"

We do not know, though we may assume, that our pre-homo sapiens ancestors (the erectus, the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals, with whom we have a traceable kinship as we do with other surviving primates) had deities that they sought to propitiate. Alas, no religion of which we are now aware has ever taken their existence into account, or indeed made any allowance for the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of years of the human story. Instead, we are asked to believe that the essential problem was solved about two-to-three thousand years ago, by various serial appearances of divine intervention and guidance in remote and primitive parts of what is now (at least to Westerners) the Middle East.

I'm not sure what Hitchens means by "religion," there, because Christianity as I was trained in it at a Christian seminary certainly takes into account "the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of years of the human story." I didn't learn in seminary that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and even Moses, were real people representing a frozen point in time, or the first people who actually mattered to humanity. Although their stories did have historical roots in identifiable periods in human history, I was taught to place them in human history. I learned that these were stories which were a part of the human story, and that I could learn them as a pastor and still take account of the stories of Gilgamesh (from Babylon) or even the Mississipians (the mysterious mound builders of Cahokia). Indeed, as a thinking person, as a theologian, I have a responsibility to. But that doesn't fit Hitchens's reductio ad absurdum religious view, so he creates a straw man he can easily topple over.

If the scriptures of Christianity or Judaism or Islam (and I note, again, Hitchens scrupulously avoids naming Judaism as one of the three religions of the Book he trashes at every opportunity. Some religious beliefs are apparently more absurd than others.) don't mention humanity before the Tower of Babylon (save for the stories of Adam and Eve), perhaps the problem is, like the Mississipians, they failed to leave records for us to decipher. But by no means has "religion" collectively conspired to take no notice of what archaeology and anthropology have discovered. Indeed, I learned more about archaeology in seminary, and in books I've read since related to Christianity and its origins, than ever I'd read before. (I won't even touch on the absurd issue of "the essential problem" being solved, as I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. That's pretty much an "insert your prejudice/presumption here" type of statement.)

It isn't religion that is absurd, it is Hitchens's willingness to parade his ignorance so publicly. His ability to form an argument isn't worth much, either.


*image courtesy of Wounded Bird

The Twa Cultures (Redux)

So I wake up with this idea in my head (which is usually where I keep them, or find them), and I mean to write it down but it's morning and there's no time, and now that there's a little time, I can't find it again.

Oh, wait: here it is. And actually it ties in with something I started and never posted, so now the business of connecting the two is going to be another wrinkle in the telling of this tale, but the basic idea is this, and it's not really such a new one: we're all looking for something to belong to, which is one reason atheists are making such a strong bid for a presence of their own; and that may even have to do with the departure of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Time has attenuated our attention to Ms. O'Hair, and certainly her disappearance and death did not lead directly to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens all hitching their popularity wagons to atheism's rising (?) star, nor did it create sua sponte the website Pharyngula, but there's probably a connection there somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do human societies. But there's also the interesting issue that, as religion retreats from the public square, some other form of community rushes to take its place. And, almost predictably, that new form casts itself as the anti-religion, as the opposition to something it says shouldn't exist, but which it needs in order to have an existence of its own. After all, if Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher didn't have Christianity to mock, what would they have to write books or make movies about?

So even the active promotion of atheism is not promotion of an ideology, so much as it is promotion of a new community: the community of those who actively reject Christianity. Atheism as it has been put forward by the "New Atheists" is little more than a very deliberate rejection of Christianity (at its broadest the "religions of the Book," though it's unseemly to condemn Judaism (!), and I've yet to hear from prominent atheists in predominately Muslim or Buddhist or Taoist cultures, or of any prolonged attacks on world religions by prominent Western atheists). There are non-believers, of course. Such people simply go about their lives, unconcerned with the effects or non-effects of religion, even when it supposedly prompts terrorists to fly planes into buildings (an action more motivated by politics than religious fervor, but that's another argument). But then there are atheists: people determined not only to not believe very loudly and forcefully, but to make of those who do believe targets for their ire, their mockery, their denigration, even their hatred (Sam Harris put into print his conviction that "Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith," (the emphasis is in the original), and this led him to conclude the only proper response to Islam was its destruction by nuclear force.), or if they are "old atheists," at least to loudly proclaim why believers are so wrong to believe. It's an interesting problem of the "other," of the one who is not you, but to whom you can only relate by seeing them in the mirror of yourself. And it connects to other thoughts I may yet publish here because such atheism is a very public practice, that is, one used to define oneself in the polis, but not necessarily one used to define oneself in private.

I had a good friend and neighbor who was very publicly, but quietly, an atheist. He admired Madalyn Murray O'Hair, which always surprised me because she came off as an obnoxious and hate-filled woman to me, someone whose opinions about my religion meant nothing to me, but whose attitude toward anyone who disagreed with her always bordered on outright disgust. My friend was so calm and tolerant and respectful of others that I could never quite see why he would admire a person so publicly disrespectful of almost everyone. But my friend was also the most Christian person I've ever known. By that, I mean he was kind, generous, charitable, lived simply, gave freely of his time, labor, materials, to any and everyone. He was not judgmental, except in regards to religion, which like any atheist he rejected and condemned (an agnostic is aloof, an atheist is more argumentative). But he helped people who need help, no matter who they were. "God causes it to rain on the just and the unjust alike," Jesus reminded his disciples, but while few of his disciples seem ever to have learned that lesson, my friend applied it to the spiders living in his windows as well as to the people he knew who could use his talents, tools, and labor.

Had he been "perfect," I suppose he'd have been an agnostic. "Perfect," of course, according to my definition. He was happy with who he was, and even when we discussed religion (especially after I decided to sell my house and move away to go to seminary), it was always done respectfully on both sides. I didn't want to evangelize him, and he didn't want to antagonize me. But I still think his atheism was something he used to define himself publicly; to define himself against an ideology he didn't share and didn't accept. My Christianity, I am repeatedly told, is something I should keep private; but it is also a public declaration, if only because part of its practice is to gather with like minded persons for an hour or so once a week, in a public place.

This idea comes back into my head because of a report by Barbara Bradley Hagerty on NPR this morning. Seems there is a "schism" among atheists on precisely how to be atheists. If that isn't the sine qua non of a "community," I don't know what is. One of the "old atheists" even says, in the report, that "we know what [the "new atheists"] are against, but what are they for?" And the answer, per Hagerty, is that they believe in reason and science. Which is an interesting choice of words, but an accurate one. Atheism, at least as publicly and loudly practiced, is just as much of a belief system as the religions they decry. Consider this passage from Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, by R.W. Southern (Penguin, 1970):

It is amazing simple to knock over cherished theories when they no longer satisfy the needs of the time. The thoughts on which royal government had acted for several centuries were blown away like airy nonsense. Almost no one bothered to defend them. The old sacred kingship had no place in the new world of business.

Southern is writing about the collapse of absolute respect for the king as an agent of God on earth. The passage he quotes, dating from the 13th century, begins:

Perhaps there are babblers who with windy eloquence contend that the king is not to be numbered with the laity since he is anointed with priestly oil. But there is a plain reason which mocks this folly....

Not exactly Thomas Jefferson, but far more critical of kings than we might assume, if we know only the popular history of the "Dark Ages." As Southern points out in setting up that quote and his conclusion:

If often happens at critical moments in history that ideas which have long held the field almost unchallenged are suddenly discovered, not to be wrong, but to be useless; then almost everyone can see they are absurd.

Now some clever atheist might snap that up and apply it to religion. But it immediately made me think of Thomas Kuhn, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a work in the philosophy of science which still makes "true believers" in science uncomfortable, as they struggle to point out that Kuhn does not mean what he plainly says, because science, after all, as religion once claimed to, deals with "absolute truth," or at least a truth as absolute as we can know it. And therefore science stands apart from both human culture and human limitations, and gives us that window on immutable reality that once only the medieval church in Europe promised to open.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Little wonder the "old atheists" in that report refer to the "new atheists" as "fundamentalist atheists." It is one thing to thinks science as a method of reasoning, another to think if it has having independent value, and another thing again to set up shrines in its name, and worship at them. But this doesn't answer why atheists feel the need to identify as atheists, other than the very human need to belong to a community, to something larger than themselves (a need we all feel. There was another story on the same program about college students suffering from "mental illness" (I use the term advisedly), who seemed rather interested in establishing their bona fides are members of a community which should be appreciated by the larger community of which they were, and were not, a part.). I'd like to think this answered that question, that Christianity presented a valid threat to the prevailing culture:

Ancient Roman civilization, says Gibbon, was bound to reject Christianity just because Rome was tolerant. This culture, with its great diversity of customs and religions, could exist only if reverence and assent were granted to the many confused traditions and ceremonies of its constituent nations....But Christ and Christians threatened the unity of the culture...with their radical monotheism, a faith in the one God that was very different from the pagan universalism which sought to unify many deities and many cults under one earthly or heavenly framework....Divinity, it seems must not only hedge kings but also other symbols of political power, and monotheism deprives them of their sacred aura. The Christ who will not worship Satan to gain the world's kingdoms is followed by Christians who will worship only Christ in unity with the Lord whom he serves. And this is intolerable to all defenders of society who are content that many gods should be worshipped if only Democracy or America or Germany or the Empire receives its due, religious homage. The antagonism of modern, tolerant culture to Christ is of course often disguised because it does not call its religious practices religious...and also because it regards what it calls religious as one of the many interests which can be placed alongside economics, art, science, politics, and techniques. Hence the injunction it voices to Christian monotheism appears in such injunctions only as that religion should be kept out of politics and business, or that Christian faith must learn to get along with other religions. What is often meant is that not only the claims of Christ and God should be banished from the spheres where other gods, called values, reign. The implied charge against Christian faith is like the ancient one: it imperils society by its attack on its religious life; it deprives social institutions of their cultic, sacred character; by its refusal to condone the pious superstitions of tolerant polytheism it threatens social unity. The charge lies not only against Christian organizations which use coercive means against what they define as false religions, but against the faith itself.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row 1975), pp. 7-9

But such an answer/problem would presume a greater commitment to radical monotheism (although that theme joins the religions of the Book together), since presumably the problem now is that Christianity is the culture, and so doesn't threaten it at all. Still, it's not hard to read Niebuhr's words about the "cultic, sacred character" or social institutions, and not apply it to the fervid defense of science and "reason" employed by Dawkins and Hitchens, et al. And that's the real issue: there are profound cultural issues here. But neither the "new atheists" nor the "old atheists" seem equipped to deal with them, so intent are they in establishing either ideological purity, or simply in attacking religion as they (poorly) understand it. And it's that position I don't understand: the position that only exists because it has something to be opposed to. It puts the atheists in the position the dog chasing the car: what do they get if they achieve their goal? In the world imagined by John Lennon's song, would they have to invent religion in order to continue to have a raison d'etre? And what's rational about that?